On Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, Lucy Liyou coalesces years of heartache into an unadorned collection of songs that burn with fervor. Her diaphanous soundscapes are backdrops for supplication, requests for witness and acceptance. Starting with text-to-speech mosaics made as a teen (her debut, Welfare, was released on Klein’s label), Liyou swiftly fabricated her own amalgamation of electroacoustic collage and theatrical sound poetry. Each release has expanded her nebula of classical piano, experimental ambient, and intimate ballads; her new album carries this steady pulse into her finest, most restrained work to date.
The genesis of Every Video can be traced to Liyou’s college years, when she began writing songs about the deficient familial love she experienced as a young closeted trans person. The record is also colored by the end of a more recent relationship, though “it’s not a breakup album,” Liyou explained in press materials. Instead, she found a strange harmony between these two life phases, prompting her to rework old songs as a way to process the present. Complex as the underlying emotions may be, Liyou lays them out with her most direct music to date, primarily piano and vocals.
The most remarkable aspect of Every Video is its space. Though Liyou somewhat cheekily referred to it as a “songs record,” the album trembles with an undercurrent of emptiness. Lush piano chords and desperate swells are merely a membrane between lacunose melodies on opener “16/8.” Instead of her usual field recordings and clipped samples, these songs are overwhelmed by plaintive lyrics and the hollowness of unreciprocated affection. “No Tide Aorta” dissolves into unnerving static, bringing to mind the fraying piano etudes of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final releases. “Jokes About Marriage” echoes the translucent vulnerability of FKA twigs’ “Cellophane,” with weeping saxophone from Cole Pulice. Liyou’s silence is not that of a vacuum, but that of anticipation.
Album centerpiece “Arrested” is a perfect encapsulation of the underlying sound language Liyou has been unraveling. Her voice is at its most present, whether Auto-Tuned or austere, whispered or stacked in melismatic harmony with vocalist and composer Mingjia Chen. The track builds pressure before erupting with an imploring demand to “learn to love what I am now.” It is a plainly communicated need to be seen in this exact moment, to be freed of the imposter’s burden. The song’s clearest antecedent in passionate crystalline eternity is SOPHIE’s “Is It Cold in the Water?” from see-sawing waves of synths on up.
