A grave and sprawling epic, Mt. Fuyu’s A Mirror to Weave swells with implication. Written, recorded, and produced from the heart of a person who’s lived through life’s struggles much too young, the album is a ferment of ideas and experiences that together capture the sheer strangeness, beauty, and terror of existence. Born in China and immigrating to the United States with his parents in infancy, the Kansas City-based artist—otherwise known as Fu Liu—moved from the coastal province of Shandong to America’s Midwest in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash to follow led to living precariously with his father in Canada, then a short stint in foster care, before settling into a strict regimen of academic and musical pursuits on the family’s return to the US.
This classical jazz education and scholarly background comes through in A Mirror to Weave, where an endless inventory of influences—crossing Coil, The Caretaker, Burial; Mark Fisher, Hito Steyerl, Carl Jung, and more—is steeped in a sublime brew of drone, post-industrial and ambient; hauntology, dub and bass. Rife with the trauma of the past, and the expansive landscapes of the present, opener “Temple” billows with decayed, distended, and eerily pitched vocals, as an arrhythmic pulse grows then crashes in a surge of noise and distortion. The disturbance rumbles through other tracks too, as the subaqueous current of “Swamp Nymphs” roils and fizzes around a crumble of pads and sine waves, while resampled and effects-laden drums charge head-first into the spooky atmospherics of “Ovre” with an erratic urgency.
Although often muted, muffled or restrained, the voice and its whispered words play a central role in A Mirror to Weave. It’s in the existential drift of “Shells”, as Fu Liu’s sweetly sung words (“seen it all/ a black hole”) ripple over a melancholy piano solo; environmental field recordings fluttering delicately just beneath the surface. The audio is taken from the parks, streets, bars, as well as online spaces Fu Liu inhabits, giving the record its heavy sense of grief and alienation. Wandering through the emotional state of pandemic-era estrangement, while also mourning the passing of friends, A Mirror to Weave is a requiem for the worst that’s already been, and an exaltation of the best that’s yet to come.
credits
released June 2, 2023
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Design by Niels Wehrspann and Solène Gonnet
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