China - 2024
Modern Classical, Art Song, Chinese Folk
Many of us have been growing up with a misconception. There’s something, in Western societies especially, that tends to divide things into oppositions. The darkness and the light, the earth and the sky, the good and the evil. Separations. But hopefully, even though borders tend to strengthen these past few years, culture has always been flowing from one country to the other, offering new ways to consider our worlds, to consider ourselves. And so we learn. We learn that these oppositions are mere illusions.
When we talk about the body and the mind, the organic and the spiritual, here again we separate two things as if they had nothing to do with each other. But if we pay more attention, it’s easy to understand that a spiritual experience only reaches its peak when the body’s involved.
Otay:onii has always been one of these artists crossing borders. Whether we’re speaking of her life between China and the United States or her music between genres, she’s always been attracted by one thing : how to crush the illusions that make us believe that some things need to remain separated.
In 2019, she released an astounding 25-minute music piece where her voice became a tool to express the pain she had in her body because of a growing mole in her chest. Here again, she broke boundaries between the inside and the outside, turning her inward pain into an outward expressionism.
This work took her eight years to make. Five years later, Otay:onii returns behind her piano so her voice finds the center of the spotlight once again. And it took her four years to make it, since songs from her past catalogue (Intention and Emotion, Good Fool, You Do) are here reworked in acoustic versions.
« I hunch my back to hide the very last of my tears ». These are the words opening Rickshaw Boy. These are just words. But the way she sings them, the way she screams them, her voice twitching and contorting like tensed and crooked distortions turns them into sonic sorcery. On the word « back », her scream tears up the space. Not because it’s loud. But because it comes from the deepest part of her body. And here we are, the organic and the spiritual tied together by the meaning of a word and the way it’s sung.
Moving through an opera made of Chinese folk and modern neoclassical darkwave, Otay:onii delivers what sounds like her brightest album. But bright doesn’t mean joyful. It means struggling for peace, and reaching it. “I kept my head up so I could go home / No matter how it rumbles / I keep my head up so I could go home / No matter how it hurts”.
With Unfuck, she tries to rebuild a world on a sane basis acknowledging the scars of the past and the traumas that lingers but aren’t as loud as they used to be. Glowing past traditions, sensual fantasies, beaming neons, waterfalls, all these elements are present in the Wong Kar-Wai-esque music video of this song. Past and present are brought together in images unifying China’s history and evolution under the same spiritual journey.
And moving through this album works the same way. Melodies and vocal sounds all seem to come from ancestral times. It’s a trance. For forty minutes, you immerse yourself into an unsettling, disturbing organic experience where you face Otay:onii’s most vulnerable state of being. In her previous records, she was surrounded by glitches and electronic sounds telling her story, her wounds, her paths towards healing and her anger. In this place she only has her voice to do all that.
“What if the morning shines and you are colder? What if the smile they give is sharper? What if the lord they murdered yells back at you?” The anxious questions from You Do find their way back into this record, everlasting brain worms that won’t keep quiet. So her voice grows louder. A traditional throat singer, a metal screamer, an incantation reciter, the hypnosis finds its way to your deepest core as it crawls beneath your skin.
And still, the fear lingers. “Stare at the moon for quite some time now / Fortune soon will be gone”. So she builds that Brave New World. But this time, we shall let the darkness intertwine within the light, the earth mingle with the sky, the body merge with the mind. True faith ain’t blind when you stop burning your eyes within the light, because darkness helps you rest your vision. In this new world, we’ll need to reshape our knowledge. And it starts here, in the realm of a riveting bare performance.
When we talk about the body and the mind, the organic and the spiritual, here again we separate two things as if they had nothing to do with each other. But if we pay more attention, it’s easy to understand that a spiritual experience only reaches its peak when the body’s involved.
Otay:onii has always been one of these artists crossing borders. Whether we’re speaking of her life between China and the United States or her music between genres, she’s always been attracted by one thing : how to crush the illusions that make us believe that some things need to remain separated.
In 2019, she released an astounding 25-minute music piece where her voice became a tool to express the pain she had in her body because of a growing mole in her chest. Here again, she broke boundaries between the inside and the outside, turning her inward pain into an outward expressionism.
This work took her eight years to make. Five years later, Otay:onii returns behind her piano so her voice finds the center of the spotlight once again. And it took her four years to make it, since songs from her past catalogue (Intention and Emotion, Good Fool, You Do) are here reworked in acoustic versions.
« I hunch my back to hide the very last of my tears ». These are the words opening Rickshaw Boy. These are just words. But the way she sings them, the way she screams them, her voice twitching and contorting like tensed and crooked distortions turns them into sonic sorcery. On the word « back », her scream tears up the space. Not because it’s loud. But because it comes from the deepest part of her body. And here we are, the organic and the spiritual tied together by the meaning of a word and the way it’s sung.
Moving through an opera made of Chinese folk and modern neoclassical darkwave, Otay:onii delivers what sounds like her brightest album. But bright doesn’t mean joyful. It means struggling for peace, and reaching it. “I kept my head up so I could go home / No matter how it rumbles / I keep my head up so I could go home / No matter how it hurts”.
With Unfuck, she tries to rebuild a world on a sane basis acknowledging the scars of the past and the traumas that lingers but aren’t as loud as they used to be. Glowing past traditions, sensual fantasies, beaming neons, waterfalls, all these elements are present in the Wong Kar-Wai-esque music video of this song. Past and present are brought together in images unifying China’s history and evolution under the same spiritual journey.
And moving through this album works the same way. Melodies and vocal sounds all seem to come from ancestral times. It’s a trance. For forty minutes, you immerse yourself into an unsettling, disturbing organic experience where you face Otay:onii’s most vulnerable state of being. In her previous records, she was surrounded by glitches and electronic sounds telling her story, her wounds, her paths towards healing and her anger. In this place she only has her voice to do all that.
“What if the morning shines and you are colder? What if the smile they give is sharper? What if the lord they murdered yells back at you?” The anxious questions from You Do find their way back into this record, everlasting brain worms that won’t keep quiet. So her voice grows louder. A traditional throat singer, a metal screamer, an incantation reciter, the hypnosis finds its way to your deepest core as it crawls beneath your skin.
And still, the fear lingers. “Stare at the moon for quite some time now / Fortune soon will be gone”. So she builds that Brave New World. But this time, we shall let the darkness intertwine within the light, the earth mingle with the sky, the body merge with the mind. True faith ain’t blind when you stop burning your eyes within the light, because darkness helps you rest your vision. In this new world, we’ll need to reshape our knowledge. And it starts here, in the realm of a riveting bare performance.