Over a series of acclaimed and elliptical records, Lucy Liyou seems to have traced the outline of several possible careers. Welfare and Practice – albums so of a piece that they were soon bundled up by American Dreams Records – featured text-to-speech snippets of a diaristic and starkly confessional nature, whether reflecting on family history or setting the listener right in the middle of moments of apparent rupture or tumult.
Discomfiting by nature, their emotional tenor and palpable disquiet was heightened by Liyou’s molten piano instrumentals and use of sound collages which often abounded in jagged shards of industrial noise. Together the works suggested an artist whose raw yet somehow furtive confessionals and synthetic vocals would plough a new furrow for pop-leaning musique concrĆ©te.
Cadaver Opening If You Just took the lyrical and melodic aspects of Welfare and Practice and set them in the context of a five-part piano suite. Dog Dreams (ź°źæ) on the other hand turned away from text-to-speech for a more lavish and even more emotionally laden embrace of pansori, the traditional genre of Korean musical storytelling which is typically performed by one singer and one drummer, following the trials and tribulations of its assorted characters while being deeply rooted in a collective grief.
From its opening staccato of saliva sounds, Dog Dreams (ź°źæ) laid bare Liyou’s ripened singing voice and the sunken limpidness of her piano, over three long tracks which stretched variously from the suffocating codependence, gushing tenacity and operatic force of the title track to the woozy drama and reiterating horror of her take on the Vernon Duke jazz standard ‘April in Paris’ to the fortune telling and romantic overtures of ‘Fold the Horse’.
Her next album was framed as an audition for the role of K-pop idol, but the ostensible narrative through-line barely limned her most fractured series of songs and soundscapes to date. Liyou synthesized organic sounds almost beyond recognition, conjured video games and dabbled triumphantly with one popular form as ‘visual (hey girl)’ landed somewhere between the wispy R&B of the FKA twigs mixtape CAPRISONGS and the shrugging industrial trip hop of Bjƶrk on ‘Army of Me’, played word games and critiqued while partially adopting the childlike postures of aegyo and amid her own distending piano managed to feature a handful of instrumentalists who sputtered and swelled on keys, strings and brass. Meanwhile the broken lyrics which staggered throughout +82 K-Pop Star once more suggested family or childhood traumas and patterns of coercion and abuse.
By contrast Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is her most songlike collection of music, rooted in the piano ballad and not quite a breakup or heartbreak album but one which reckons with love and loss in its own discrete way. Liyou writes that she began most of these songs at the age of nineteen in a college dorm room, at which time they were addressed to her parents and concerned her desire to be loved and accepted as a closeted transgender young adult. Now some six or seven years later that desire has fallen away. In its stead Liyou began to rewrite and rework the material to grapple with the impending end of a relationship, with her partner of two years set to move away. She writes:
Listening to this album now, I feel really affected by this parallel between the love in wanting my parents to accept me for who I am and the love in wanting my partner to stay with me regardless of our circumstances. I always assumed that these two loves were separate but I think recognizing that (for trans people like me, or maybe just for me specifically) these loves have overlap has been simultaneously distressing and comforting.
Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is a beautiful, graceful and emotionally potent record. It opens on a note of musical theatre fantasy which contains the record’s eternal and selfsame gesture of ‘please stay’. With a self-deprecating air, its first lines are ‘to leave you alone / is nothing more than a favour’ but there is scarcely a trace of irony as Liyou’s unadorned vocals, more than a whisper but still with the hint of a quaver, express a luscious yet needy desire as though each word were measured and uttered through moistened lips. ‘But the more I wait / the more I want you’ she confesses as rustling birdsong and a few electronic patches seem to settle ’16/18′ in a continuous present, even as the song swirls and whorls to its lavish, pleading climax.
From birdsong to something more nocturnal, on the standout ‘Credit’ the suggestion of crickets and burgeoning synths present a kind of looped moment, that of a curtain perpetually being drawn onto the possibilities of the night. ‘Do you want me now / do you want me now?’ the singer repeats, asking and needing or giving without want of a receipt, on a song which inhabits the theatricality of pansori but also carries the neo soul sultriness of say D’Angelo on his ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’ or even the forthrightness of En Vogue on their classic ‘Don’t Let Go (Love)’.
An audience gently applauds in the middle of this midsummer night’s dream, as Liyou uncannily blends a personal address, staggering in its intimacy, with aspects of stage performance in the process managing to ceaselessly transcend both forms or worlds. In the end her question and her scarcely audible closing request to ‘bear all / look at me’ seems addressed to us all, as from cockeyed glances to a smatterings of acclaim we yearn to share in her rapture.
