Semay Wu

Raspberry Hotel

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Cassette

Boomkat Product Review:

‘Raspberry Hotel’ is the long-awaited solo debut LP by cellist Semay Wu, who’s best known as longtime player with Homelife, here left to her own devices on ravishingly inventive improvisations made in Glasgow.

A regular presence in NW England since the ‘90s with Paddy Steer’s Homelife, Semay Wu’s illustrious discography takes in work with everyone from Paul Heaton and King Creosote to The Owl Ensemble. Her first solo album is collaged from a week in a Glasgow studio, generating eight parts of unpredictable instrumental experimentation from her trusty cello plus a range of toys, electronics and everyday objets. The results form a semi-live showcase where runs of in-the-moment thought are ruptured with fleeting jump-cuts and spangled with a distinctive playfulness that will charm lovers of free music and sculptural sound art by artists ranging from Okkyung Lee to Rhodri Davies or Andy Votel, Sean Canty & Doug Shipton’s mixtape collages.

Working to her own lysergic logic, the album treads the finest line of frenetic and disciplined, from a blend of melancholy, rustic cello and squabbling electronics in ‘Midnight Peony’ to the pranging mechanisms and speaking-in-tongues expression of ‘Beauty Sleep’. She persistently pulls the rug form under the listener’s feet between purely documentarian snapshots oaf concentrated blatz on ‘Gut Wend’, to the poltergeist concrète frolics of ‘Ceremonial House’, and a standout ‘Eau Reader’, which takes its title from a commissioned poem, written by Juana Adock, and quietly recalling a more frayed echo of claire rousay’s domestic scenarios - appearing to make the washing-up melodic, and turning textured with the sounds of electric razors, chopped with what sounds like deft tape methods..

Cassette (8)