For most of the last decade, Lia Ouyang Rusli’s work as OHYUNG has reveled in shape shifts. 2018’s Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame) moved from sweeping string-enhanced dreaminess one moment to hard, speaker rattling hip-hop and beat-driven bursts of noise the next, making 2020’s Protector, with its stuck-needle glitches, tumbling percussion, and jarringly quick shifts to the club floor, not all that surprising. Arguably, OHYUNG was hip-hop. That is, if hip-hop was Earl Sweatshirt hooking up with Boredoms circa Soul Discharge.
However, neither of these records, much less Godless, a 2022 collaboration with drummer Matt Evans, could have predicted that same year’s nearly two-hour long Imagine Naked!, which is where I discovered this artist and which led me to believe OHYUNG to be one of the most inventive, long-form ambient experimentalists of the last several decades.
That album’s first track alone, “My Torn Cuticles!”, is nearly 16 minutes of what sounds like a repeated piano riff from several blocks away, draped in gauze. It’s William Basinski if his loops had already disintegrated. All of which makes You Are Always on My Mind seem like it’s from another world again.
There are arguably suggestions from those earlier works snuggled in here somewhere. Ultimately, this is its own beast, coming as it does at a point of literal transition in Rusli’s life as they discovered their true identity thanks to the freedom they witnessed at “raves and in dark, hazy rooms.” It’s the first genuine OHYUNG pop album.
It’s also the product of sample packs of string loops taken to places their original creators likely never considered. “I’d Rather Be a Ghost by Your Side Than Enter Heaven Without You” uses a repeated string riff, a harp sample, laughter, and a whispered, Auto-Tuned voice that repeats the title. It’s the feeling of being reassured that you’re not alone, even with thunder cracking in the background. “I’m Coming Towards You” uses declamatory, chopped string hunks and swoops as a piano tinkles and a disembodied voice surfs over all of it until it fades away with the sound of ocean waves. It’s Claire Rousay’s Sentiment if she had recorded it in her sleep.
However, then there’s the thud of “I’m Holding Close the Memory Fades”. The strings cup the tune’s melody as OHYUNG’s voice purrs, “I want to feel what is real.” Multiple Auto-Tuned voices eventually join for a track that paints a soundscape for nearly physical reminiscences. Even a song of seeming self-doubt like “No Good” takes a beat that at first feels plucked from an AC/DC album, drapes a string loop over it, sprinkles all of this with electronics, cello notes, and repeats the lines “anyone can see, I’m no good for you” until the listener believes anything but.
With You Are Always on My Mind, OHYUNG has gathered shards of ambient murk, pop’s most delirious possibilities, and huge, 4/4 slabs of percussion as repetitive as the album’s dreamily crooned lyrics for something that conjures nods to the Flaming Lips‘ “Race for the Prize” and its sweeping keyboard-derived string sounds as well as Yves Tumor‘s Safe in the Hands of Love. It’s an album of ecstatic release after making the most beautiful self-discoveries.