Lycia
Cold (Projekt)
An interview with Mike Van Portfleet
by Angela Dauthi
Exploring the depths of endless reverb and slow tempos, Lycia (Lie-SEE-ah), named after a city in ancient Greece, is the brainchild of Mike Van Portfleet.
You’ve been around since 1990, and without exception, you’ve always had the same general sound. Do you think that after over seven years you might be reaching the limits of what you can do with that form?
I think there’s been a little variation, but it still seems to be going in that direction. Recently I’ve been exploring within the same style but taking it other places. I have a side project called Bleak, which is a lot noisier, running things through distortion… I think what you’ll eventually see is me moving away from even using drums and getting more ambient. I’m moving slower rather than faster.
Lycia used to be just you, but you’ve brought in several other people over the years, like Tara Van Flower and David Galas.
It’s such a constantly evolving thing. Prior to Ionia, the first album, I had worked with several other people, but most of that stuff was never released. It just turned out that when Ionia was released, I was by myself. Some people thought that it was a solo project, but for me it has always seemed like a band because other people have been involved. I’ve always wanted it to be a band. When I was working by myself, it was primarily because I had to . I couldn’t find the right people to work with. Over the years, David came in, and he was involved for a while, but now it’s just me and Tara. When people come into Lycia, I may write a song, or control the direction, but I like to let the people do what they do. I don’t say, “Okay Dave, you play this bassline,” I say “Write something to this.” So he could have his originality, and a lot of the time, it brings a new aspect to the song, something I wouldn’t have come up with.
It seems like when a person writes music by himself, it becomes almost incestuous without a sharing of ideas.
That’s definitely right, I think when you bring somebody else in, it brings a different vantage point, which keeps things fresh.
Where did you get your style?
In the early days of Lycia I tended to construct some type of monotonous rhythm, build the electronics around that, then add guitar, and then the vocals. But on The Burning Circle, it was totally the opposite. I wrote everything on acoustic guitar and vocals, and then built around that. On Cold, I wrote the synth parts first. It varies from time and place, though I have to say that the vast majority of material I’ve written over the years really is built from the bottom up. Place is a big influence, too. The early Lycia albums were recorded when I was living in Phoenix. I would take these side trips out into the desert to try to get into a certain state of mind when I was working on stuff, and I think to a certain degree that would come out in the music. Cold was the first album I had worked on since moving to Ohio, and I purposefully waited until the winter to record it. Living in Phoenix, I hadn’t really experienced winter, and I was kind of curious as to how it would affect the songwriting process. Environment is a big influence on my work. The world around me lends a mood to the albums. It’s more that than anything happening in the scene, and I think it’s important that because I’m so reclusive – what you said about it being incestuous, feeding off itself – that’s really where Lycia got its sound. I cut off all outward music influences, and started listening just to what I was doing, and that spiraled in on itself until it got to this point where the sound was different from the others.
Cold could almost be considered a concept album, with all the songs, the lyrics, etc., pertaining to “cold” somehow.
I was a little preoccupied with it, it being my first winter in a long time, looking out the window and seeing the snow had an unusual effect on me because I hadn’t been around winter in a long time. Living in the desert, it was very bizarre to me. The last time I experienced winter was when I was a kid, and that brought some strange emotions back to me. I wanted to use the winter imagery for that reason, and also, I wanted to use the imagery because it’s symbolic of what I was going through at the time. When I was writing that music, there was a lot of personal upheaval going on, a lot of changes. I guess you could say that the emotional atmosphere was cold as well. So I tied the two things together, the imagery outside in the winter applying to the things going on in my life. I’ve always toyed with the idea of doing a massive theme album. When I was a kid, I used to listen to The Wall and Quadrophenia, but I’ve gotten to the point in my career when I don’t like to think too far ahead, so I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I suspect that there will be a few theme albums, maybe even more specific than this. Right now I’m just thinking about our upcoming tour.
Speaking of which, when you play live, do you need more musicians than were used on the album?
Every tour is set up differently. I seem to be a person who always gets frustrated and tries something different. With the Burning Circle Tour, I was frustrated with the tour before, because we went out and did the DAT tape with two people on stage, and I was tired of hearing people say “Oh, all you guys do is use a DAT tape. It’s not real,” even though if we used a sequencer, a lot of people would be fine with that, but I don’t see the difference, really. So on the Burning Circle Tour, I made a point of having the only programmed thing be the drum machine. On the upcoming tour, Cold is much more synth-oriented, so we’re going to be using the DAT tape again, which I don’t see as a bad thing. For me it saves the expense of buying five more effects racks and a sequencer. It’ll be me and Tara onstage, she’ll be doing keyboards, I’ll be playing guitar. Some rhythms and some other synth parts will be on DAT. I don’t have a problem with throwing the basic synth and drum parts on DAT. It’s a massive no-no to put any guitar on DAT, because that needs to be played live to get the right effect.
What sort of reactions do people have to seeing so much music come from just two people?
Up until the Burning Circle Tour, a lot of people would sit at the front of the stage, and they’d literally be spacing out. We run a lot of smoke at our shows, and a lot of backlighting. For the most part, people just sit and stare. We did a show in Cleveland a few months back, to try out some newer material – a little more rhythmic, a little more mid-tempo – and the reaction was quite a bit different. We had a pretty active crowd, they actually stood up. I’ve played shows, and there’s people laying on the floor, it looks like they’re sleeping. My natural reaction is “they must hate us, they’ve fallen asleep,” but later they come up and say they were so spaced out, they just wanted to close their eyes and drift off.
Who have you toured with before?
We toured with Trance to the Sun before, and that was a lot of fun. Their music works really well with ours. We opened up a tour with Type O Negative and Electric Hellfire Club. That was unusual, to say the least. Being the first band, it got kind of rough at times, with such a diverse crowd. We played in front of a typical metal crowd, they didn’t really know what to think of us. It was strange. When we got on stage and played slow, spacey stuff, there generally wasn’t a lot of interest. I think we opened a few eyes, though. When we walked off the stage there were these guys dressed up like Marilyn Manson saying “You guys were really cool.” But then again, we were playing in Syracuse, and I thought they were going to kill me.
