Lycia

Immense snow-covered expanses, swept by gusts of freezing wind under a slate-grey sky. Skeletons of bare, frost-bitten trees. Desolate, impenetrable lands where, beneath the icy blanket, solitary forms of life crackle away, sheltered from the darkness of the looming night. The winter landscape of Ohio strikes Mike Van Portfleet like a revelation, in stark contrast to the Arizona desert where he had lived until then. "I spent months at the window watching the trees and the snow-covered fields," he recalls. "A winter in the Ohio countryside can be as desolate as a summer in the desert, and just as fascinating." The experience left such an impression on him that he was moved to write an entire concept album devoted to winter. Nothing strange, after all, for someone who had made the chill of the soul the guiding principle of his art. "My work," the guitarist explains, "has always been shaped by the climate and the environment around me. Before, it was the desert, with its sense of isolation and repression, but also of open spaces and light. Now it's Ohio's turn."

Thus was born the most majestic and evocative work in the entire Lycia saga. "Cold". The only title it could ever have had.

A Heart in Winter

By 1996, the year the record came out, Van Portfleet (from Grand Rapids, Michigan) had already established himself as one of the leading figures of the neo-gothic revival of the 90s, under the aegis of Sam Rosenthal's label Projekt Records. Alongside Rosenthal's own Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Lycia embodied the new dimension of dark music: no longer a theatre of horror, macabre urges or Ossianic ritual, but a metaphysical portrayal of desolation, of a cosmic pessimism. Yet while Rosenthal's project drew mainly on the austerity of chamber classical music for its solemn scores, Van Portfleet opted for an ethereal, abstract reimagining of darkwave, dissolving traces of psychedelia, ambient and industrial music beneath dense clouds of guitar and layers of keyboards. It's a work built through subtraction, draining the most grand-guignol heart out of gothic rock to arrive at cosmic music, brushing against the tones of requiem and Gregorian chant. Through apocalyptic records like "Ionia", "A Day In The Stark Corner" and the monumental "The Burning Circle And Then Dust", the American guitarist forged an arid, bleak imagery, heavily influenced by the desert landscapes of Arizona. Compared to that existential ordeal, "Cold", despite its icy rigor, opens up glimmers of light and hope, lingering more in shades of melancholy than despair, and placing greater emphasis on melody.

Two new elements contribute significantly to this shift. First, the compositional approach: while on his early records Van Portfleet had started from rhythms, and on "The Burning Circle And Then Dust" from guitar, on "Cold" he decided to build the songs starting from the synthesizer, ultimately steering his sound toward a more electronic turn, denser and more layered. The other decisive element is the permanent presence of a second voice, entrusted to the clear, celestial soprano of Tara Vanflower, countering the leader's menacing whisper in a kind of loose echo of the Michael Gira–Jarboe duo. The six-plus minutes of "Snowdrop" bring this double intuition to its finest expression, laying Tara's ethereal litanies over an enveloping bed of keyboards, dotted here and there with bells and tambourines in a sort of snow-bound ecstasy, sealed too by the lyrics ("All the aching signs we miss/ To live in purple scarlet bliss/ And swim with jeweled golden fish/ And breathe the autumn air so crisp").

Yet the project's isolationist, desolate soul remains unchanged, even if steered toward forms of rarefied elegance not too far removed from the ancestral sounds of darkwave institutions such as Dead Can Dance and In The Nursery.

Odyssey Among the Ice

So the echoing guitars and characteristic reverbs of the Lycia sound return, flecks of fragile harmonic textures shattering upon drifts of snow and fog (the opening "Frozen"). This is music in black and grey, marked by solemn beats and built on long atmospheric textures, drones and subtle electronic patterns. It's an almost monochromatic soundscape that nonetheless unfolds through a series of variations in the intensity and density of the sound, at times faint and almost impalpable, at others condensed into imposing masses, as if to suggest the majesty of glaciers, as in the muffled "Later" that closes the album as though echoing from beneath a blanket of snow or from the depths of the permafrost, dulling the sound as reverb and feedback fade into the distance.

