Lucy Liyou – +82 K-Pop Star

Even as she ascends the last step and under a starry cavalcade of ceiling lights, the solitary glare of a spotlight or a shifting mass of neon strobes fingers tentatively to jostle the microphone out of its socket, deep down Lucy Liyou desires to make her listener feel uncomfortable most of all. Or maybe only first of all, because through the fog of forlorn piano keys and scarcely fathomable pitch-shifted vocals there are fragments of melodies and thematic swoons, submerged references to some of her favourite popular music and other desires besides which though barely enunciated still stretch out with an electric charge to fill the room.

Where last year’s Dog Dreams (개꿈) swapped molten piano instrumentals and text-to-speech snippets for a staccato of saliva sounds and a more fulsome embrace of pansori – from the suffocating codependence, gushing tenacity and operatic thrust of the title track to the woozy drama and reiterating horror of her take on the Vernon Duke jazz standard ‘April in Paris’ and the romance of ‘Fold The Horse’ – her latest theatre piece is framed as an audition for the role of K-pop idol, whose opening gambit is interrupted by a transposed coughing fit before the aspiring artist is chastised by two music executives for singing English lyrics with a Korean accent, which in their own words (translated from the Korean) gives the audience a sense of ‘second-hand embarrassment’ by crudely circumventing the emotional heft of the song.

Organic sounds become synthesized almost beyond recognition, like on ‘toefl’ which refers to the standardised English language test, where the plunk of water droplets and the sound of ice in a highball glass being stirred transform into an ominous wall of encroaching static. The track carries a video game quality, suggesting both the malignant artificial intelligence of the enrichment centre in Portal and the mysteriously floating orbs of the walking simulator Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, while amid the semantic scarcity of a series of tersely related words (such as ‘reservoir’ and ‘whelk’, ‘noctuelles’ and ‘shell’, ‘gut’, ‘wooden’, ‘box’, ‘soil’, ’embedded’, ‘trowel’ and ‘stucco’) there is a shred of early Xiu Xiu, with the discomfiting umms and aahs reminding this particular listener of the gut-wrenching ‘20,000 Deaths for Eidelyn Gonzales, 20,000 Deaths for Jamie Peterson’.

Lucy Liyou has furnished the release of +82 K-Pop Star with a PDF document which she describes as ‘essential to the music’, a compendium of fractured narratives, some poetic, song lyrics and visual transcripts, photographs and screen captures all of which concludes with record credits and liner notes by the poet and Red Tower chronicler Rodney E. Dailey II, whose imagery evokes translucent skies and plumbed worlds, opening with the lines ‘I want to be—a[mass]ed / Held by drooling edges of bulging globes—’ in a manner which faintly echoes the Beats, especially the bop rhythms and surreal fusions of Gregory Corso.

A clue to ‘toefl’ can be found in a line from the document which reads ‘never heard of ae-gyo’, a Korean term for the cutesy displays of affection like high-pitched voices, puckered lips and puffy eye makeup, hand hearts and face-framing which are expected of idols and young women alike, typically serving to reinforce traditional gender roles. The document summarises aegyo as a basic effort to ‘sound like a baby’, which gives new shape to those aahs and oohs.

Elsewhere these fractured narratives suggest childhood abuse and other family traumas, plus furtive trysts or perhaps the mobile nature of the modern casting couch, more strangely impersonal but no less opportunistic or lewd. Elaborating the sonic palette of ‘toefl’, one such text describes ‘breathing in lake water’ and the uttering of ‘water phrases’, while the long-running line ‘she’s pressed against car glass fog can you say it salamander dotted eighth contrabass she can talk like a baby grand hand in my underwear label’ seems to encapsulate a dark schematics of exploitation masked as rational quid-pro-quo.

‘karaoke’ sounds like a submerged baritone choir, as if viewed through a terrarium, while ‘superstar’ features some of the most clearly articulated words on +82 K-Pop Star as over plunging keys or stretched and strangulated synthetics Liyou says ‘I’m not waiting for your love’ and ‘My baby fucks me up’, before the end of the track offers something like counting cash and a couple of bird calls, a brief snatch of daylight. Through the pitch-shifted morass, ‘visual (hey girl)’ is the most song-orientated piece on the record, amid the breathy lines ‘It’s like a kiss and a burden in the mouth’ and ‘You look better fucked up’ landing somewhere between the wispy R&B of the FKA twigs mixtape CAPRISONGS and the shrugging industrial trip hop of Björk from the Post album opener ‘Army of Me’.

A tenebrous cast accompany Lucy Liyou on +82 K-Pop Star, with Jiyoung Wi and bela providing the voices of the two music executives, the former responsible for the spatial intimacies of Accept All Cookies which landed on enmossed at the end of January, while bela issued one of the shocks of the spring with their debut album Noise and Cries (​​​굉​​​음​​​과 울​​​음​​​) on Unsound, a stirring composite of pansori arias, Enya-like vocal refrains and death metal growls, industrial hiss and cybernetic maximalism which evoked the contemporary queer club while also pulling in aspects of hwimori and dongsalpuri, two jangdan or traditional Korean folk rhythms. Best known for his tenor saxophone and lap steel guitar, Andrew Weathers adds synthesizer to the short squibs and crashing cascades of ‘fighting / warm up’, and on the standout ‘debut’ a trio of ambient improvisers lend a hand in the form of Stephan Haluska on harp, Henna Chou on cello and Justin Houser on trumpet.

Through twinkling keys and descending chords, ‘debut’ opens in the limbo between supplication and intimidation as Liyou intimately solicits ‘Listen boy. My first love story. My angel. And my girls’ then ‘My sunshine’ as keys begin to distend and stretch out, lingering on the cusp of ominous drones. The track is the most redolent of Dog Dreams (개꿈), especially when the swell of Chou’s cello provides a similarly piquant sense of both tension and languor, embittered anguish and cathartic relief. Amid more keys and Korean vocals, with portent and menace a voice mutters ‘Let’s go’ and the stagnant pool or quagmire of synths and drones is stirred by harp glissandos and the stately sputtering of Houser’s trumpet. The tangled atmosphere languishes through clinking cutlery, runaway keys, whinnying trumpet and roiling cello.

So following much gnawing at the margins, a club discursion and buried K-pop references, the aspiring artist finds themselves back in front of the two music executives who try hard not to sound too disgruntled yet are still decidedly less than pleased. They want her to lose a bit of weight, to perfect her hair and makeup and besides all that learn to be a little more natural on film. At last +82 K-Pop Star draws to a close with a little synthesized victory march like you might get for completing a level of an early-nineties video game platformer or achieving the jackpot on a casino hall slot machine. The ‘grand prize’ has been activated.