- Connecting the dots between Krautrock, adult contemporary and downtempo, Yu Su's latest EP features four breathtaking vistas crafted from a wondrous attention to detail.
- Back in 2021, Yu Su recruited three musicians to play parts of her album Yellow River Blue for KEXP's Live At Home series. It's one of my favourite pandemic-era performances—think lo-fi videography in someone's basements with plenty of masks—bringing her debut LP to life with all of the vibrant contrasts turned up to 11. The uplifting house-ish lilt of "Xiu'' disintegrates into the chopped and screwed Krautrock of "Klein," before a beat is built back up into the dubby downtempo "Gleam." Each of these tracks, on paper at least, could be a million miles apart, but Yu Su's songwriting holds them together as the intricate interplay of melody and rhythm coil and unfurl like a timelapse video of a flowering Yosemite meadow. Her follow-up, the four-track EP I Want An Earth, picks up where Yellow River Blue left off, creating strange and wondrous tidepools that ripple across tempos and timbres.
As Yu Su's music has shifted away from the lethargic grooves she started out making, she's leaned into her musicality, bringing together not just genres but what feels like an infinite number of ideas in each song. "I realised that I can have 20 different layers of melodies going on," she once told Ableton, "but I have to have a focus—a driven main melody, and that melody has to be very grounded."
"Counterclockwise'' is a perfect example. A simple, ascending scale holds the track together while stringy synthesizers and undulating chords pulse over the top. About halfway through, she introduces a series of keyboard leads that sound as if they're being played in reverse. This creates a weightless feeling of space and time, like the physics defying bliss of Wile E. Coyote just before he looks down and realises his fate.
The rest of I Want An Earth is just as intricate. On the title track, scruffed fret boards and moody chords are interspersed with snippets of field recordings, before Su adds chuggy Krautrock drums and a flute-like lead that could've been lifted from a Brainticket album. "Menta Y Menta" lurches along with a staccato stutter, as darting arpeggios race across the stereo over a synth that sounds like it's slowly releasing helium. Even on the record's most minimal track, "Pardon," which isn't much more than a heartbroken piano somewhere between Debussy and Burt Bacharach, she adds the occasional robotic chirp of her synths and the sparkle of strings.
Taken individually, these minute shifts in her tracks are micro changes in timbre, tone and texture. Sometimes the introduction of a new melody or a drum pattern can be so small it's easy to miss. But viewed as a whole, they add up to something much bigger. This makes the title of the record feel particularly fitting: I Want An Earth features four tracks that are worlds unto themselves, making the EP into a quiet and subtle, yet no less profound, act of musical terraforming.
Tracklist01. I Want An Earth
02. Counterclockwise
03. Manta y Menta
04. Pardon