Flora Yin-Wong’s Holy Palm is a travel diary in sound, one where temple bells and voice notes replace passport stamps and ticket stubs. The London-born electronic musician sourced its contents from her frequent peregrinations, gathering abstracted rustling and rumbling from all sorts of exotic and mundane places: a supermarket in Tokyo, an airport in Bali, a street festival in Buenos Aires, weddings in Hackney and Thessaloniki. Buddhist monks chant in Cantonese in Hong Kong’s Po Lin monastery; a Greek Orthodox priest is recorded on a car radio in Crete; whales sing off the coast of Trømso. In many ways, her album is a record of motion itself. Not only do many of its sounds come from the actual act of travel—journeys by plane, train, and automobile; transit via tunnel, aqueduct, and escalator—but it is sequenced in a way that emphasizes forward motion. Sounds tumble together, sometimes layering into complex harmonies, but just as often, shoving and bumping into one another, like restless tourists in line for the Pompidou or the Taj Mahal.
But most of those references you might not ever glean with your ears alone; this record of motion takes place largely inside the sonic equivalent of a vehicle with blacked-out windows. In the album’s credits, many of Yin-Wong’s sounds—unlabeled mementos rescued from the depths of her iPhone—are identified only as “unknown.” The organizing principle here is similar to the strategy she used on Ubi Stunt, her 2019 commission for Somerset House Studios, in which a single piece might collage together wind and gravel in the UK, crows in Hokkaido, insects in Bali, and a thunderstorm that has lost its geotag. (Some of those same sounds seem to reappear on Holy Palm, in fact.) Here as there, place and nonplace dissolve into one another; fragments of highly specific environments crumble into a fine, gray dust.
Across much of the album, Yin-Wong’s collage consists of gorgeous ambient tones and textures that feel more composed than found. “Tirta Empul” opens the record with pealing gongs and the rattle of wooden percussion; as metallic drones swell in volume, the pace remains agonizingly slow, the mood ritualistic. In “Vale,” an extended foghorn blast is layered and harmonized with itself; gradually, the barest outline of a melody emerges, backlit against a scrim of deep, bassy tumult. Then, with “Martyrr,” a brief blast of noise—electrical static, a broken air conditioner, who knows—gives way to the mournful singing of a Christian monk, who is himself displaced, in “Bitterness,” by the sad, sour tones of plucked strings looped against keening, minor-key melodies. At times like these, Yin-Wong’s use of texture, contrast, and flow gives her arrangements an unmistakably musical, even lyrical character, like a dark-ambient DJ set accompanied by the tin-roof rattling of a Foley artist.
Venture deep enough into the labyrinth and you’ll find a few stabs at actual club music: In “Aurochs,” white noise is sculpted into the equivalent of techno’s customary kick/hi-hat/snare patterns, and in “Diyu,” heavy percussive strikes are looped into an ominous industrial march. But much of the time, club music appears only as the index of a specific memory. Captured from the green rooms of nightclubs or the backseats of taxis, snippets of grime, UK garage, and techno are recorded on Yin-Wong’s phone—drenched in hallway echo or tinnily compressed through car speakers—and then scattered through the mix like breadcrumbs leading back to late nights remembered only by those who lived them.
On the 15-minute tracks “Loci I” and “Loci II,” Yin-Wong largely abandons the musicality of the rest of the album in favor of a randomized slide reel of places. Layering gives way to simple juxtaposition. Each sound—a snatch of Corona’s Eurodance hit “Rhythm of the Night,” Balinese chanting, a snippet of grime MC—is given a moment’s time, then shunted aside in favor of the next. It is as though she were flipping through files on her phone—perhaps searching for a specific memory, perhaps just scrolling idly. These tracks are less expressive and more cryptic than the rest of the album, and on an aesthetic level, they feel less satisfying, but they also seem crucial to the questions Yin-Wong asks with Holy Palm.
In her quest to understand the nature of the relationship between sound, place, and memory, Yin-Wong’s collage resembles the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil, an audiovisual essay stitched together with images from a fictional cameraman’s travels in Japan, Iceland, and Africa—department stores, temples, commuter trains—and overlaid with after-the-fact reflections taken from his letters. “He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time,” says the narrator. “Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.” Like San Soleil’s protagonist, Lin-Wong is a kind of hunter-gatherer, a collector of moments captured and severed from their original contexts. Fascinated by the banal, the forgettable, and the fleeting, she asks: What happens when a memory is cut loose, and only its echo is left?
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