Lilacs & Champagne is the sampling project of Alex Hall and Emil Amos, both founding members of Portland, Oregon experimental rock outfit Grails. Working with found recordings, tape collage and 1970s film-soundtrack fragments layered over hip-hop beats, the duo carves out a sound that resists easy genre labels. After nearly a decade of silence, they returned in 2024 with Fantasy World, widely reviewed as their most ambitious record to date.
Lilacs & Champagne released the album Fantasy World on July 19, 2024 - their first studio album in nearly ten years.
Post-Trash chose Fantasy World as album of the week and described the duo's sound as difficult to describe using conventional genre terms.
During the Grails European tour, Hall and Amos gave an interview to Sun 13 magazine in which they described the creation of Fantasy World.
Spectrum Culture in its review compared Fantasy World to Madlib's Beat Konducta series for its approach to crate-digging and experimentalism.
