Even if you’ve been avoiding the New York ambient and hip-hop scenes, which I don’t recommend doing, there’s a chance you’ve heard the work of Lia Ouyang Rusli. She’s struck up a creative relationship with Julio Torres, through scoring his directorial debut, 2023’s Problemista, and his surreal 2024 HBO series, Fantasmas. Both artists hold space for sentimentality and disorientation, where big, queer feelings meet the psychedelic trip of surviving in New York City. Outside of film scoring, Rusli composes and produces everything from ambient soundscapes to avant-garde rap under her alter ego, OHYUNG. Her journey as OHYUNG has led them to trip-hop-infused pop on her newest album, You Are Always On My Mind. Over 11 tracks, Rusli balances freneticism and romance, bridging the divide between her past and present, arriving at an ultimate form that is as slippery as it is beguiling.
Nothing on You Are Always On My Mind fits together perfectly. Assemblages of generic string loops and prominent drum production mix with a litany of samples and entrancing vocals, all slightly out-of-step with each other. It feels like musical Jenga, where if any one feature slips too far behind, the entire structure could crumble. There’s a Tirzah-like murkiness crossed with the emotional vocabulary of more eaze. Even textural differences feel unnerving: “no good” balances attention-yanking drums with legato string passages, and each pointed drum hit feels just ahead of any change in the strings. Skittish electronics dart overhead, following their own rules, as Rusli sighs, “Anyone can see / I’m no good for you.” She represents a dialogue between her trans self and a prior self, riddled with put-downs designed to suppress. It feels like water pressing against a dam, chipping away at the masonry with every shift of the current.
Rusli’s hip-hop roots are essential touchstones that complicate the pop romance from which she starts. Rusli’s first two solo works as OHYUNG, Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame) and PROTECTOR, are collages of rap and dark, ambient pop that are as personal as they are rich with commentary. In an interview, she elaborates: “…I have an urge to take these random sounds I’ve collected and cut them up.” You Are Always On My Mind resembles trip-hop laced with delicate samples, somewhere between the hauntological dance music of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ and the pensive pop of Astrid Sonne. Rusli’s uncanny splices can be of film clips on “id rather be a ghost by your side than enter heaven without you,” babbles on “i swear that i could die rn” or any the juxtaposition of drum cycles and string flourishes on “no good.” J. Fisher, OHYUNG’s labelmate from her Deathbomb Arc days, appears on “5 strings {lake},” a dreamlike exercise in daily existentialism. Their collaborative take on airy hip-hop transforms layers of familiar sounds into something unrecognizable or, more often, vaguely familiar but warped beyond immediate comprehension. The string loops supporting “id rather be a ghost by your side than enter heaven without you” are impossibly precise; human hands can’t recreate the same amplitude of vibrato bar after bar.
You Are Always On My Mind traffics in the uncanny to present the heightened experience of transition, where everyday moments of panic or celebration often come with an extra coating that turns the notable into the otherworldly. There are moments where Rusli pushes even further, like on closer “im coming towards you,” where a spectre repeats “I’m coming towards you” over minimal ghastliness, at once taunting and entreating listeners. Whatever it is, it’s coming. You can meet it in the middle or you can wait. These songs don’t make for a club-ready album, but raving is part of the OHYUNG experience, personally and professionally, so the club has to make an appearance. “dancing on the soft knife” offers some extra kinetic energy, kicking off with a bellowing call: “Crush me in the club.” Like a raver stepping outside of herself and onto a dance floor, the song stands on the precipice of transition, negotiating the ambivalence of leaving one life behind while embracing another. “I swear that i could die rn” calls out a DJ Goth Jafar set at the soon-to-close Brooklyn club Paragon as a night of triumphant euphoria.
It’s in these moments that Rusli finds peace with her present self, past self and the people around her who are brokering their own negotiations with embodiment and identity. What position OHYUNG maintains with those past selves will always be contested, but the rave is the ideal space for shutting the bullshit down and letting joy reign supreme. You Are Always On My Mind then sounds like the smoking area outside the rave: On “no good,” for example, Rusli balances self-conscious lyrics with danceable production. She know that she’ll be happier if she can ditch the self-consciousness and return to the community of the dance floor.
The cinematic “dog medicine” presents too-perfect strings with resounding timpani hits, becoming a kind of ceremonial procession. It’s saccharine, but cracks appear. The mere presence of imperfection is enough to throw things off; no need to present the collapse when it’s already being imagined. It’s from this place of imbalance where OHYUNG confronts the past and present, leaning on her experiences in film scoring, hip-hop production and ambient experimentation to create emotionally fraught pop music. The collocation of organic sounds and electronic manipulation throughout You Are Always On My Mind bargains between the tangible and the possible; it’s an emotional conglomerate that words can barely summarize, leaving the lyricism minimal but not distractingly so. OHYUNG’s choice of samples, loops, drum hits and vocal treatments are carefully misaligned, rich with the kind of flaws that make the music feel lived-in and humanistic but not out of control. You Are Always On My Mind is an unpredictable masterpiece that showcases an artist at her most earnest, searching for composure in a world lacking any, making turbulent yet accessible pop music.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He can be found on social media, sometimes.
