OHYUNG, 'yes my weeping frame!'

Piano drifts, lifts and flutters like leaves wet from spring rain — the notes float, but carry the weight of water. Musical figures feel familiar, but are never quite the same as they shift within the instrument's creaking wood and through the room's resonant body.

OHYUNG is better known as a producer of hyperactive hip-hop and pop music, but on a new double cassette, imagine naked!, plays with shapes of ambient sound. No two tracks explore the same mode, but there is a tether of tenderness throughout. The wandering, minimalist piano piece "yes my weeping frame!" carries a Harold Budd-like movement — romantic, bleary-eyed, a bit mournful — but always, always moving with a gentleness so desperately needed in a harsh world. The music video, featuring the dancers Kyoko Takenaka and Marie Lloyd Paspe in a single-take improvisation, reflects the same. This is music that caresses the corners, feels out the dust and fills the quiet, to paraphrase a line from the t. tran le poem ("Vegetalscape") that gives the album its song titles.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.