This is your brain on drugs.
While I was over here salivating for the next pot of experimental gold, Lilacs and Champagne had slipped quietly past my radar. Having stumbled upon Amos’ ambient electronic solo outing, Filmmusik from a Pelagic Records blind box a few years ago, and having casually followed Grails’ work for a short time, I can honestly admit that I never connected the dots until now. Alright, so I am not the brightest crayon in the box (insert pause for derisive laughter), but now that I finally have my head screwed on straight, let me tell you all about what I’ve been missing.
Much akin to fellow loop hero stalwarts of recent years, Luo and Le_Mol, Lilacs and Champagne share this rich, unabashed sense of wonder, a penchant for mercurial mood-building, wry humor and an intrinsic randomness. The third album from Lilacs and Champagne, Fantasy World, concerns itself in particular with the fascination of the endless unknown; of curiosity itself.
Sounding by turns playful and paranoid, Fantasy World draws upon Funk and Hip Hop motifs and psychedelic cuts of tape: at any given juncture, smartly pivoting styles to satisfy some kind of stream of consciousness abstraction now proudly playing at the theater of the mind. Juxtaposing F¬ar Eastern melodies with passages that sound as if they were plucked from A Saucerful of Secrets and Lovage. Applying that classic 70’s sleazy sheen, that 80’s slick charm, Fantasy World sounds like an old exploitation flick gone off the rails; one whose voyeuristic mark is the clever whimsy of the artform itself. Thumbing through previous outings such as Amos’ Zone Black, you can clearly see the common chord; the obvious obsession goes way back.
And when, on the backside of the album, the mood turns introspective: with here and there a piercing volley of dancing keys, constant as rapid eye movements in the early morning, it brings about an otherworldly clarity but not any certain understanding. Like the best in arthouse film, it demands to be revisited, reanalyzed, misunderstood, and eventually relegated to unimpeachable culthood.
With otherworldly baselines and shapeshifting keys: with the gloriously anachronistic Melotron at the helm, Lilacs and Champagne craft a hypnagogic pastiche of unsettling curiosities. Part Ferocés, part DJ Shadow, part dystopian teleprogram; a seemingly random but highly intentional collage of subversive art and pop culture, Fantasy World covers a dizzying variety of disparate styles and fuses them into a fleeting lovely mess. And I love it. This is my home now. This is literally my fantasy world.
