Brooklyn-based experimental Asian-American musician and composer Lia Ouyang Rusli a.okay.a. OHYUNG explores their very own gender transition with the arresting You Are All the time On My Thoughts – a hanging new album of trip-hop laced, rave-inspired digital songwriting due March twenty eighth via NNA Tapes (US) and Phantom Limb (UK) respectively. Pre-order HERE.
Described by Rusli as ”my trans self and my former self in dialog, from each views,” You Are All the time On My Thoughts represents their prolonged, sophisticated, however essential journey between lives, strewn with each doubt and pleasure. It’s ecstatic, pop-oriented shift in path from an artist primarily identified for noise, experimental hip-hop, and ambient music, however carried with smooth confidence, maturity, and a silvery, hallucinogenic shimmer that reveals Rusli’s experimental background. It’s, writes Rusli, ”generally written from a darkish place and different occasions from a spot of happiness.” All through, darkness and light-weight rise and fall in layers of phased strings, trip-hop drum manufacturing, and earworming vocal strains.
A movie rating composer by day, Rusli’s songwriting craft is meticulous and nuanced. You Are All the time On My Thoughts was, maybe surprisingly, shaped primarily from processed ”generic string loops” present in on-line pattern packs – a wierd and wilfully jarring reminder that what appears to be isn’t all the time what’s. Recontextualised, these string loops enshadow the simplicity of their origins and reveal a grace and purposefulness maybe not even imagined by their authors, subtly drawing out euphoria and pressure in equal steadiness.
Rusli additionally writes of the affect of rave tradition central to their transition, and of the document’s manufacturing and theme. ”It’s a declaration of affection for raves and the darkish hazy rooms that helped me to be free and true with myself. Seeing different people who find themselves so free and exquisite and considering that someday that may be me: that’s me sooner or later.” However there may be additionally a worry and unease current. Lead single, no good, explores ”the worst model of myself as a trans particular person, feeding doubt to my pre-transition self, all delivered over a relentless beat, swooning strings, and glistening synthesis.
OHYUNG is Lia Ouyang Rusli’s alter ego and solo venture. Their first album Untitled (Chinese language Man with Flame) was launched by Deathbomb Arc. In 2020, OHYUNG launched their sophomore album PROTECTOR (by way of Chinabot), a rare experimental rap cross-genre collision via distorted 808s, pitch-shifted rapping, frenetic pop power, and ambient loops. In 2022 OHYUNG launched their assortment of ambient soundscapes on NNA Tapes titled think about bare!, receiving reward from critics.
As an in-demand movie composer, they’ve scored A24’s Problemista and HBO’s Fantasmas by Julio Torres, Neo Sora’s Happyend (2024 Venice Worldwide Movie Pageant), and the Gotham Award and Impartial Spirit nominated movies Bruiser on Hulu and Shatara Mitchell Ford’s Check Sample. Rusli additionally scored quick movies Bambirak and Relaxation Cease which received Jury Awards for Worldwide Fiction and US Fiction at Sundance.
Directed by day, no good options OHYUNG in various varieties—the bride, a statuesque scarlet diva, and a rave woman in biker boots performing in an empty warehouse—each echoing the opposite via choreographed actions. The hazy pop track is an anthem to the contradictory worry of changing into the particular person you’ve all the time needed to be, and an ode to the transformative potentialities of raving. Photographs of liquid, morphing metallic evoke the metamorphosis on the coronary heart of the album, earlier than closing with Do You Suppose I’m Disco, a poem by Olivia Sio Tse, which takes the viewer into the interstitial and wordless house that the membership affords us all: ”There earlier than I used to be there / I needed you to think about.”
Take a look at the video for no good beneath –
~
OHYUNG shall be taking part in an album launch present in Brooklyn at Market Lodge on twenty eighth March. Particulars and tickets HERE.
You Are All the time On My Thoughts tracklisting:
1. you’re all the time on my thoughts
2. no good
3. canine drugs
4. i swear that i may die rn
5. 5 strings {lake}
6. crush
7. dancing on the mushy knife
8. im holding shut the reminiscence fades
9. id slightly be a ghost by your aspect than enter heaven with out you
10. years in the past
Now we have a small favour to ask. Subscribe to Louder Than Struggle and assist hold the flame of impartial music burning. Click on the button beneath to see the extras you get!