Lucy Liyou

Los Angeles-based composer Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Combining disparate sonic elements into critically cohesive pieces, the musical world of Lucy Liyou alternates between beautiful serenity and unsettling entropy. Arresting ballads and contemporary classical pieces fragment into decaying shards, voices get warped beyond recognition, and shimmering light makes way for bit-crushed noise. Her latest record, Dog Dreams (개꿈), is a rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but rather how both are interlocked in an affective dialectic. Liyou’s work has earned acclaim from Pitchfork, The Guardian, Bandcamp Daily, The Quietus, Them, Tone Glow, Wire Magazine, Mixmag Asia, The FADER, and NPR Music, among others, and received notable airplay on NTS Radio, KEXP, NPR, and Sonos Radio’s Radio Hour with Thom Yorke. Liyou has shared the stage with artists like L’Rain, claire rousay, Salamanda, Drew McDowall (Coil), Theodore Cale Shafer, HTRK, Liz Harris (Grouper) and performed on stages such as Cafe OTO, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Rewire Festival.

Instagram:

@lucyliyou

Twitter:

@foldthehorse