OHYUNG Shares Two New Singles

OHYUNG-the project of Brooklyn-based musician and composer Robert Ouyang Rusli (they/them)-today shared a new pair of singles: the melancholic, cascading piano piece "yes my weeping frame!" and the effervescent, rhythmic "i'm remembering," both from their forthcoming album, imagine naked!, releasing April 22nd via NNA Tapes.

These two very different pieces help emphasize the breadth of OHYUNG's phenomenal debut ambient release, which is just as varied and ambitious as their hyperactive genre-mashing rap/pop releases.

Alongside the two singles OHYUNG also shared a new music video for "yes my weeping frame!," a single-take capture of improvised movement made by artists Kyoko Takenaka & Marie Lloyd Paspe, which depicts the complex interplay between body and soul: "We were exploring the concepts of inner child and intuition as it relates to one's body as the frame," says Takenaka, "such as how our source energy comforts us and wants to be one with the present body, but also how it can get scarred and want to protect us from misuse or abuse."

OHYUNG's music is continuously shifting, investigating, and deconstructing the possibilities of form. Written and recorded mostly over just a 72-hour period, the immersive and mesmerizing imagine naked! focuses on expansion and atmospheric depth. It is a collection of loving ambient expressions of persistence, repetition, and variation.

Each song is titled after a line from t. tran le's poem, "Vegetalscape," which acts as an artistic companion to the album. The poem works to spotlight little things that le imparts beauty upon despite the challenges of living with mental illness, such as a bedroom garden, or a sibling's voice singing in the shower. OHYUNG's engulfing, gentle landscapes take on the context of something more literary than their wordless atmosphere-each line feels as though it informs the timbre of its connected piece-and they reflect le's poem as these snapshots of small items and instances, and brief melodies are appreciated and made beautiful beyond their size.

On this album, OHYUNG shifts again, deliberately moving away from the experimental, electronic, hip-hop, and noise influenced work of their previous records, Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame), PROTECTOR, and GODLESS, and expanding on the space found in their work as a composer on films like Bambirak, which won the 2021 Short Film Jury Award for International Fiction at Sundance Film Festival, and the Gotham Award-nominated Test Pattern. By focusing on longer, more drawn-out, and textural compositions as an exercise in patience and as a means to cope with the difficult, oscillating new experience of time brought on by the pandemic, OHYUNG has found yet another new way to consider reality and feeling.

imagine naked! is humanist music that seeks to explore the mundane strangeness that defines our everyday and that breathes air, or purpose, or just some kind of color into ourselves and the people and the environment around us.

Listen to the new singles here:

Watch their new music video here:

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