OHYUNG: imagine naked! (NNA Tapes, 2022)

June 21, 2022 at 7:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

OHYUNG: imagine naked!

This album’s porn spam-like title is highly misleading, as it’s one of the most creative, serenely beautiful ambient releases of the year. A huge departure from the artist’s previous noisy experimental hip-hop recordings, this one concentrates on lush, fragile loops, with very subtle alterations and drifting field recordings creating faint ripples which end up having a major impact. All of the exclamation marked titles are taken from a poem called “vegetalscape” by t. tran le, and the album does exude more of a playfulness than other ambient/minimal releases. Opener “my torn cuticles!” is the type of highly repetitive 16-minute loopscape that I would have no problem with if it continued for hours and hours. “i’m remembering!” is a series of evenly paced notes hopping gleefully in succession. “to fill the quiet!” is a gorgeous flow of static-laced waves, with melodic variation indicating that this is a living, breathing organism. “yes my weeping frame!” is an entry into the “long, rambling, repetitive piano spiral” subcategory. “philodendrons trail!” seems like it’s going to be a simple dripping, fuzzy sequence until the sounds become magnified and blown out of proportion. Lastly, the non-CD “releases like gloves!” hits the spot if you just need to hear a few simple notes repeated for an indeterminate length of time. It lasts 37 minutes, and it does slow down a little bit by the end, but put it on repeat and play it in the background and you’ll barely notice any difference as it approaches the end and loops back around.

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