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lovejustforaday · 3 months

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2023 Year End List - #1

夢之駭客 Dream Hacker - Otay:onii

Main Genres: Post-Industrial, Experimental

A decent sampling of: Neoclassical Darkwave, Electroacoustic, Glitch, Industrial Techno, Drone

Brace yourself, cause from here on out this is mostly just gonna be me fanboying and gushing uncontrollably.

Back in 2021, I had championed the Chinese American singer/songwriter/composer/producer/performance artist Lane Shi Otayonii a.k.a. Otay:onii for her experimental record Ming Ming on that year's roundup, describing her potential to become "one of the greatest producers of the decade". But who is this enigmatic artist?

Lane Shi divides her time and energy between creating and touring with her hardcore noise rock band Elizabeth Colour Wheel, and performing studio black magic with her solo project under the Otay:onii name.

She is also an artist who regularly alternates her base of operations between two worlds, residing at different times in New York City and Shanghai. The duality of her identity as a Chinese American is a narrative thread that appears many times throughout the artist's work, informing some of the thematic elements of her records.

According to a really great interview she did with the YouTuber Heinos, the moniker 'Otayonii' itself is actually a name that was given to the artist when she met a Seneca First Nations man, who asked if he could call her by the name for 'wolf' in his ancestral language. She liked the sound and what it represented, and so decided to own her new given title.

Musically, Otay:onii is primarily a post-industrial project, but Lane Shi regularly incorporates aspects of darkwave, glitch, drone, traditional Chinese music, and electroacoustic music into her work. Her signature sound is equal parts atmospheric, lovecraftian, primordial, playful, and frenetic. She's kinda like if an ancient vengeful demi-god reemerged from the bowels of the Earth, and learned how to download and play around with studio software on a laptop.

As a vocalist, Lane Shi possesses a contralto range, and falls under one of my favourite niche categories of woman singers I like to call "force-of-nature belters", along with the likes of Tanya Tagaq and Björk. She has a trademark lower register that I would describe as a witch's snarl, a gentler middle register, as well as a higher register that she usually reserves for piercing battle cries and wailing like a banshee.

Her 2018 debut Nag was a comparatively more minimalist, grayscale undertaking, heavy on the more ambient and gothic tones of her sound. A genuinely solid first effort, if a bit less memorable than later records, barring the deliciously dreary eponymous song which is still among her very best.

2021's Ming Ming was an upgrade in all respects. Pulling major influences from Chinese folk music and folklore, I described the record in my previous Otay:onii review as a "true Pandora's Box . . . like the story of a mortal who attempts to enter the realm of the gods". Lots of ominous industrial cyber-magic, with a rare few moments that could have perhaps been edited down or omitted altogether to increase the force of its impact.

So, what to make of her latest then?

Dream Hacker is an exorcism. An inferno of ancient eternal flames envelops this absolutely bonkers and surreal listening experience. Each song carries powerful buildups in intensity combined with impossibly elegant structural competence. Far and away one of the most visceral and transcendent records I have ever beheld. This gets into your bloodstream, like an innate, raw instinct towards entropy.

Otay:onii's work has never sounded quite this immediate, energetic, and dynamic, thanks to the incorporation of avant-garde industrial techno beats that gives the whole project a mighty propulsion. Even during its quieter moments, you as the listener are never far from being engulfed in its unruly fire and brimstone. So many little leftfield moments that made me audibly go "what the fuck?" upon my first listen, too.

To me, this is album of the year not just because it poses the best collection of songs from an artist in 2023 (which, to be clear, it does), but also because it forms the most cohesive and fully realized project of the year. Every moment of this record feels intentional, meticulously crafted, and designed to fit accordingly into a larger entity. This is almost a living, breathing organism unto itself.

Lane Shi described how much of the inspiration for Dream Hacker came to her in a dream, or as she sees it, an "astral projection". Within this dream, she says she witnessed stones being thrown by a child until two of them overlapped, followed by a great light which emerged from the center of the overlap. The imagery was profound enough that she ended up naming most of the tracks after different aspects of what she saw in the dream.

