The Lickets - Here (On Earth) (2011)

Mitch Greer, Rachel Smith i Lena Buell muzički su i vizualni umjetnici koji djeluju pod imenom The Lickets i još nekoliko pseudonima, natkriljenih nazivom International Corporation.
Njihov "transcendentalni mini orkestar" svira na sobi punoj instrumenata, od violončela i sitara do harmonija i flaute. Utjecaji indijske muzike, Johna i Alice Coltrane, La Montea Younga i njegova Theatre of Eternal Music te psihodeličnog rocka iz '‘60s izranjaju u miksu suvremene klasike i eksperimentalnog folka.
Živa šuma u vašoj kući.

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www.lickets.com/
internationalco.bandcamp.com/
THE LICKETS' TEN RANDOM MYSTERY FLAVOURS

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Once again, the San Francisco-based The Lickets dazzles us with music of the utmost magic and wonderment, just as the group has done since 2005's Fake Universe Man and 2007's Journey In Caldecott first brought its luminous music to the masses. Presumably Mitch Greer and Rachel Smith are once again the creative forces behind the new release, just as they've also been responsible for material issued under the Quintana Jacobsma and Mary St John aliases. In some ways, the album can be seen as a microcosmic distillation of The Lickets' two late-2010 full-lengths, Song of the Clouds and Eidolons, as many of the new album's pieces would have fit comfortably on the latter while the new album's closing meditation, “Here (On Earth),” is similar in epic tone to the former's nearly album-long “Song of the Clouds” but condensed to a seven-minute form.

The new album features eight mystical reveries of electric and acoustic design that inhabit a timeless realm in a manner reminiscent of Popol Vuh; just as that group's music transcended the time of its creation, so too does The Lickets' music. In fact, one setting in particular, “End of Jupiter Phase 1,” could pass for a Popol Vuh production as easily as one by The Lickets, given the meditative tone of the piece in question and the way it somehow manages to effortlessly meld cosmic and bucolic qualities into a single whole. Here (On Earth) begins on a suitably mesmerizing note with “Transpersonal Earth Spirals” and its incandescent swirls of phantasmagoric sound before moving onto “The Intervals Between the Ordered World,” its droning pull as strong as a black hole. While shimmering drones such as “The Octant Coordinate System” dominate, the group also makes room for a lilting psychedelic folk waltz, “Neither Sun nor Moon,” whose arrangement of hushed vocals, flute, acoustic guitar, and harmonium lends the song a peaceful feel and ‘60s vibe. Though individual instrument sounds assume a fuzzy character when they're blended into a hazy mass, certain sounds—strings, organ, percussion—do occasionally separate themselves from the whole during the album. Refreshingly direct and concise, Here (On Earth) presents forty-four minutes of the group's trademark splendour—more incredible music for devotees of long-standing and a perfect entry point for new listeners. - textura.org

Hey there, over-stressed Stanford student! Ever wish you could find some music that would calm your nerves, find your inner sense of serenity, and more importantly, drown out the banal pop garbage your roommate is blasting? Or, if you’re a music nerd like me, do you wish you could enjoy dense, cerebral music on a purely spiritual level, without having the listening experience turn into an intellectual chore? Then local Bay Area experimental outfit The Lickets are for you, and their new album Here (on Earth) is a must-hear.
In case you didn’t catch their on-campus performance last year, a bit of a refresher: The Lickets specialize in creating gorgeous, electroacoustic soundscapes that prompt introspection, meditation, and euphoria. But “new age” this ain’t—this is for fans of Philip Glass, Stockhausen, Miles Davis, and other visionaries who sought to express spiritual intangibles through new sounds and bold, inventive compositions. There is nuance amid the ambient sprawl in the surprisingly succinct tracks. (This is one of the few Lickets albums to not have a song over 8 minutes in length. In contrast, their previous album, Song of the Clouds, has a 46-minute track.) Within the confines of short tracks, the droning melodies feel endless, with oscillating harp and guitar arpeggios swirling beautifully and cohesively. The opening track “Transpersonal Earth Spirals” features dissonant Moog synth melodies and gentle guitar strumming; the latter motif is explored more thoroughly on other tracks, such as the enchanting “End of Jupiter Phase 1.” However, keyboards take the place of stringed instruments on some tracks, such as “The Octant Coordinate System,” my personal favorite on the album—a lush, meditative masterpiece.
If you fall asleep to that track or any other (which, needless to say, should not be seen as evidence of the album being boring at all), the following track won’t wake you up. The Lickets compose their albums with a flawless eye for flow and symmetry. Even the jarringly non-ambient, folksy track “Neither Sun nor Moon” (the first Lickets song to feature vocals) feels perfectly in place where it is. By now you may have gathered that I am making absolutely no effort to be impartial or maintain authorial distance. I’ve seen them live on campus, and have reviewed them before. So yes, I’m biased, but I stand by all my statements on this fantastic band, particularly the end of my KZSU review: Listen to this while watching the sun rise and you can probably die happy. - Diego Aguilar




