Mike VanPortfleet Beyond the Horizon Line

Abject fear and insanity have an inherent sound attached to them.  It’s a soft, foreboding, and quite ominous stream of musical abstracts that fires synapses in our brains, revving up core emotions.  Thus far, Lycia is the only band that has effectively sound-tracked those.  Mike VanPortfleet has gone a step further by creating the active audio component of dread and utter desperation, mainlining it directly into your soul.

 I used to think, back in the 70s, that there existed no better expressway into fear than Tangerine Dream’s Stratosfear until I heard Lycia ’s hair-raising Cold.  Since then, Cold has become the sole audio expression of the bleakness of helpless existence.  A word of warning to the uninitiated, Lycia musical forays are terrifying to hear as they induce the very horror they explore.

In this solo issue, away from the influences of Lycia , VanPortfleet aptly walks through the nether regions of our corruptible humanity via minimalist pathways.   Beyond the Horizon Line begins with a steady flow of deep, synchronous chants and eerily enchanting banshee whisperings, interspersing with an industrial screech of metal.  There is no light in this world, only a feeling along for some sense of border, of which there is none.

The anger in this music is fierce, the threat of violence just beyond your field of vision.  There are tracks that are reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, especially  “Stellar Buckshot Awaits”, which reminds one of Ridley Scott’s Legend and its closing theme.  But where Legend exudes an ending of happiness, “Stellar Buckshot Awaits” runs a seemingly happy thread of music underneath an overwhelmingly frightening overlay.  What may seem a clash of emotions actually becomes a far more sinister run of music that will unnerve you.

Wind, metal, and darkness are the threads of this work.  The sound of the hot wind is relentless, rising and falling with the terror of Horizon Line’s world; the wind carrying with it the stinging industrial smells of metal on metal from some unknown mechanism of pain.  Track after track, you’re assaulted with crawling skin set to music.  Beyond the Horizon Line is an unyielding world of anguish, desperation, and a barrage of fear.

 I’ve always considered VanPortfleet’s work with Lycia to be a travel through the silent and uncharted darkness of humanity. Whether that work is representational of humanity’s loneliness, its anger, its fears, its hatred, or a hybrid of all of them, Beyond the Horizon Line contains the essence of them all behind a curtain of music that barely shelters us from the horrors found past them.

Ten modular tracks, ten different journeys; Beyond the Horizon Line is filled with 60+ minutes of varying soundscapes. All of them will unsettle you.