Hidden Room Concert: Lichen

As autumn settles deeper into our homes and the days grow colder, we love to conjure up rooms filled with warm melodies and playful sounds for you. It is Lichen's gentle sound — and its power to carry us into a dreamlike state — that brings us this sense of warmth.   Lichen is a Brussels-based band at the crossroads of folk, French chanson and jazz. A saxophone, a trumpet, a Rhodes piano, French lyrics, a percussion kit, and now and then a burst of handclaps or a melodica: Héloïse, Fanny, Ben, Dieter and Louis have been weaving songs together for over a year. Their music draws on a wide palette of influences — inspired by contemporary and emerging artists such as Rita Payès and Cindy Pooch, more subtly by the Orchestre tout puissant Marcel Duchamps, and also by Airelle Besson. They play with musical conventions and styles, regularly incorporating Eastern and Balkan modes and colours. Should you catch those timbres — your ears haven't deceived you.   These are stories, tender and political, feminist and free — an ode to gentleness, nature, dreams and the imagination.   Come and treat yourself to some warmth!