Eidolons (2010) streaming

 

Her Name Came On Arrows (2009) streaming

They Turned Our Desert Into Fire (2009) streaming

Issued concurrently, The Lickets' Her Name Came on Arrows and They Turned our Desert into Fire make the strongest case imaginaeable for the San Francisco trio's enchanting brand of psychedelic folk music. As they did on their previous outing Journey in Caldecott, shamans Lena Buell, Mitch Greer and Rachel Smith deploy a mini-orchestra of acoustic instruments—cello, flute, acoustic guitar, organ, sitar, harmonium, hand percussion, et al.—to call into being undulating vistas of luminous mantras and soundscapes. The Lickets' raga-like settings suggest a strong Indian influence, and traces of visionary ‘60s jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane, the time-transcending drones of La Monte Young and his Theatre of Eternal Music, and ‘60s psychedelic rock surface too as parts of the trio's heady mix.

“Arrow of Expanding Light” initiates Her Name Came On Arrows with a hallucinogenic swirl of cello, dulcimer, acoustic string instruments, and percussion that feels like a peyote-fueled incantation—an apt beginning to the consciousness-expanding journey that follows. A cello navigates an ecstatic path through the baroque drone landscapes of “Circles In Parallel,” while “Constellation Umbrella” dives into a dream-pool of banjo, strings, and keyboards. The first disc also includes “In the Garden of the London Underground,” a gentle, vocal-based madrigal cloaked in a fog of reverb; “They Turned Our Desert Into Fire,” a waltz of melancholy mood and stately design; and “The Seven Pomegranate Seeds,” which caps the album with a lamentation for cello and acoustic guitar.

They Turned Our Desert Into Fire differs from the other album in length (seventy-four minutes compared to the first's fifty) and in at times being slightly more ponderous and restrained, as demonstrated by “Butterfly Beach,” a meditative setting of seaside drift, and the seductively-brooding medieval folk setting “Clairvoyant Perception of the Unseen Unicorn.” Like a bucolic and peaceful trek through the countryside, “Ilyushin Il-76” is downright jaunty, while “Second Sight Procession,” untethered from any earthly mooring, glides like a shuttle through the upper spheres for a trippy thirteen minutes. Creaks and flutterings resound against a backdrop of acoustic strums and finger-picking in “Festival on the River of the Frozen Moon,” a beautiful, funereal dirge for cello and flute. Mention must be made, too, of “The Heron & the Hummingbird,” whose elegant, serpentine weave of cello and acoustic guitars casts an irresistibly hypnotic spell. The second disc also boasts one of the trio's most ear-catching pieces and undoubtedly its most epic to date: the twenty-one minute “Endless Migration.” Against a shimmering sea of sitar tones and string washes, flute and cello melodies intertwine in an ecstatic daze, suspending time in the process. When the piece moves into its second half, it burrows even deeper into its oceanic mass, becoming ever more awe-inspiring as it does so.

Transcendental and transporting, the material collected on these companion releases achieves a seldom-heard reconciliation between improv-inspired exploration and structural coherence that's difficult to achieve, even if The Lickets makes doing so appear rather effortless. With the material coming at the listener in wave upon remarkable wave, the discs provide an incredible two-hour listening experience, and the releases constitute a major accomplishment on the band's part. - textura.org

 

 

Journey In Caldecott (2007) streaming

Journey In Caldecott collects fifteen hallucinatory forays into multiple genres, with haunted psych-folk the most prominent. Mitch Greer and Rachel Smith deploy a mini-orchestra—violin, cello, guitar, double bass, flute, Farfisa, mellotron, vibraphone, Theremin, Mini-moog, chimes, xylophone, and percussion—to create their thoroughly trippy travelogue. Often it's a challenge to identify the instruments within a given piece when they're so wholly subsumed within Lickets' densely layered mix; some instruments manage to stay at the surface, while others blend into the overall hazy fabric. - textura.org    

