- Bringing many loves together—shoegaze, tech house and the traditional sounds of her home country—Ciel's debut album both soothes and compels movement.
- In the face of frustration, some artists treat music as a means to escapism, while others use it to make sense of the world they actually exist in. Cindy Li feeds her surroundings into her music, making beautiful sounds and uplifting rhythms out of the mundane and the natural. "Music is all around us indeed," the Toronto-based, Xi'an-born producer once told music magazine Fifteen Questions, speaking on her growing appreciation for recording environmental sounds. "I've turned rain drops into arpeggiated bleeps, loon calls into synth leads, the wind moving through leaves into percussive effects. They're all musical and contain harmonic content." While writing her debut album, Homesick, during the pandemic, she looked outside and took stock of a desolate landscape, both physically and politically. She saw anti-Chinese discrimination at an all-time high in the media, the dance music industry and her everyday life.
Yielding gold from copper, Li transmutes this venom into the joyous melodies and acrobatic rhythms on Homesick. The classically trained pianist brought brisk, intricate melodies to previous records like Trojan Horse and Electrical Encounter, but on this new project, her studio sessions led her to dive deep into the world of Chinese traditional instruments. This inspired her to pull from an expanded acoustic repertoire that, on the album, nestles within an electronic ambiance of swirling ambient techno pads, tech house bounce and delayed bleeps. The project's track names are inspired by the natural materials that form these acoustic instruments, such as silk, bamboo and stone.
Li performs some of these instruments herself. On "Wood," we hear her play the kuaiban. The instrument's bamboo boards brush gently against each other as synths percolate like water exiting a pool water jet. On "Stone," arpeggiated synths wiz overhead while she produces satisfying clicks with temple blocks. She invites other musicians to perform live on other songs. Choral synths sail into the heavens on "Bamboo," while Heidi Chan's xiao, an end-blown flute, whistles through muted drums like a phantom. Dolores Chung performs the guzheng on "Silk," its twinkly plucked notes breaking up a deep, moaning vocal that recalls Elizabeth Frazer's celestial sighs on the Massive Attack classic "Teardrop."
Collaborating with other producers, like her work with fellow Canadian producer D. Tiffany as Psychedelic Budz, Li maintains a bright, quintessentially Canadian tech house bounce to her music. Alone, her music normally floats high above the dance floor, emphasising mood over drive. But there are many delectable moments on her latest project that balance both. On "Breath," vocals shriek and yawn in and out of delightfully clunky percussion. "Gourd" stays closest to the dance floor's starry-eyed peak, featuring a vocal that smoothly intones, "Rav-ing" and a pitched up vocal that shortly spews in return, cat!. That track is snuggled up next to the album's other strange and invigorating standout, "String," where a synth line corkscrews downward and a chipmunk vocal sputters above percussion that bounces like a heated game of table tennis.
The airiness in Li's music comes from her roots listening to shoegaze bands like Broadcast, Slowdive and Chapterhouse. "'Dreamy' is a word a lot of people use to describe my sound. Well, that's not an accident. The dreamy quality and swirling texture of shoegaze can absolutely be found in my records,'" she told Mantissa in 2019. She brings this breezy psychedelia to Homesick through immersive and deeply textured songs like "Metal" where a featherlight melody tunnels through a lively field of digital chirps and "Gourd," where blinking signals elongate and guide listeners to oceanic pads speckled with sparkling dust. The album is brain music as much as it is body music, and its density of details make it feel enveloping enough to live in. It's difficult magic to fantasise light when staring out into a grim reality, but with her sheer love for music, Li does just that.
Tracklist01. Bamboo
02. String
03. Gourd
04. Hide
05. Breath
06. Wood
07. Metal
08. Stone
09. Silk