Yikii,
a hyper-prolific female singer and producer from
Northeast China, released several albums in 2017 and 2019 of
horribly deformed electronic
twee-pop elegies. Inevitably her music feels fragmented and never
fully fleshed-out. Her songs are mostly ideas, sketches, intuitions.
Several compilations collect unreleased songs from 2012-17 that show the
progress of her artistic path.
A mood of depression and mental insanity radiates from
No Pain (2017) and
Threshold of Pain Abnormal (2018), each compiling more than two dozen songs of the previous years.
The majority are
devastated child-like lullabies: for example, Mono Meat Factory (like if someone just
dropped a nuclear bomb on a kindergarten) and Water Prison.
But there are also
naive chants behind which there hide suicidal messages, like Killmeplz and My Funeral.
There is the
ghostly musique concrete of Quietus Timestop, and the
alien rock'n'roll of Why Not Dead.
There are also
instrumentals: the industrial music of the 26th song, Depression + Pitch Black Road, and
the sinister sonata for piano and distorted electronics Perverse Love.
The standout is perhaps the
soothing and moving 12th song, The Last Bauhinia, which is borderline
ambient music.
Flower's Grave (2019) is mostly instrumental and indulges in the gothic element, best in
Non-being.
Industrial noise and rhythm always lurks behing the corner (and prominent in Sunset Shackle) and a clownish-dada spirit pervades many moments (notably the collage Toxic Clouds in Dreamland).
The problem with all her albums is that they mostly contain filler.
Albums like Nihil Butterfly (2018) and
Gentle Nightmare (2018) have very little to offer.
There are many directions in
Don't Cry Little Ghost (2019), but none is pursued with enough
conviction and perseverance. The dramatic Moonlit Neverland stands out.
Forgotten Path (2020) contains one of her dynamited
kindergarten nursery rhymes, Mermaid Beast.
Crimson Poem (2021) invests in disorienting structures like Phantasmagoria and Five Layers of Crimson Snow, but also coheres around
a hybrid of
classical music, horror film soundtrack and industrial music in
Heart Halo. She has become skilled at sampling/composing orchestral
music.
Unfortunately, there is still the problem that all the compositions feel
unfinished, superficial, and sometimes random.
Black Hole Ringdown (2023) further improves the sense of "completeness",
notably in ghostly compositions like Salt and Rhodonite and Cicadas in the Snow, but also in the
adventurous musique concrete of pieces like Thanaposis.
Her music can be threatening and ethereal at the same time, as proven especially in Melancholia Glass Bird.
She perfected her digital arrangements for the apocalyptic atmosphere in which she drenched the 15-song The Crow-Cyan Lake (2023), about her 20th album in just six years.
In fact, the title of the piece Tragic Sublime is a good representation of the mood.
The emotional peaks are reached by several desolate dirges like The Undying Butterflies, leading to the mock-classical lied Moon Dial.
The Light of Anglerfish is as close as she ever got to pop music.
The nine-minute Memoirs of the Corrupted City is her most ambitious
composition yet, but also one of the most direction-less, just a collage of
collages.
Chorion (2024), a collection of longer songs (instead of the usual fragments), sounds like
an attempt to create more substantial, quasi-classical pieces like the
unusually thundering Heavenly Hell.
The vocal tunes are more focused, and suddenly they evoke the twisted
cabaret of the
Residents
(The Invisible Trepidation).
