Lucy Liyou - Welfare / Practice (2022)

“I'm trying to document emotions, more than specific events and memories. I mean...that's what my music is at the end of the day - I'm just documenting.”

This is Lucy Liyou, the Philadelphia-based experimental musician behind cinematic sister LPs Welfare and Practice. Working in their Korean-American lineage and pulling from childhood memories, Liyou takes inspiration from Pansori (Korean Folk Opera), a style of Korean musical storytelling; and Korean drama soundtracks. Collaging text-to-speech (TTS) with their own voice, personal field recordings, audio samples from memes, Tumblr, and YouTube videos, synthesizers, and lush acoustic piano, Liyou creates their own distinct narrative.

Composition for Welfare began in late 2019, when Liyou set out to write an album inspired by Pansori recordings their grandfather used to play. Pansori is traditionally performed by a single vocalist accompanied by a drummer who plays a Korean drum called a buk. “It made me think about what storytelling is through music, and how powerful and world-building the voice alone can be,'' says Liyou. “I wanted to emulate that but in kind of a brutalized manner...so I was like, let's try it with the TTS.” Liyou did careful research into Pansori in the process of creating Welfare, wanting to be very deliberate in the record’s composition. They laugh, “I literally had a thesis for that album, I was almost out of my mind.”

The record begins with “I’m Going To Therapy”, a ten-and-a-half minute track that opens with a haunting “Happy Birthday” motif before snapping into focus on a clear voice asking, “When would be a good time to tell Mom I’m going to therapy?” The piece walks listeners through Liyou’s tumultuous experience of going to therapy for the first time, and navigating how to communicate about it with their family. “It's so taboo in a lot of Korean households,” they explain. Like much of Liyou’s music, Welfare is largely about family, identity, and the complicated dynamic between the artist and their parents.

“Unnie” is the second track on Welfare, and the most musically straightforward, with rich reverb-laden piano cradling Liyou’s own gentle singing voice. The song, which is sung half in Korean and half in English, touches on themes of gender identity and familial connection. Here, Liyou’s love of R&B can be faintly detected, as wispy ethereal backup vocals echo their slow, mellow voice repeating “But I’ll take it, but I’ll take it.” The track, which was written after the rest of Welfare, wasn’t originally supposed to be included in the album. It wasn’t until ijn inc. label-head Klein heard the track and suggested they add it that “Unnie” became part of the album. Liyou jokes that now the track is everybody’s favorite off the record.

On “Who You Feed” Liyou jolts listeners from the serene comfort of “Unnie” to a darker, noisier, at times dance-inspired sonic fabric. The track was made with help of friend and electronic musician Barbara Bonita, who collaborated with Liyou on the harsher, noisier elements of the piece. The track ends with a minute-long field recording of pigs snorting as ambient voices linger in the background. Liyou describes it as being like a fairy tale, a fantastical mood similar to that of Pansori, posing the question of how much one owes their parents, and playing off themes of guilt and expectation.

In the record’s closing track, “Some Form of Kindness”, Liyou moves through melancholic vignettes in an ending more contemplative and synth-focused than other tracks. “I love you, I love you,” repeats a soft, childlike voice throughout the album's final piece, as different melodic lines drift in and out with metallic shards and pieces of stories seething in the environs. More questions are asked but seldom answered at the center of the silhouette: “I love you, I love you, I love you…” “…then why do you hold me like an enemy?”