Lucy Liyou

Bio

Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Liyou’s debut project, A Hope I Had, was a sonic examination of hereditary depression in Asian families. Liyou followed up the release with her debut full-length, Welfare, an ambitious analysis of the colonialist concept of self-care. Less than a year later Lucy Liyou released the acclaimed follow-up, Practice, which drew deeply on aesthetic touchstones from Liyou’s Korean heritage to examine how families explicitly and implicitly pass on coping mechanisms—or lack thereof—for grief and loss passed through generations. Lucy Liyou’s first two full-length albums Welfare / Practice were reissued on vinyl for the first time in May 2022 via American Dreams Records. Her latest record Dog Dreams (개꿈) is a rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but are rather interlocked in an affective dialectic.