CLOT Magazine presents Lý Trang - Here on an oozing ice

CLOT Magazine

For our next mixtape instalment, we welcome Lý Trang, a musician-sound artist who will unveil a haunting musical storytelling piece arranged as an abstract dialogue around time travelling. Born and raised in the mountains of Northeast Vietnam, Trang's experiments with hollow rhythms follow folkloric instrumental phrases, and the music buzzes widescreen magic. Moving to Vietnam’s capital Hanoi for school, she connected with the local underground scene, joining Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective for a short period before focusing more on her work as a multimedia artist. In 2018 she self-released ‘Snail Skeleton’, an album that hints at her sonic interests and various live-scoring commissions, soundtracks and installation works. Recently she released her second album, 'Syenite', grounded in a sense of alienation, first when she moved to Hanoi for school and later when she relocated to Moscow just a few months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the Russian capital, her separation from home cracked open a deep yearning that swallowed up the erupting geopolitical uncertainty and disillusion, crystallizing into the album's 10 electro-acoustic tracks. Last year she also released her debut film 'Sisyphus's Cat' a conceptually complimentary short that charted the search for a lost pet in a parallel universe, and her music follows a similar trajectory, interpreting interlocking themes sonically instead of visually. The mix she has prepared for us, she says, "Is a musical-storytelling piece arranged as an abstract dialogue between the captain of a time machine and a girl who wants to be transferred to the future. The conversation is sometimes highlighted and sometimes escaped into layers of music, untangled by the thrill of technology in its content and way of producing sounds. The "captain" voice was amped through a vocoder, which dragged my voice down to a voice of a non-human character. In this sense, I tried to constantly call to mind human scales of time, science, presence and sustaining—even if only in their defamiliarizing absence. And I lean into the aesthetics of alienation, trying to imagine the world of immortal and forever-sustaining entities in the future and questioning that idea". Tracklist: Tracklist here: Live Performance “Cosmic Bodies" and phosphenes (from “Syenite") Magnetic iceberg sand congee (from “Syenite") Live Performance “Golden Bridge" sáo cọc ngang ao under the Arbat metro station (from “Syenite) (All tracks written and performed by Lý Trang)