OHYUNG: IOWA

An album review of the latest ambient masterpiece by OHYUNG (aka Lia Ouyang Rusli). This one in ‘tribute’ to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”

OHYUNG

IOWA

OHYUNG

Lia Ouyang Rusli is an artist and film composer, but under her solo moniker OHYUNG she makes everything from ambient and experimental pop, to distorted noise and Musique concrète.

IOWA is the result of an artist residency in the state, and a reflection of that physical state through ambient music. It is also an overt tribute to the intentions of Bruce Springsteen’s solo album, Nebraska — though not at all referencing its sound, the cover artwork, and single state title makes this clear enough.

There’s also the use of negative space, which is all through Nebraska, different tools to achieve that though, since we live in a different world. And OHYUNG is a different type of musician.

The more obvious touchstones for sound are Malibu’s recent recording, Vanities:

And Lustmord’s album from a dozen years ago or so, The Word As Power:

Both artists, like OHYUNG, use their own voice to make wordless vocals, then stretched and processed and layered, and also incorporate a wide range of samples, found sounds, synthesised textures and various ‘drop ins’ from home-studio filters and live instrumentation.

IOWA begins with purgatory, which stretches her vocals into almost unrecognisable shapes, they feel like caged sounds crying out in the distance of lost melodies. I thought also of the way Lucy Gooch frames ambient music, but Lustmord’s creations were firmly in mind for me. And only in a good way of course.

In all dolls go to heaven we have a negative-space version of something like Moby’s God Moving Over The Face of the Waters. Where that is all busy with its cascading piano, and layer of musical motifs, this is the wash of what’s left when all of that has been removed; music as extraction process, refinement. The choir at the ruins, singing on a loop for the last canary down the final coal mine as humanity eats itself in a race to the finish.

But hey, it’s not all so upbeat! The piece, January, is a short shock of sound design, audio waves crashing, beached, and dancing parakeets feels like Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) assembling a first layer of soundtrack for the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems.

In the longer, more stretched pieces, nevada for instance, OHYUNG plays with the sample-sources, her own voice, and the new synth layers, to create a collage so deep you might never find the end of the sellotape.

The music of feelings you can’t articulate, and there’s a breathlessness to so much of this too, the black angel offers ghostly footsteps that are very nearly percussion but also might not actually even be there.

By the time of closing 12-

minute epic, memorial, it is somehow both close to overwhelming, and the music has permanently slipped into the background to wash over whatever else is happening, while that in turn takes a shape that folds over the music.

IOWA lasts an hour, but feels like it could play forever.

As with Springsteen’s Nebraska, you know something profound has happened; something so small as to be utterly enormous.

I feel like I was always listening to this album, long before I heard it. I am not sure, now that I know it, how I’ll ever be able to stop.