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Cosmic and personal, this witticism signed Lycia, a project by that man who lives in the rigor of inner death and whose name is Mike VanPortfleet. I couldn't believe it. It was the same days as Det Som Engang Var, the desire to scar the soul. Days of suggestion bent to the malevolent and peeled visions of others, in the need to experience something that would violate the soul, believing it to be true.
Listening as an adult to this work, the abrasions of VanPortfleet are still alive, paranoid, fresh due to the impossibility of a successful coagulation. More than in fumes and darkness, widely evoked in the dark earth abyss of this album, today it seems to me to live Guernica as that face (the second from the right, in the upper part) observing disfigured disasters and situations scraping the bottom from below and not from above. Like a Faust defeated by Mephistopheles, VanPortfleet wanders in the limbo of sounds of the most disparate gothic genres, put together with reckless wisdom.
Regardless of the artistic discourse, I believe he was truly unwell when he recorded this album. The low tempos are those of the emptiness following the cry, the awareness of a great evil, the bewilderment towards one's own being. Ecstatic cadences that brand each heartrending moment, reminiscent of the solemn advance of some mortal marches of Dead Can Dance. The atmosphere belongs to a state of consciousness difficult even to imagine, due to a soul's freezing that takes place in a cosmically detached environmental context (this word returns). Distanced plucking hones icy and austere sounds from another world, post gothic rock. The magnificent alienation of a distant voice creates folkapocalyptic resonances, while some synthetic drones bring this human defeat into the dream, so frustrated that it can't even become a nightmare. There's also something evil and lobotomizing in this cauldron where depressions simmer. The slow and mechanical throb of programmed beats on the machines muddies the entire album with industrial slavery, which in its flow ultimately gives the impression of being covered by the sticky web of a spider. All in one breath, it hurts. Taken individually, tracks like the gateway to hell "And Through The Smoke And Nails" are unsettling and disorienting, useful for being enchanted, treacherous due to how easily they can draw you into these quicksands. Everything else is tears, which I don't wish to discuss here.
Forgotten masterpiece. 1993.
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