The album starts with humble beginnings. "You Do/Rub" is a two-parter, opening with the haunting, softly swirling piano ballad melancholy of "You Do". The lyrics are deeply cutting and vulnerable, as the artist ponders her shaky relationship with her father as a daughter of the generation where China had implemented the one child policy, breeding stigma against female offspring in the more conservative rural communities. Lane Shi wields her voice like a delicate blade, gracefully and artfully interrogating her father's worldview. The progression of the piano's melody suggests a kind of resolution in ambiguity, resisting rigid, narrow-minded answers to multidimensional questions.

Then quite abruptly, "Rub" completely overtakes and drowns out the serenity of the softer piano song, like a sudden onset computer virus infection. What becomes of this part two is honestly one of the most immaculate timbral frequencies I've ever heard. A glitchy, droning wall of madness forms in dark, ominous, tempestuous clouds all across the sky. Warm colours are sucked out of existence by a black hole, leaving only greyish pale blues. The soul is washed with abrasion until all that's left is the ability to observe. Sound design on this is fucking unreal, as though Lane Shi Otayonii is wiping clean of our universe, leaving only a empty slate to form the basis for her own new sonic domain, wherein she is god of all things.

"Light Burst" is the combustion spark of a rebirth of all things that comes immediately after. Lane Shi let's out a shrill cry of tremendous power and agony amidst the grinding dust and debris of an incredibly dense and intricate industrial techno concoction, built upon her long standing love affair with minor second chord progressions. This track does not relent, adding more and more layers to its already colossal tower of babel proportions until, just as suddenly as it came into existence, it vanishes without a trace of detection.

"Two Rocks A Bird" oscillates like an electron creating new electromagnetic waves. Sound particles split into atoms that dance in a mindless frenzy. Even as a regular Arca fan, I don't think I was ready to comprehend something like this the first time I heard it. Subverted all of my expectations. I think the artist may have invented a few completely new sound textures on this track. A highly reactive new form of industrial music.

After deliberating with all of the sheer fucking brilliance to be found on this project, I eventually concluded that "Overlap" was my favourite off of the record. Like the best song on her last LP "Blackheart Breakables", this is an epic midpoint that just continues to build and build, feeding endlessly like a malignant being that cannot be stopped. Hand drum beat patterns are mutated, modulated, and mutilated by industrial electroacoustic mechanisms, while a synthesized flute echos a most forlorn and sinister melody.

Lane Shi takes on the shape of a skillful pyromancer, testing her newfound powers by conjuring a sea of flames that I visualize with my mind's eye as something similar to the Darvaza Gas Crater. Alternatively, I imagine thousand year old stains of bloodshed on the tombs of a ransacked temple, or the ancient terracotta soldiers of Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum brought to life for the purpose of ushering a new war. "Overlap" is just something else, man. My other pick for song of the year.

"Ritualware" opens with a rare calm, dreams swirling on the outskirts of a newborn world that has not reached its zenith. The spacious void bursts to life with a single, literal drop (another brilliant production choice), creating ripples in space-time that give way to a trumpeting sawtooth synths' cacophonous symphony.

"Good Fool" brings things to a stirringly harmonious denouement. The light of the last candle is blown out, and a creeping dusk sets in. Petals of sound float along the wind and promptly dissipate, as everything reaches an uncanny stillness. A hushed, rapid-fire breakdown of bass drums, hand drums, and gongs occurs as the final closing act of the record.

I know I've already said this like a dozen times before about a dozen different artists, but it really needs to be said here - more people should know about Otay:onii. No one I've discovered has been doing anything as consistently exciting, challenging, and infectious as this project in the last few years. As it stands right now, the artist is criminally unknown and criminally underappreciated.

Dream Hacker is the rare ambitious record that dares to be so challenging and not only lives up to all of its potential, but manages to make the old formula of doing things look incredibly obsolete by comparison. Not many avant-garde music albums are this ridiculously fun to listen to, let alone manage to capture sonic worlds that are this truly sublime.

I've probably listened to this at least 40 times in the last year, and I plan on at least doubling that number in the following year. This is not just my album of the year; it is my top album of the 2020s as a decade so far, and already one of my favourites of all time. This record sets my soul ablaze and I simply can't get enough of it. Otay:onii is my new religion, and Dream Hacker is the scripture.

