Q&A: OHYUNG Dialogues with Herself in Hypnotic New Album ‘You Are Always On My Mind’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY ALYSSA YEH ☆
Photo by Marion Aguas
OHYUNG IS EVOLVING — and wants you to evolve with her. The New York City-based producer, composer, and vocalist released her new album, You Are Always On My Mind on March 28 as a conversation between past, present, and future selves.
OHYUNG’s last record, imagine naked!, was an ambient exploration hailed by NPR Music as one of the best experimental albums of 2022. With You Are Always On My Mind, she takes a different direction.
Creating a sound that is at once experimental and familiar, OHYUNG manipulates “generic string loops” taken from sample libraries to explore her gender transition and the concept of self. She takes listeners on a mesmerizing, introspective journey while paying homage to the communities and cultures that hold and shape her.
Written to a future self, OHYUNG explores the anxiety surrounding her trans identity in “no good,” repeating the mantra, “Anyone can see / I’m no good for you,” over a restless production. There’s also a sense of foreboding and absurdism throughout the album, evocative of a pandemic-shaped world. In “5 strings,” featured artist J.Fisher raps “Apocalypse any second, while I reply to this message.”
But through the tension of the strings and pulsating beats, a release comes. In songs like “i swear that i could die rn,” OHYUNG captures the complete bliss of being amongst beloved community, immersed in the catharsis of a night out.
Read more about OHYUNG and her creative process below:
Photo by Marion Aguas
LUNA: First of all, I wanted to say congrats on the release of You Are Always On My Mind. It was a beautiful listen-through for me, and I just really appreciate the art that you make. Previously, you've described the album as a dialogue between selves, pre- and post- gender transition. Would you be able to explain a little bit more about this dialogue and what it entails?
OHYUNG: I don't necessarily see transness and transition as a binary of: you're not trans, and then you're trans. But at the point of my life when I was working on this record, I was thinking a lot about transition and hormones. For some of the songs, I was just imagining what I would be like several years down the road. I feel like it can be expanded past the trans conversation to anybody who has a version of themselves that they want to become, that they're too afraid to become. With [gender] transition, there's all these elements that are liberating but also make your life become much more difficult in many ways. You just do not fit into society in a certain way anymore. You can't hide as much. [Through this album], I was trying to work through the fear and embody the self-doubt, especially through my song “no good.” There's many lyrics that are just like, I don't know who you are. I was asking my future self, will I become what I imagine I will become? Will I become something else entirely? Will I flourish? Will I completely crumble? The record is an exploration of all those thoughts.
LUNA: Thanks so much for sharing. I also know that you relied a lot on generic produced string loops for this album, to indicate that things are not always what they seem on the surface. I would love to know your thinking behind this choice.
OHYUNG: I think there's some sort of parallel between the autonomy of the body and the self, and then the autonomy of taking something and making it into anything you can imagine. As a producer and film composer, I just run into a lot of really generic, bad-sounding stuff in sample libraries. So it kind of stemmed from a fun exercise of, let me see what I can make. I really enjoy taking sounds and combining them to make new chords, and reversing things, and things like that. And as someone who grew up playing violin, I'm just drawn to strings. I don't like the distinction between high art and low art, but there is something fun about taking something that feels so simple like a string library and turning it into something completely different. And as an artist, I try not to think in terms of genre or limit myself to creating any specific kind of music. I feel very free when I just have zero brand. I'll just make whatever.
LUNA: I really like that. Speaking more to your two practices as a film composer and then also for your personal art, what is the creative process for both? How do they differ, and do you borrow things from each process?
OHYUNG: They definitely inform each other. Scoring films is really fun because I just love films and I love storytelling with music. That's why I usually work in the medium of the album, and not EPs or singles, just because once you collect the songs and you can create a narrative arc, I feel like one song's meaning changes in the context of the rest of the songs. But, there are elements of film scoring where it is a job, and my job is to ensure the vision of the director gets translated through the music. So I can bring my own ideas, but my brain is constantly thinking of what is going to work in conjunction with the rest of all these other pieces in the film.
Whereas with my music, it's just completely limitless, but at the same time, there's sometimes a feeling that there's too much freedom in making your own music, and it's completely debilitating. So sometimes you have to put parameters on yourself. For me, I think the exercise of using the string libraries really helped create a cohesive feeling on this record. So I do borrow ideas from film scoring [in my personal artistry]. I'm working in so many different genres of music that I just learned how to make music in many different styles and different ways, and I take a lot of what I learned from each project and bring that into my general music-making toolbox.
Photo by Marion Aguas
LUNA: I wanted to ask about one of your tracks, “i swear that i could die rn.” You mentioned this is inspired by seeing your friends at raves and feeling very at home. I wanted to know about the role of rave culture, particularly the rave scene in New York, and how it’s shaped your music and your personhood?
OHYUNG: I feel like all my friends who I go to raves with are going to be like, this bitch is making another rave record. But it's just what is important to me and what has shaped me. It's just so queer and so liberating to be in these spaces. In this sense of the future self and past self, I would go to these spaces and just look at other people, and be like, oh my God, who is she? I wish I could become her. Or, I wish that I had that freedom to be myself. So in some ways, the club really shaped who I am in seeing models of who I would like to become.
LUNA: Continuing with specific questions about the tracks—for “id rather be a ghost by your side than enter heaven without you,” I was wondering what the lines at the end are from; it’s giving me C-Drama vibes.
OHYUNG: Yeah, It's from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon! I remember watching that film when I was a lot younger and reading that subtitle when they jump into the abyss. That line has just stuck with me for so long. And so, it just made its way into a song, finally.
LUNA: When people are listening to your album, what is the setting or space that you’d recommend listening in?
OHYUNG: I would say, probably everyone feels this way, but just listening with good speakers. Not on like, a f*cking Macbook speaker, at least on a first listen, just because as a producer I put a lot of care into the sounds. Even if it's a sh*tty sound, I really want that sound to feel sh*tty.
But for this one, there's not any specific space that it needs to exist in. It's an album about raves, but it's not rave music necessarily. So I don't feel too precious about that.
Photo by Marion Aguas
LUNA: Since you made this record, how has your relationship to the songs changed, if at all?
OHYUNG: It's changed a lot where, at this point in my life now, there's no fear anymore. At the time of making the record, I was filled with fear. I can't really say whether I've become this person that I was afraid of, or inspired by, or vice versa. I feel like I sort of have guided myself in certain directions, but the feeling is always, I just am who I am. But I would say less fear and more peace with my thoughts around transness and belonging.
LUNA: Do you have any hopes for what listeners take away from this record?
OHYUNG: I don’t know. I think it's a record that can be listened to from beginning to end; it does have this narrative arc of questioning and then moving forward. I just hope people are always questioning themselves, playing with their gender, and trying to grow in their own ways.
