- Subtle but impressively dynamic ambient music informed by Mariah Carey and Disney movies—in a good way.
- Lucy Liyou debuted in 2020 with Welfare, one of the most musically and emotionally uncompromising electronic albums of the young decade—an opera in the Korean p'ansori tradition that anyone with a difficult relationship with their parents might find near-impossible to stomach. Strikingly, it was sung entirely through text-to-speech software, giving the album a remote, faintly malevolent tone. After listening to that work, it was surprising to hear that one of the formative musical epiphanies in Liyou's life came from hearing Mariah Carey for the first time as a kid, and suddenly understanding the expressive potential of the human voice.
Carey's voice appears twice on Liyou's new album, Dog Dreams, first in recognisable form, then garbled beyond the point of abstraction. The Songbird Supreme serves as the guiding spirit for the three lengthy tracks here, which don't outwardly have much to do with almighty radio hits like "Fantasy" but share a sense of aspirational glamour and mythic grandeur. The album moves like a 60-pound Dolce & Gabbana gown, every note full of sparkle and flash, shimmering with such weight and grace it seems to abide by its own laws of gravity. At one point, Liyou requests "Disney strings" and promptly receives them. It's that kind of album.
The title track clocks in at over 14 minutes, the first five of which are devoted to layers of distorted mouth sounds that gradually fill out the stereo field. This might come off like the kind of trial-by-fire some artists place at the beginning of their records to weed out casual listeners, like the near-infinity of drums that introduces the Microphones' Mount Eerie. Instead, it's like watching the night sky gradually fill with stars, or falling asleep as your wakeful thoughts yield to strange, uncontrollable streams of consciousness beyond the brain's control.
The track deepens and deepens, and then five minutes in—at the exact moment you might start to forget what you're listening to—Liyou's voice suddenly enters. It's a surprising moment, not least because she's never foregrounded her voice on record before. She actually sings on stretches of Dog Dreams, and while her voice is less trained than her formidable piano playing, it has a pleasantly dusky quaver and a slight tinge of musical theatre exaggeration ideal for a project balancing vulnerability and heightened glamour. The rest of the time, she's whispering mere inches from the mic, employing an intimate vocal style that a few years ago might've scanned as trendy ASMR.
It's often difficult to make out what she's saying, either because her voice is so quiet or because it's slathered in broken-transistor effects. Yet vocals that flirt with the threshold of intelligibility often reward repeat listening, and that's true of Dog Dreams. This music sounds so plush and moves so glacially that there's the risk that it'll float away to the edges of the listener's consciousness. Liyou avoids this by establishing the possibility that any errant whisper could be a gutting confession or a gorgeous piece of poetry, encouraging the listener to pay close attention and look beyond the music's pretty patina.
I can imagine some listeners being disappointed that Liyou has moved away from the unflinching candour and harshness of Welfare towards something resembling traditional ambient music. But anyone who comes out of Dog Dreams feeling that it's inherently less authentic for being an easier or more comfortable listen is missing the point. If Mariah Carey's effortless pop songs can trigger such powerful reflections, why can't this music do the same? The highest praise I can give Dog Dreams is that it's easy to imagine a young fan picking it up and feeling like they, too, could summon Disney strings out of nowhere.
Tracklist01. Dog Dreams (개꿈)
02. April In Paris (봄)
03. Fold The Horse (종이접기)