If you counted a ratio of sorts scaling the central inventors of Journey in Caldecott against the amount of instruments they used, an approximate result would be three to thirty. This wouldn’t be so daunting if it were not for two reasons. Firstly, the trio’s brisk, nature-orientated intentions seem to develop far more than one would expect – and most musicians don’t need as large a quantity of instruments to create such open scenery. But secondly, most don’t need to use all of them just for one track. The Lickets, however, deliver a treat with whatever they want to play.
It’s an obviously excited collective of musicians who write Journey in Caldecott, but their attempts to paint a wilderness often find them running out of landscape. The repetitive, almost drone-esque nature that begins straight from “Crowd Of Pimps in The Rain” and resolves at “The Bee Keeper” actually makes for quite an idle album; this may be despite the trio’s motive, but what they lose out on in being captivating they regain in being mesmerising. While this is all down to the thickness of the album (it’s a journey presented layer upon layer), it doesn’t detract from the organic feeling that really has to exist here. The top-heavy “Smoking Hippie” is surrounded by so much in the way of whistling, drumming and guitars that a fragile voice – one of the only musical tools barely touched upon in Journey in Caldecott – remains lost in the haze. What comes out is a happy accident; the prolonged drone nature of the album doesn't quite sound like it was anyone's intention (it sounds too upbeat for that), but at the same time it is superbly sustained as hypnotism.
The noise coatings simply become an onslaught: “Rama 4 Road”, for example, follows with not a space left empty in ‘psychedelic’ keys, unmelodic chimes and general weirdness. It shouldn’t really be the method to engage with the sprase atmosphere The Lickets are trying to create, but their 2007 release can still be lauded with its ‘forest’ crown because it’s still the word any listener will take away. It’s still folksy, but in a more complex way. Sometimes (“Rabbit Moon” or “Rama 4 Road”) their world is comprised from an unlikely synthesiser, for instance, but this is only made a reality with the sounds on the outside – at the same time, traditional methods such as lax percussion can become The Lickets’ secret forte.
Everything is utilised well enough to be onboard, but the sheer overload causes some flow issues that make it harder to delve into whatever tour Journey in Caldecott is offering. It may just be meandering because the music is obviously film based – one glance at additional projects show three films, matched with two other musical projects. Coincidence or not, Greer, Smith and Buell have managed to space out a whole range of sounds in this release which shouldn’t be bogged down by required listening circumstance. While hailed genre-defiant, it’s really just the overflowing of instrumentation and ideas that cause Journey in Caldecott to be folk every day and post-rock every other. Much to everyone’s question-asking in this aspect, their music will remain ‘psychedelic’. It shouldn’t matter too much what it gets called unless the orchestra wish to exceed their aim – Journey in Caldecott is sort of a forest inside your house. - Robin Smith

Released online at pay-your-own prices the same day that Radiohead set In Rainbows loose, Journey in Caldecott is Chicago duo The Lickets’ fourth album. Featuring a transcendental mini-orchestra, Mitch Greer and Rachel Smith deliver a trippy journey through mythical lands and lush sonic forests. After all, Journey in Caldecott is more than just the album title, it’s the entire concept behind this work. This IS a journey, from the opium drenched “Crowd of Pimps in the Rain,” to the unholy temples worshiping the “Rabbit Moon,” ending with the quiet celebration of a quest finished with “The Beekeeper.” Haunting, eerie, and altogether unique, The Lickets pull from numerous influences—at one point sounding like an Old World procession and an Indian throne room the next. With tracks like “Smoking Hippie” and numerous self-references to ‘60s psychedelia, there may be a suggestion that this music is better experienced with the aid of some sort of (ahem) medication, but no such enhancement is needed. This is indeed a mystical trek of an album, one that you’ve never experienced before and never will again. To sample the music, The Lickets even provide a literal journey through Caldecott on their website (it’s sort of like a Victorian Myst), complete with their music as a soundtrack. Take a sample, don’t be afraid to get hooked—all the cool kids are doing it. And hey, with their entire discography available for as low as $1 an album, how can you go wrong?

- www.musicemissions.com/
 


Fake Universe Man (2005) streaming



Song of the Clouds (2010) streaming