Yikii - Chorion (2024)

The eerie lullaby of Yikii’s vast creative universe continues with her latest LP, Chorion. Following the anxious beauty of 2021’s ambient, post-club, and avant-pop-inspired Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 album, the Changchun-based artist carries her expansive experiments in harmony and dissonance onto her timeless gothic electroacoustics that operate at the nexus of the past, the present, and the future. Here, avant-garde contemporary classical meets utilitarian videogame composition to create a wholly immersive sonic environment that’s as ravishing as it is terrifying.


Named after the life-giving embryonic membrane that eventually forms the placenta, Chorion takes its conceptual cue from science-fiction writer Andy Weir’s acclaimed short story, The Egg. In it, a god and a dead man on the threshold of reincarnation discuss the notion of a Universal One—the unity of everyone and all things. On Chorion, the idea of whether we are "every human being who ever lived" is presented less as a question and more an inarguable fact, in a soundscape built from a glut of musical material created and collected by Yikii between 2018 and 2021.


Haunting the album cover is a painting of a Rhaphidophoridae—the artist’s entomophobia (an extreme fear of insects) projected onto the spiny silhouette of this blind and unpredictable subterranean cricket, reminiscent of the parasitic arthropods of first-person shooter games like BioShock and Resident Evil. Trained pianist Yikii applies these solitary pursuits of the digital era to her experiments in microtonal music and special tunings, which delve into the dark recesses of the cumulative subconscious. From the queasy hallucinations of her “Dream Cassette” reworking to the acutely physical rhythms of “Melinoë” and “Mongolian Worm,” there’s a twisted interiority to Chorion, where a battery of sonic, conceptual, and emotional material implodes in a dazzling vortex of violent intensity.