Yu Su’s Yellow River Blue nods to China’s famous Yellow River, which flows alongside her hometown of Keifang, in the country’s Henan province. The album was inspired by a 2019 tour across China that took the Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician from the country’s coast to the Tibetan Plateau, and it’s easy to envision that river’s meandering journey while listening to Yu Su’s little worlds of sound. Her music is a network of stylistic tributaries that unfolds with elegance, never too busy yet still containing an abundance of striking sounds. Yu Su’s work shapeshifts gradually over time, widening and opening itself to new elements: the classical piano she studied as a child, the textures of ambient, the punchy beats of dance music, and instruments from her homeland.
Yu Su’s work is evocative of the dancefloor but exists apart from it, or maybe even beyond it. Tempos and moods lean toward downtempo; she blends overtly synthetic textures with stringed instruments and soft piano, stretching out stuttering textures with dub delay. In the years since she discovered electronic music at a Floating Points concert in Vancouver, Su has made music for both clubs and art galleries. “When I DJ or make music and when I make sound installations it’s completely different stuff,” she has said, “so I wanted to combine those things and blur the lines between those codes that were designed to separate people.” Yellow River Blue reflects a range of potential moods and spaces. The big drums of “Melaleuca (At Night),” with shades of left-field ’80s pop like Yellow Magic Orchestra, sound like they might have been crafted for slow-motion dancefloors; “Klein” could be the soundtrack to a mist-filled installation; while a track like “Dusty” seems designed for listeners to drift inside their own minds.
There’s occasionally an almost vaporwave-like tenor to Yu Su’s sound, like the heavenly waiting-room music of “Touch-Me-Not,” or the grimy, vaguely chopped-and-screwed “Klein,” whose clanging percussion and trippy whirlpools are right out of a deep cut by Dean Blunt or Actress. While Yu Su’s debut EP strolled casually along, “Xiu” aggressively jump-starts the album with pounding drums and intensifying rhythms, though it remains grounded in the calm of her fluttering voice. The mixture of naturalistic sounds and electronic textures lends an energy reminiscent of trip-hop or the ambient psychedelia of artists like Future Sound of London.
The passage of time is a central element of Yu Su’s work. Sounds start out clear and gradually become distressed until the point of disintegration. On “Touch-Me-Not,” a full choir of synths begins to stutter before slowing to a static-ridden crawl. For all the quieting ambience of her music, Yu Su’s compositions can leave you feeling slightly on edge, unsure of how the beats might morph or the tempo might subtly adjust. But at times her music can be unexpectedly bright, almost cheerful. Closing cut “Melaleuca (At Night)” bounces atop glittery keyboard riffs and crisp snaps; “Dusty” builds from gentle nighttime chirps into a slow-motion breakbeat anthem. Dub is a steady presence, particularly on “Futuro,” which recalls the buoyant cadences of vintage Seefeel.
In addition to the titular reference to the landscape of her childhood, Yu Su also frequently draws on timbres, instrumentation, and pentatonic scales traditional to Chinese music, further rooting the album in a sense of place. Throughout Yellow River Blue, you can clearly hear Yu Su joining together different parts of her life, and that fusion of disparate styles is part of what makes Yellow River Blue so inviting. Created with an exacting sense of compositional precision, it nevertheless wanders like a slow-moving river, offering a new discovery around every bend.
Buy: Rough Trade
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