LICHENS - Omns

After the understated, highly improvised "The Psychic Nature Of Being", Rob Lowe (ex-90 Day Men) returns with his Lichens project to explore psychedelic sound from a spiritualist perspective, delivering a magnetic and far more measured work - not yet definitive, but certainly captivating.

Accompanied by a DVD featuring a twenty-eight-minute live performance, "Omns" pays tribute to nature's deepest breath, exalting the soul's hidden vibration, as if it were a tangle of sensations and emotions that only music can manage to untangle. The manipulated voices of "Vevor of Agassou" form the shifting backdrop to a delicate magic of chords that could have sprung from one of the most diaphanous enchantments of Roy Montgomery. It's a shiver that carries with it an enormous weight of imaginary landscapes, a nostalgic overture wounded deep down by a thirst for infinity that dissolves, melancholic, into the timeless void of "Faeries", like a boundless autumn in the dark room of memory, sparse piano chords beyond the wall.

Then physicality reclaims its space, an electric guitar free to soar within its own range, as if Peter Green believed himself to be Hendrix while playing Jerry Garcia, but with Fahey (a transfigured Fahey) at heart ("Bune"). For its part, the extremely long "M St r ng W tchcr ft L v ng n Sp r t" represents something of a summation of this new Lichens incarnation: slowed-down raga, pastoral settings, arcane liturgies and a chorus of resigned nymphs dragging us toward a forgotten moor, lost and silenced. The dream-soaked watercolor of "Sighns" resolves the dilemma.

Then it's a bit like returning to everyday life, coming back from a small dream.

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30/04/2007