If this ‘Credit’ is the most amorous moment on Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name then sometimes the singer seems to shift perspective or slightly blur the line between who is leaving and who is staying. The third track ‘Arrested’ opens ‘Any second now / I’ll feel the need to come back crawling right this / instant’ although in the absence of the fixed presence of her lover what she is crawling back to is not so much the fact of their relationship as a memory of shared touches and sentiments and space.
Suggestively she sings ‘I’ll let you fang my amber parts’ and then ’cause I’m not / strong enough to tell you that I want / so badly to be someone that I’m not / I wanna kiss you and sew you a body that brings you the pleasure you value’ as her self-abnegation grows more acute. At times layering her own voice into whorling choruses comprised of short phrases or solitary words, here Liyou is supported on backing vocals by Mingjia Chen, who adds tender and crushing emphases and whose stunning star, star – a through-composed collection of songs featuring the thirteen-piece Tortoise Orchestra – was released on New Amsterdam Records a couple of years ago. All of this builds into one incredible outpouring and a humble entreaty, as Liyou repeats ‘arrested by your every need / my love say that you need me, need me, need me, need me’ with the tumbling fervour of Van Morrison in ‘Madame George’ or ‘Cyprus Avenue’ before adding ‘please learn to love what I am now’.
An emotionally devastating one-two punch, ‘Arrested’ features an accompaniment of whirling and spectral organ keys with a few twinkling arpeggios and a steady patter of industrial echos and watery drops. Chen’s voice provides the fluttering outro. Whereas some of the songs on Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name are redolent of neo soul or even Latin pop, Liyou who has openly acknowledged the influence of pansori and opera, ambient electronics and musique concrĆØte as well as K-pop on her previous works for this album adds another frame of reference in Mariah Carey whose love songs and balladry – later inflected with the beats and rhythms of R&B and hip hop – saw her dominate the nineties chart. Carey is an important touchstone for Liyou’s record but that’s less for her singing voice, which was often pleasantly breezy or even plainspoken, and more for her use of scatting and melismas and sighs, those interludes and openings like at the start of ‘Always Be My Baby’ with the melismas of Liyou and Chen playing a prominent role in ‘Arrested’.
‘No Tide Aorta’ is mostly instrumental, with delicate and restorative piano glissandos rolling out over a distant or dissipating thunder and some faintly glitching beats. The drama of the piece evokes something of RosalĆa as Liyou adds a few vocalisations or sibilances before the track at the halfway point cedes to a wash of staticky noise, blooming and sparkling a bit like the shimmer in Annihilation, the cult Alex Garland science fiction film.
The opening to ‘Imagine Kiss’ meanwhile reminds me of say ‘Black Lake’ the centrepiece to Bjƶrk’s emotionally ravaged breakup album Vulnicura plus the song ‘Gradient Sky’ from Black Lights by her Icelandic compatriots Samaris. Flowing out from ‘No Tide Aorta’, it inhabits a zone of pulsing, spartan immediacy and proves a kind of ghost story or a song about possession and doubling as Liyou seeks some kind of finality while imagining what will happen when her relationship has come to an end. Supported on backing vocals by Chen and G. Brenner, it is as though she is saying to her lover ‘tell me this isn’t real so I can go in living in that unreality’.
‘Jokes About Marriage’ starts off as another piano ballad, more of a standard but with an interstitial drone that reflects its sodden despondency before the song introduces Cole Pulice and their transportive, elegiac sax. Liyou sings about loss or impending loss: the loss of inside jokes and shared locales, the loss or in effect the death of future plans, the loss of a once settled feeling of warmth, comfort and safety. Mournful yet somehow hopeful and bronzed, Pulice’s misty bugle call and Liyou’s wispy voice eventually cede to the field recordings of Andrew Weathers, a constant Liyou collaborator, as ‘Jokes About Marriage’ shuffles out to the sound of tinkling chimes, rustling softly in the wind, a few dog barks and far-flung hollers.
The final track on Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is also the title piece. A total breakdown or relinquishing of the song structure, it consists mostly of silence with no more than seconds-long snippets and field recordings interrupting the blank space. From a clopping or rattling and a single chime or sine tone, we hear variously train whistles, the opening phrases of telephone conversations or voicemails, running water possibly in the vicinity of a waterfall, a sustained piano key and traces of brass and wind, some percussive sounds on the piano, a whispered and serpentine ‘call me’ and finally what sounds like the piano lid being closed shut. piano lid closing shut.
Fond and even playful while possessing both a haunting aspect and the soothing quality of a lullaby, ‘Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name’ lives up to its title and is best heard in the context of Liyou’s closing statement, which reads:
I named the record Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name to remind myself that the more amorphous moments I’ve shared with you are the moments most important to me. Because they make me work harder to remember us as who we were together. And because that work means that there is still love for me to mine. To keep.
