Lucy Liyou

Welfare / Practice

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

MP3
FLAC
WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

Lucy Liyou combines their first two releases into a definitive early self-portrait on their debut for American Dreams Records, home to aces by claire rousay, Brett Naucke, Martha Skye Murphy & Maxwell Sterling

Pairing Lucy’s brilliant 2020 debut digital release, ‘Welfare’ for Klein’s Ijn Inc label with its 2021 follow-up ‘Practice’ for Full Spectrum Records, the resulting 12-track set provides a necessarily broader canvas for that shapeshifting melange of text-to-speech vox and collages of sampled Internet ephemera with original acoustic piano. The dreamily mazy work takes firmer context in light of its inspiration from Pansori, a style of Korean folk opera musical storytelling and drama, here enacted by Lucy with a filigree arrangement of spectral presences and raw, sampled textures knit into a frayed, hypnagogic sort of narrative. Maybe a bit obvious to say, but the results land pretty squarely between the observational tekkerz of Klein and claire rousay, yet are distinguished by an emphasis on a flux of atmospheric subtleties and integral influence of their Korean background.

The uncanniness of Lucy’s first four tracks which form the ‘Welfare’ release resound a mix of naïveté and craft, mostly taking over 10 minutes to unfurl strange yarns that spool from the melody of “Happy Birthday” to drily TTS-intoned thoughts on “When would be a good time to tell Mom I’m going to therapy?”, and proceed to model the experience of therapy in anxious noise reflecting its taboo nature in Korean society. This metaphorical technique manifests in the sublime, half-sung Korean and english of R&B vignette ‘Unnie’, and most obliquely on ‘Who You Freed’, resolving in keening shoegaze-like shapes and classical piano eddies on ‘Some Form of Darkness’.

So to ‘Practice’, the record’s more spacious and fragmented half, conceived, according to Lucy, “as therapy work for myself” during a two-week period early in the Covid-19 pandemic whilst living at home in Seattle with their Grandma. Rather than stagnate, Lucy worked more quickly and less guided by Pansori, keeping tracks to a 3 min lifespan as they fleet from cinematic keys and whispers of ‘You are every memory’ to the real world elision of field recordings and open-window keys on ‘September 5’ via simply gorgeous passages such as ‘Uncle’, to the digital angularities of ‘At the dinner table’ and ‘Patron’, and the sublime of ‘How to build an automaton’.

Brilliant.

MP3 Release (12)