Lucy Liyou – Welfare / Practice – New 2 LP Record 2022 American Dreams Vinyl – Electronic / Experimental / Field Recording / Korean Opera American Dreams Records

“I’m trying to document emotions, more than specific events and memories. I mean…that’s what my music is at the end of the day – I’m just documenting.”

This is Lucy Liyou, the Philadelphia-based experimental musician behind cinematic sister LPs Welfare and Practice. Working in their Korean-American lineage and pulling from childhood memories, Liyou takes inspiration from Pansori (Korean Folk Opera), a style of Korean musical storytelling; and Korean drama soundtracks. Collaging text-to-speech (TTS) with their own voice, personal field recordings, audio samples from memes, Tumblr, and YouTube videos, synthesizers, and lush acoustic piano, Liyou creates their own distinct narrative.

Composition for Welfare began in late 2019, when Liyou set out to write an album inspired by Pansori recordings their grandfather used to play. Pansori is traditionally performed by a single vocalist accompanied by a drummer who plays a Korean drum called a buk. “It made me think about what storytelling is through music, and how powerful and world-building the voice alone can be,” says Liyou. “I wanted to emulate that but in kind of a brutalized manner…so I was like, let’s try it with the TTS.” Liyou did careful research into Pansori in the process of creating Welfare, wanting to be very…  more

released May 20, 2022

Remastered by Andrew Weathers
Album Design by Devin Shaffer
Album Art by Wilson Minshall
Original Art on Practice by Wilson Minshall
Original Art on Welfare by Faye Wei Wei

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