Taking cues from ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura and Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, Seoul duo Salamanda conjure vivid fantasy worlds with richly tactile sounds: mallets striking, objects plunking, vocal cords pushing air through pursed lips. Yetsuby, one half of the duo, takes a similarly physical approach to sound in her solo work. But where Salamanda’s music often conveys a sparkling, childlike quality—call it the psychedelia of innocence—Yetsuby’s solo records have often been more chaotic. She twisted up synthetic sounds on 2019’s Heptaprism and leaned toward Two Shell-style overload on last year’s shuddering My Star My Earth. Her new EP, B_B, is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet. It sounds like a geyser of ball bearings, or a plasticine rainbow, or a marimba the size of a bridge.
Both Yetsuby and Salamanda have long displayed ambient leanings, but “Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place,” which opens the EP, is the closest she’s come to crafting something that might be filed within the genre. Softly rounded synth arpeggios bubble expectantly; chimes flicker across the stereo field; jagged streaks of tone occasionally resemble Jon Hassell’s prismatic horn. Still, despite the music’s incidental feel and the absence of drums or melody, the mood is anything but chilled. The moving parts are unpredictable and the placid, new-age tones are offset by metallic bursts and an overarching air of turmoil. The piece belongs to a contemporary strain of hyper-digital music whose organizing principle is gestural in nature, as though Yetsuby had reached into the virtual space of her DAW and smeared the sounds into a shimmery blur.
At five minutes long, “Who Swallowed the Chimes” is both the longest and the most formless of the EP’s six tracks. The rest of the record zigzags between streamlined rhythmic studies and maximalist amalgamations of IDM and hyperpop. But no matter the style, a sense of mischief reigns. The brief, percussive “If I Drink This Potion” traipses along at a relatively restrained 112 beats per minute, yet everything seems designed to make it feel faster and more hectic than it is: Drums explode into effervescent clouds, and the downbeat constantly shifts, lending the impression of a frantic jog across liquefying sand. Things settle down on “1,2,3, Soleil,” a 90 BPM head-nodder whose thumping log drums and elastic, dancehall-inspired syncopations could easily pass for a Salamanda track. But Yetsuby can’t resist her habitual impishness: Dappled flute accents soon cede the way to garish splotches of synth, and 32nd-note arps take off like a runaway train, tipping the groove toward singeli’s breakneck gait.