Chorion by Yikii

cassette comes hand-wrapped in manga with pin and a digital download after purchase

The eerie lullaby of Yikii’s vast creative universe continues with her latest LP, Chorion. Following the anxious beauty of 2021’s ambient, post-club, and avant-pop-inspired Crimson Poem 深紅之詩 album, the Changchun-based artist carries her expansive experiments in harmony and dissonance onto her timeless gothic electroacoustics that operate at the nexus of the past, the present, and the future. Here, avant-garde contemporary classical meets utilitarian videogame composition to create a wholly immersive sonic environment that’s as ravishing as it is terrifying.

Named after the life-giving embryonic membrane that eventually forms the placenta, Chorion takes its conceptual cue from science-fiction writer Andy Weir’s acclaimed short story, The Egg. In it, a god and a dead man on the threshold of reincarnation discuss the notion of a Universal One—the unity of everyone and all things. On Chorion, the idea of whether we are "every human being who ever lived" is presented less as a question and more an inarguable fact, in a soundscape built from a glut of musical material created and collected by Yikii between 2018 and 2021.

Haunting the album cover is a painting of a Rhaphidophoridae—the artist’s entomophobia (an extreme fear of insects) projected...  more

Chorion
by Yikii