10/10

Highlights: "Overlap", "You Do/Rub", "Light Burst", "Two Rocks A Bird", "Ritualware", "Good Fool"

#album review #music review #list #aoty #year end list #favourite music #favourite albums #aoty2023 #post-industrial #industrial music #otayonii #otay:onii #lane shi otay onii #chinese american music #experimental #experimental music #2023

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lovejustforaday · 2 years

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2021 Year-end list - #5

冥冥 (Ming Ming) - Otay:onii

Main Genres: Post-Industrial, Experimental

A decent sampling of: Neoclassical Darkwave, Traditional Chinese Music, Glitch, Drone

Albums like this are the reason I love music sharing forums and really just the internet in general.

Without these platforms, I likely would never discover artists as utterly fringe and idiosyncratic as Brooklyn-based resident and post-industrial artist Lane Shi “Otay:Onii”. Her blend of brutalist sawtooth electronics, tense melodies, and cackling vocals has proven to be the most challenging, but also some of the most rewarding new music I've heard this year.

On her sophomore LP 冥冥 (Ming Ming), Otay:Onii has created less a collection of songs and more a torrential hurricane of electronic spirits, swirling in a wondrous display of lovecraftian mystique. This record is a true Pandora's box; a creation of the twisted and profane, like the story of a mortal who attempts to enter the realm of the gods, only to find themselves cast down and stranded in a world of despair.

Motivated by a growing disconnect she was beginning to feel with her Chinese heritage, Lane Shi set out to write music that explores parts of her ancestry. This includes taking parts of ancient mythology from her native culture and playing with how those ideas translate to a modern world. The album title itself comes from the character “冥”, which I've learned in some contexts is used to refer to the underworld.

Something I noticed upon first listen that I really loved about this LP was the musical motif across multiple tracks (I’m a sucker for those) of having songs based mostly around minor second intervals (”Child No. 2″, “Blackheart Breakables”, “Intentions and Emotions”). This creates a tonality that sounds distinctly uneasy and unresolved, which works quite beautifully with the LP’s themes of sacred and forbidden realms.

"From Me II to Me" is a windswept wasteland of drone music, heralding the onslaught of malevolence that inhabits this record.

The listener leaves the wasteland and enters a palace of darkness with "Child No.22", a twinkling lullaby with death festering underneath. A sonic storm begins to collapse the pillars of this track, with booming percussive explosions muffled in the background.

"Subhuman Sings" is an especially wrathful experience. The song begins minimal and traditional, before an eerie snarl leads to a deranged and piercing 3/4 waltz through hellfire and lyrics of body horror. Listening to this actually makes me visualize being burned alive upon a ritual pyre.

The lengthiest track here, the gargantuan "Blackheart Breakables", is also the greatest accomplishment of this LP. Six minutes of expertly-crafted buzzing industrial mechanisms and layered vocal chaos creates a flood of sound that feels corporeal, mechanical, and supernatural all at once. In other words, this song basically tears your soul from your body.

"Intentions and Emotions" is a slightly more forgiving track, lowering the intensity just enough for a solemn piano song that gives space for Lane Shi to demonstrate the nuanced qualities of her acrobatic voice. The industrial breakdown at the end of this track is less of an apocalyptic event and more like a really awesome rave in the underworld.

The only track I don't really "get" is "Through Death A Cup of Coffee". This is the only part of the record where the organized chaos did not produce amazingly rewarding sounds to my ears. Fortunately it's still an interesting track, and the rest of this album kicks so much ass that I don't even have to think about it.

Seriously, this is an INTENSE undertaking for an album that's only 37 minutes and eight tracks long, but I promise if nothing else that it will be a memorable experience.

Ming Ming is one of those electronic albums like Shaking The Habitual that really makes me think: how the hell does anyone come up with this? This is an absolutely mind-bending record, and Otay:Onii is well on her way to becoming one of the greatest producers of the decade.

9/10

Highlights: "Blackheart Breakables", "Subhuman Sings", "Child No.22", "From Me II to Me", "Intentions and Emotions"

#ming ming #otay:onii #lane shi otay onii #album review #music review #aoty #year-end list #list #2021 #post industrial #experimental #electronic

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