OHYUNG Announces New Album 'imagine naked!'

The project of Brooklyn-based, Asian American musician and composer Robert Ouyang Rusli (they/them)-today announced imagine naked!, their first album with NNA Tapes will release April 22nd, 2022. Lead single "symphonies sweeping!" is the extension of a breathless instant, the moment between the orchestra's end and the recognition of applause, as notes linger and hang in the air.

The accompanying self-directed visual for the track is a personal video diary on survival, love, community, and growth-a montage of all of the small things that make up ourselves. Collaged shapes and forms, split screens and overlays, the footage shifts between images of self and mundane yet emotional moments-a tall shadow across the grass, a dog rolling on the sidewalk, karaoke on a Monday night, making art with friends.

OHYUNG's music is continuously shifting, investigating, and deconstructing the possibilities of form. Written and recorded mostly over just a 72-hour period, the immersive and mesmerizing imagine naked! focuses on expansion and atmospheric depth. It is a collection of loving ambient expressions of persistence, repetition, and variation.

Each song is titled after a line from t. tran le's poem, "vegetalscape," which acts as an artistic companion to the album. The poem works to spotlight little things that le imparts beauty upon despite the challenges of living with mental illness, such as a bedroom garden, or a sibling's voice singing in the shower.

OHYUNG's engulfing, gentle landscapes take on the context of something more literary than their wordless atmosphere-each line feels as though it informs the timbre of its connected piece-and they reflect le's poem as these snapshots of small items and instances, and brief melodies are appreciated and made beautiful beyond their size.

On this album, OHYUNG shifts again, deliberately moving away from the experimental, electronic, hip-hop, and noise influenced work of their previous records, Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame), PROTECTOR, and GODLESS, and expanding on the space found in their work as a composer on films like Bambirak, which won the 2021 Short Film Jury Award for International Fiction at Sundance Film Festival, and the Gotham Award-nominated Test Pattern.

By focusing on longer, more drawn-out, and textural compositions as an exercise in patience and as a means to cope with the difficult, oscillating new experience of time brought on by the pandemic, OHYUNG has found yet another new way to consider reality and feeling.

imagine naked! is humanist music that seeks to explore the mundane strangeness that defines our everyday and that breathes air, or purpose, or just some kind of color into ourselves and the people and the environment around us.

Watch the music video for the new track here:

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