Flora Yin-Wong - Cold Reading (2023)      


Review:
The idea of making a pact with the devil has a long musical history, and usually follows the same storyline: a musician sells their soul in order to gain some inhuman musical virtuosity. The examples are myriad and run from flamboyant French composers to the infamous crossroads of blues musicians like Robert Johnson. The story behind Giuseppe Tartini's famed "Violin Sonata in G Minor"—AKA the "Devil's Trill Sonata"—is a slightly different take on the Faustian bargain. Tartini doesn't sell his soul but rather meets the devil in a dream where he's shown the most beautiful composition ever made. "The Devil's Trill" was Tartini's attempt at recreating that dream, the closest approximation he could muster. The composer and sound collagist Flora Yin-Wong took inspiration from Tartini for her latest album Cold Reading. It's easy to see what Yin-Wong likes about the story. "Ever since I was young I've felt there was another layer of things to the world," she explained to The Quietus, "[And] I guess we're all just trying to describe what that is."  Like Tartini, her music is defined by a dissonance between dreams and their representation. Her last album, 2020's Holy Palm, was defined by a process of ethereal recreations of her travels. Rather than making sonic facsimiles, she layered disparate iPhone field recordings atop one another, creating impressionistic palimpsests where insects from Bali chattered over Greek priests. On Cold Reading the music becomes even more abstract and skeletal, but it's held together by a sort of theology. Religious imagery has been a staple of Wong's work—she published a book called Liturgy in 2021—and there's something distinctly devotional about this record, from the bells on "Meadow Copse" to the New Age daydreams of "Beautiful Crisis." But the faith here is definitely lapsed. Wong has a whole song dedicated to the third-century martyr, Saint Victor, who was sentenced to be ground to death, which gives you a good indication of where her head is at. "Vittore Al Corpo" is a funeral march of strings and Burial-style vocals over arhythmic drums as inviting as guillotines. But Wong also knows how to temper this austerity, looping in a rainstorm, running feet and the plonk of a stream on the trudging on "Meadow Copse." This all builds to the record's best song, "Nectar Dripping." It's like a slowly rusting Cocteau Twins record, where the dream pop synths and muffled vocals slowly corrode under the industrial-like crunch.  Cold Reading is miles away from Wong's club-oriented music. Even Holy Palm had a few moments where you could detect her PAN lineage. But that's gone on Cold Reading. "Banjar" and "Konna" do start with danceable hand drums, but they disintegrate pretty quickly. "Konna" is bathed in television static, while the drums are sped up on "Banjar" so fast that they become indiscernible. To find a rhythm anywhere on the record is like the musical equivalent of the Droste effect: staring at a pattern within a pattern within a pattern until the whole thing creates a sense of vertigo.  Cold Reading was written after a long trip to Southeast Asia, part of which Wong took with her father. It was an overdue return for her father to his native Kuala Lumpur, as she explains in the liner notes. But the experience wasn't one of homecoming—instead, she felt "an overwhelming sense of rootlessness, and understanding that all there is is emptiness and entropy." And while threatening chaos lurks in the corners across Cold Reading, Wong is still able to create pockets of beauty amidst the ruination. — ra.co


   


Track List:
01 - All My Dreams Are Nightmares
02 - Meadow Copse
03 - Konna
04 - Banjar
05 - Vittore al Corpo
06 - Hands
07 - Nectar Dripping
08 - 108
09 - Beautiful Crisis
10 - Nea Selini


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, experimental
Country: London, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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