Best orchid album4/16/2023 ![]() ![]() Over the course of YIAN, Chua gathers the threads that link home, history, and their relationship to the body. Digital distortion glitches the matrix like sorrow short-circuiting the brain. Meanwhile, “Grief Piece” drifts through the lonely expanses of its namesake. A bass drone pulses gently low strings swell and the tremolo of violins shimmer like light on water. The orchestral “Meditations on a Place” evokes both the impressionistic warmth of Ravel and the icy panoramas of Sibelius. Each track becomes its own kind of home, or at least a safe harbor. Here, as throughout the album, Chua creates landscapes out of the hollow spaces within her. On the elegiac “Autumn Leaves Don’t Come,” glassy strings played sul ponticello criss-cross like flocks of birds. Chua’s voice thickens like rope, and she casts it outward, as if in search of anchorage. Haunting these spaces is the classic diasporic question of home. It follows that much of the album is spent navigating-and redefining her relationship to-hazy, in-between spaces. Born to a Chinese-Malaysian father and white British mother, Chua seeks both a relationship to her roots and release from its inherited traumas. ![]() YIAN, by comparison, expands outward, offering not just vignettes but stories, often rooted in the artist’s own experiences as a child of the Chinese diaspora. ![]() Her previous EPs, 2019’s Antidotes ’s Antidotes 2, captured tender vignettes of shifting moods and moments in time. The London-based cellist and producer has spent years excavating the delicate interiorities of melancholy and longing. ![]()
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