Los Lichis - Dog

Pitchfork 80

With our crate-digger culture reaching peak levels, it’s always surprising to find an artist that has been making music for over 20 years and hasn’t already been anthologized. That’s what makes the surprise arrival of Los Lichis, a collective of experimental musicians and visual artists from Mexico City that first started working together in 1996, such a vital shock to the system. Chances are the recent reissue by Massachusetts-based Feeding Tube Records of Dog, a comp culling from the group’s self-released material, is the first time you’re hearing of them.

The members of Los Lichis—José Luis Rojas, Gerardo Monsiváis, Manuel Mathar, and French sound artist Jean Baptiste Favory—are entirely responsible for keeping below the cultural radar. Until recently, their music was only available for purchase in art galleries in Mexico. They have been slow to embrace digital distribution; their Bandcamp is just a couple months old. But from the sounds of this fantastic collection of dessicated art rock, cracked electronic experiments, and AM radio intrusions, their emergence from the shadows feels long overdue.

While the two-LP set isn’t arranged chronologically, listening through reveals how these men evolved as musicians and improvisers. Their work from the late ’90s—made before the arrival of Favory and his synthesizers—is rough-hewn and exploratory, built from junky-sounding drum machine rhythms and warbling electronic melodies. It has the excitement of Morton Subotnick compositions. Other tracks from that era, like the loopy and drowsy “Opium Boogie” and Throbbing Gristle-esque “Osaka ’77,” are a little more direct but remain suffused with a healthy dose of tape hiss and a playful energy.

As a producer, Favory’s input through the ’00s on helped bring Los Lichis even further into focus. Favory met Mathar and Monsiváis when the pair showed their art at Paris’s International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in 2000, and since then, he has been a satellite member of the group, visiting Mexico once a year for improv sessions and performances. His impact helped clean up their recordings considerably, and it also brought a welcome psych rock influence to the proceedings. “L’Origine de la Guitare Fantôme” slinks from its slow, glittery build into a nicely dawdling Dead-like jam punctuated by insistent keyboard bleats. “L’Inévitable Catastrophe,” meanwhile, has the overwhelming gush of a Loveless interlude.

What this collection is missing is the more overt political commentary that has been central to the visual work that Los Lichis has done on their own and as a collective. There are hints within certain song titles—the early Sonic Youth sounding “Krondstat Variation” is an apparent reference to the site of a major uprising during the Russian Civil War, and an overmodulated blues jam from 2002 is given the name “Eva und Adolf”—but otherwise, the music could have even more impact if married with some of the group’s striking videos and paintings. Even without visual accompaniment, Los Lichis retain that naturalistic spark and simmering wildness that only the best improvised music can provide.