add to cart
add to wantlist
email a friend
 
PRICE:
$29.50
IN STOCK
01. Flora Yin Wong - All My Dreams Are Nightmares
02. Flora Yin Wong - Meadow Copse
03. Flora Yin Wong - Konna
04. Flora Yin Wong - Banjar
05. Flora Yin Wong - Vittore al Corpo
06. Flora Yin Wong - Hands
07. Flora Yin Wong - Nectar Dripping
08. Flora Yin Wong - 108
09. Flora Yin Wong - Beautiful Crisis
10. Flora Yin Wong - Nea Selini
ARTIST
TITLE
Cold Reading
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
LOVE 126LP LOVE 126LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
11/17/2023

Flora Yin Wong's ravishing interiority finds lucid expression on an absorbing second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes with hyperrealist, concrète sound design. Through ten parts, Flora crystallizes the ennui that followed an uncanny, disorienting trip to East and Southeast Asia. She spent solitude in a haunted house during the quiet snowfall of Kyoto, where she might have offended some spirit, and nights in mountain temples with South Korean monks, and an equally strange feeling return to the Island of the Gods. Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief, Flora read about Giuseppe Tartini's Violin Sonata in G Minor, aka the "Devil's Trill Sonata," a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe music heard in a dream, which the composer felt he could never fully bring into reality. It's this soporific motif that binds and underpins Cold Reading, finding Flora chasing the dragon of fleeting fantasy through passages of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory. From her use of the "Devil's Trill' Sonata" in "All My Dreams are Nightmares" through evocations of subtropical humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of "Konna" and "Banjar", to a breathtaking dreampop denouement "Nectar Dripping" and the Enya-like lush of "Beautiful Crisis", Flora blooms her ideas with an open-ended ambiguity so often missing from so called ambient music, ushering the listener into a sound world that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms. Clear vinyl.