More than ever, it's Vanflower who embodies the human element, the voice that lets a ray of sunlight through the frozen dark, her Elizabeth Fraser-esque trills weaving between the slowed drum beat and the space-prog keyboards of the icy "Bare", redolent of 4AD, while Van Portfleet, with his liquid guitar, alternates layers of dissonant noise with more delicate notes that offer, for a moment, a touch of warmth. But if the Cocteau Twins' "Victorialand" was influenced by the magical landscapes of Antarctica, here the inspiration is the continent's long sunless winters, waiting for a dawn that never comes. What emerges is a sense of alienating solitude, an obsessive paranoia ideally embodied by the nerve-wracking repetitions of "Baltica", with Vanflower's sinister nursery-rhyme-like la-la-la threading through the sequence of icy keyboard chimes and bells (funeral bells, of course).

The minimalist "Colder" sounds as if it comes straight from beyond the grave, with an insistent drone and a piano brushing in a romantic adagio amid the electronic storm driven by the keyboards, a symphony that seems to float endlessly before crumbling into the boreal dawn of its epilogue. More chilling than a gothic sabbath.

There's nothing left to do, then, but take refuge in that catatonic trance that is "December", the winter month par excellence, with its sweet, ambient incipit soon replaced by a hypnotic, relentless riff, stretched to breaking point; or else in the immense icy sheets of "Polaris", where amid an unreal, dreamlike ambient stasis, Tara returns to intone her unsettling, mesmeric "la laaa laa", among disarming lines like "I am loving again/ Polaris/ I am nothing again".

But the emotional peak of the album lies in the 7:27 of "Drifting", poignant and heart-rending in its funeral-march cadences, with Van Portfleet riding a sweet guitar chord repeated almost on loop, underpinning his desolate vocal before Vanflower's melodious voice joins in on the chorus in the finale. Pure magic.

Ohio's eternal ghosts

While the rarefied keyboards, courtesy of the excellent Dave Galas (also handling bass and drum machine), and Van Portfleet's reverb-drenched guitar take centre stage, the drumming is no less crucial: solid, precise, thunderous, as if coming from a canyon or some fearsome chasm, it drives the whole album masterfully, in that interplay of light (scarce) and shadow (abundant), in that alchemy of sounds distilled and skilfully manipulated by Lycia. Dizzying vertigo in which the sweet din of shoegaze crumbles away, leaving only a sense of solitude before infinite, overwhelming spaces. A mechanism that runs perfectly in tune with the album's wintry mood, as if the instruments themselves were playing specific roles: "The guitar is as sharp as the icy winter wind, the bass marks the tempo with which the snow muffles sounds and swallows up everything it encounters (making it vanish), Mike's voice testifies to surrender, while Tara's seems the whisper of the ghost of a siren catapulted and trapped in the ice of Ohio" (Alessandro Lucentini, Kronic).

Content of such value could only be matched by packaging equal to it: witness the splendid hardcover of the first CD edition put together by Projekt, with bronze tones and skeletal trees on the cover, plus an elegant booklet containing the lyrics. In 2007 the album was reissued by the ever-praiseworthy Silber Records, albeit in a more spartan format. Little matters, though. What really counts is keeping alive the memory of an extraordinary work, whose greatness was perhaps not truly grasped at the time by a critical establishment still too attached to Lycia's earlier epic releases. More far-sighted was Alternative Press magazine, which immediately ranked "Cold" among "the ten best goth albums of all time". Legions of disciples and admirers would later pay their due tribute – from Nine Inch Nails to Xasthur, from Prurient to Type O Negative.

Certainly, even in times of global warming, there can never again be winter without the soundtrack of the nine frozen symphonies of "Cold". Punctual and magical as snowflakes on the mountains of Ohio.

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30/10/2022