Ahead of their debut album release this Friday, London-based artist Lucinda Chua returns to share YIAN’s final single “Something Other Than Years.” The track finds Chua enlisting friend and fellow genre-defying, post-classical artist Yeule for the album’s closing track, a gentle song about searching for guidance. “Show me how to live this life / Something other than years,” Chua calls out. “There’s more in this life / Angel being of light,” Yeule sings back, the artists; unique voices intertwining over a feeling of infinite space.
Chua and Yeule recorded “Something Other Than Years” in an “ASMR cave” set up by Chua, where the pair lay on the studio floor on a bed of cushions surrounded by mics in stereo. From this cave sprung a warm swirl of sound in infinite layers, spacious and reassuring. The track bookends YIAN, following previous singles “Golden,” “Echo,” and “An Ocean,” all of which came alongside short films by Tash Tung, Jade Ang Jackman, and Chua herself. The song also arrives ahead of Chua’s live meditational soundscape set for RESONANCE, a collaboration between her and Diasporas Now in London on March 30th, and her biggest headline show to date at London’s ICA on May 9th. Tickets for that here.
Pre-order YIAN here and check out the tracklist and listen to “Something Other Than Years” below.
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“YIAN” (燕), means swallow in Chinese, and is part of “Siew Yian,” the name given to Chua by their parents to preserve her connection with her Chinese heritage. Just as the migratory songbird lives between places, so did Chua, the artist living in the in-between of the English, Malaysian and Chinese cultures that make up their heritage. In the absence of Mandarin as a mother tongue, music became a way to express the parts of herself that couldn’t be described in words; “YIAN” emerged as a way to heal.
A deeply introspective and fully realized vessel of creative expression (Chua self-produced and engineered eight of the ten tracks), “YIAN” emerges as less an album than a worldview, a commitment to learning and uncovering one’s own selfhood honed over Chua’s lifelong reconciliation with their own personal history and identity.
Through this process she found new language through which to express her experiences, language which lay in the practices she developed and the creative community with whom she built solidarity along the process: co-authoring visual identities with main collaborators Tash Tung, Jade Ang Jackman and Nhu Xuan Hua and set designers Lydia Chan, Jonquil Lawrence and Erin Tse. Chua also constructed the album’s physical language through dance with movement directors Chantel Foo and Duane Nasis.
Lucinda Chua
“Echo” is a battle cry with words made of silk”
The FADER
“Never has reverberation felt so cathartic”
MTV
“her gossamer, soulful compositions feel less like songs and more like dreamy meditations.”
NYLON
“Echo is a tiny cathedral of a song”
Pitchfork
YIAN
March 24, 2023
- Golden
- Meditations On A Place
- I Promise
- You
- An Ocean
- Autumn Leaves Don’t Come
- Echo
- Do You Know You Know
- Grief Piece
- Something Other Than Years
