In My Dreams You Were Golden

Lichen is the recording project of South London-based songwriter Michael Clark. Languid on the surface yet masterfully structured beneath, Lichen’s music balances delicate textures with emotional weight. There’s a heady marriage between this cultivated formal control and the intensity of Clark’s lyrical world, one that has evolved quietly but deliberately over the past decade. 
 
Clark’s earliest recordings began appearing online in 2014: self-recorded, self-released songs that caught the ears of his peers and slowly built a following. The Line of Best Fit described his early work as “a veritable treasure trove of undiscovered sad bastard alternative.” His debut EP, Something To Be Won (2019), marked a formal arrival: four sparse, poetic songs full of lyrical candour and ghostly precision, praised by God Is In The TV as “a swirling and atmospherically tender set… poignant and heavy in content, but shimmering.” 
 
Since then, Clark has expanded his palette both musically and collaboratively. A string of standalone singles, including Winter Song, Talking to Nobody, Never Felt the Morning Sun, and Light on the Firing Line (featured in Shane Meadows’ BBC series The Gallows Pole), saw Lichen evolve from an insular project into something more collective, without ever losing its intimacy. Carefully arranged strings, keys, guitars and percussion create space around Clark’s voice, enriching the sense of stillness and lyrical precision at the core of each track. 
 
This evolution culminates in In My Dreams You Were Golden, Lichen’s debut full-length album. Produced by Ted Barnes (Beth Orton, Clayhill) and mixed and mastered by Sean Read (Edwyn Collins, Dexys, Soulsavers), the record brings together a full ensemble to deliver Clark’s most expansive and emotionally complex work to date. Across ten tracks, he explores death, memory, and spiritual survival through elemental imagery - bones, water, stone, fire - all filtered through a dreamlike sense of displacement and grace. 
 
Taken as one, Lichen’s work offers a meditation on the lines between the past, the present, and the eternal that persist within the landscape of the everyday. There’s no posturing here: just quietly devastating songs, drawn with patience and performed with care.