Sweet Trip - Halica: Bliss Out, Vol. 11 (Expanded Edition)

A cult classic. Sweet Trip are a unique blissed-out techno group. They integrate programmed beats with their vintage Fender guitars creating songs of stunning beauty and contagious rhythm. It's definitely 100% techno, but with breathy female vocals and shimmery guitars. It's more on the electronic than the ethereal side, yet comparable to Slowdive and The Cocteau Twins. This record is the bomb.

This expanded reissue includes Halica in its entirety with the addition of remixes and versions of the album's signature track Fish, which first appeared on the Fish EP.

"We met between 1993 and 1994, and 4 years later, after several band name changes, we released Halica on Darla Records. We couldn't believe that our little cassette of 4-track demos would eventually become our full length debut, and to this day we still cannot believe that this has happened.

Halica was recorded on a Tascam 4-track with just a couple of drum machines, a Juno 6, guitars, lots of pedals, and PZM microphones from Radio Shack, usually late in the evenings and into the early mornings. Roby would sleep for a couple of hours after, wake up early, and rush to rehearsal to meet Valerie and Viet and show them the latest weird demos. During this time, we were set on being a traditional 4-piece band, but we weren't able to find the right bass player that would suit our sound. The Halica demos opened our minds to the possibility of tossing out the traditional band format and figuring out how to play these drum machine tracks in a live setting. Viet switched from drums to bass, heavily processed Alesis HR-16 and Boss DR-660 drum machines became our drummers, and off we went.

When the time came to work on the artwork, Viet found a picture of ecstasy pills that we passed to our designer, Ryan Hicks, and together we came up with the idea of tweaking the image to make it look like clouds. You can still kinda sorta make out the "E" on some of the pills.

Fun fact #1: on the original pressing, the tracks Come to Me and Follow Me have their titles switched around. Come to Me is actually Follow Me and vice versa. You can sort of tell which track is which by listening to the lyrics ("come to meeee..."; "follow me, and I'll follow you...").

Fun fact #2: the little mushroom icon on the title of the record is a joke. At the time, Roby had a pretty wild mop-top that made him look like a mushroom, and Viet would poke fun at him by calling him that. The joke made its way to the artwork."

- Roberto Burgos, January, 2022

2xLP tracklist: