FLORA YIN-WONG - Holy Palm (Modern Love)
Following her mesmerizing turn on PAN’s ‘Mono No Aware’ comp and a string of wildly varying productions and mixes in recent years, ‘Holy Palm’ appears like a woven tapestry of interconnecting recollections, rendered with and around an extensive repository of field recordings made over the past 6 years. Deploying production strategies ranging from Max processing to sharp/stitched collage work, Flora filters and tiles aural snapshots of far-flung places - from an abandoned Arctic settlement in Svalbard to an accidental recording of a monk chanting prayers on the radio in rural Chania, Crete, and drug-fuelled Tokyo club scenes - into an uncanny investigation of how ritual punctuates and gives meaning to life. With an abundance of references, each piece of toys with the imagination’s sense of place; memory is permeable, plasmic, and recalled here through abstract, textured sound design. The 10 original compositions flicker to hallucinatory effect, brooding with a dark soul as traces of gamelan intersect ghost radio signals from the Arctic and a windswept Dungeness; real, unreal, surreal. The final pair of extended ‘Loci’ parts present the source material at its rawest and most suggestive, with fleeting grime & jungle car stereo blasts seeping into Indonesian street scenes, insects in rice paddy fields, the Chicago subway, thunderstorms, yangqin recordings; gongs, Mariah Carey, a Greek wedding in Thessaloniki, crickets at night, running water, fire safety training, a street festival in Buenos Aires, bubbles, whale calls on a boat in Tromso, wind chimes on a mountain on Teshima Island - snagged in imperceptible transitions that mirror delirious, unfathomable impermanence. In effect ‘Holy Palm’ perceptively outlines the uncanny magick in the rift between the real world and faith-based beliefs, hypnotizing a personalized, syncretic book of sonic spells. Recommended!
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