Vital NYC experimental solo artist OHYUNG explores their own gender transition with arresting new album of trip-hop laced, rave-inspired electronic songwriting You Are Always On My Mind.

“dancing on the soft knife” sees OHYUNG in a typically expressive mode, a reverberating vocal line hovering with angelic presence around a Mezzanine floor of beat production and floor-ready spoken verse. “This track is set on the verge of self-discovery,” Rusli explained. “That moment during transition when you accept the truth of who you are and plunge into your new life. That self-realization during the rave, while being obliterated by sound and the throngs of people, when you are finally born anew.”

“And now, under this new regime, I feel that the song takes on a new meaning: in an era where trans people are attacked every day, we’re forced to constantly dance on a knife’s edge. And yet musically, the song’s euphoric quality encourages us, and undercuts this dark sentiment, hinting that we will survive, we will be okay.”

Lia Ouyang Rusli describes their new album as OHYUNG as “my trans self and my former self in conversation, from both perspectives.” The record represents their lengthy, complicated, but crucial journey between lives, strewn with both doubt and excitement. It is an ecstatic, pop-oriented shift in direction from an artist primarily known for noise, experimental hip-hop, and ambient music, but carried with sleek confidence, maturity, and a silvery, hallucinogenic shimmer that reveals Rusli’s experimental background. It is, writes Rusli, “sometimes written from a dark place and other times from a place of happiness.” Throughout, darkness and light rise and fall in layers of phased strings, trip-hop drum production, and earworming vocal lines.

OHYUNG - Dancing On The Soft Knife

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OHYUNG - Dancing On The Soft Knife

Phantom Limb