In Flickers

The Artist

Lycia is an American darkwave and ambient project founded in the late 1980s by Mike VanPortfleet, initially in Phoenix, Arizona, and later rooted in the isolation of rural Ohio. Their sound is defined by glacial synthesizers, heavily processed guitars, hushed or murmured vocals, and an atmosphere of near-total desolation — music that feels less composed than weather-patterns. Alongside collaborators including Tara VanPortfleet, the project became one of the defining voices in American darkwave, influencing a generation of ethereal and cold wave artists. In Flickers arrives as a late-career return, finding the project older and, if anything, more committed to a sound stripped of compromise.

The Album

In Flickers was released in 2015 on Handmade Birds, a label with a strong track record in heavy and experimental music — an unusual but fitting home for Lycia's particular brand of glacial drift. Recorded during a period of renewed creative activity after years of relative quiet, the album finds Mike and Tara VanPortfleet deepening rather than expanding their palette. Production choices lean hard into texture over momentum: synth layers accumulate slowly, guitars dissolve into reverb, and silence is treated as a compositional element. Thematically, the album circles grief, distance, and the slow erosion of memory — feelings rendered not through lyrics alone but through the physical weight of the sound itself.

Listen For

Glacial Layering. Pay attention to how sounds arrive — not all at once, but in slow accretion, each synth or guitar texture settling beneath the last like sediment. The album rewards patience; its emotional impact builds in the final minutes of a track rather than at any identifiable peak.

Tara VanPortfleet's Vocals. Her voice is used less as a melodic instrument and more as another textural layer — breathy, distant, and treated with enough reverb to feel like memory rather than presence. Notice how rarely it competes with the instrumentation, choosing instead to dissolve into it.

Dynamics and Stillness. Lycia uses near-silence as deliberately as any loud passage — the moments of near-complete quiet in tracks like "Gone" force an uncomfortable intimacy before the next swell of sound arrives. Structure here is tidal rather than verse-chorus, and the album's pacing rewards listening without interruption.

Lyrical Minimalism. The words spoken or sung across In Flickers are sparse, and that sparseness is the point — phrases like half-remembered sentences carry enormous weight precisely because so little is said. Listen for moments where a single word surfaces from the murk and lands harder than a full verse might.

Themes of Loss and Fading. The album's title is the key: everything here exists in a state of flickering — between presence and absence, sound and silence, clarity and dissolution. Tracks like "Flicker" and "Distance" make this explicit, framing grief not as rupture but as a slow, almost imperceptible dimming.