Lee Yi on Thesis Project

A new self-titled release

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Lee Yi’s [self-titled album](https://thesisproject.bandcamp.com/album/lee-yi) is due out on the Thesis Project label at the very start of June. Three of its seven tracks are up as part of the preview. Hovering strings and granular, shifting atmospheres, along with muted horn, combine with more grounded piano to produce works that are both recognizable and challenging, the elements suggesting structures that never quite congeal, Yi leaving much of it to the listener’s imagination. This is the first Thesis release that will be a solo album. Previous records in the series, which is highly audio-visual, were all collaborations, by the likes of Julianna Barwick and Rafael Anton Irisarri, Dustin O’Halloran and Benoît Pioulard, and Takeshi Nishimoto and Roger Döring, just to list a few. It’s clear from listening to *Lee Yi* why it sits so well beside these other records, because its spaciousness, its breadth, feels like more than one intelligence is at the helm.

More on the Thesis Project at [thesisproject.us](https://thesisproject.us/). More from Lee Yi, who is based in Málaga, Spain, at [leeyi.bandcamp.com](https://leeyi.bandcamp.com/) and [soundcloud.com/leeyiproject](https://soundcloud.com/leeyiproject).

The Hitman’s ASMR

Video game ambience and not

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

*Hitman 3*, the latest from the long-running video game series, counts Dartmoor in England among its numerous international locations. A gamer ASMR account on YouTube has set out to produce documents of each of the settings, this one moving from graveyard to abandoned conservatory of flowers to the interiors of a grand home. (There’s also another video up already for an [Italian locale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdzDhdhzM1A).) Notable in the game is that because of its remote places, in contrast with, say, largely urban fare like *Grand Theft Auto* and *Cyberpunk 2077*, when voices are overheard, as they are here, they don’t pass as background noise. They stand out like fluorescent paint might against a sodden British hillside.

Video originally posted to [YouTube](https://youtu.be/YhE34TBDKg8).

From a Whisper to a Whisper

From Tatami-ya Music of Aukland, New Zealand

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Much of the beauty of this “lofi ambient track” by Tatami-ya Music is what doesn’t happen. About 30 seconds in, after an opening sequence of tones as spacious and cloudy as the image superimposed in the video on the music equipment, a harder beat kicks in, only to be repeated at such a slow pace that each time it’s as if it might not even have returned.

In different hands, the song would have proceeded from whisper to, if not a scream, then a bludgeon, but the hard beat never does more than it does from the start. It doesn’t ramp up. It doesn’t accelerate. It doesn’t populate the track more than it does initially. The restraint leaves room for not only the sparsely accumulated sounds to be heard, but for the listener to experience a lingering sense that it might, in fact, yet go in a different direction.

Track originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK3rbZ4KA34). Tatami-ya Music is Hidenari Nozaki, who is based in Aukland, New Zealand. More at [instagram.com/ghiden](https://www.instagram.com/ghiden/) and [soundcloud.com/tatamiya-music](https://soundcloud.com/tatamiya-music).

Current Favorites: Unreal Real Birds + Video Game Birds

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ Jason (Bassling) Richardson posted this remarkable video he shot of a [lyrebird doing its thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP6x3UOXAqE&t=34s). The variety of sounds, which really do bring to mind a synthesizer, are all the more striking in the context of the bird’s dance.

▰ I spent much of a morning this week listening to just wind chimes, occasional distant thunder, and intermittent bird chatter — all from the video game [*Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2QVG2yxFm0). (Thanks, Naxuu!)

▰ Jesse Goin & Nathan McLaughlin team up on [*Earth Tones Miniatures*](https://nathanmclaughlin.bandcamp.com/album/earth-tones-miniatures), a time-slowing mix of acoustic guitar and deep, soothing drones.

▰ Yoshio Machida’s [*Modulisme Session 041*](https://modulisme.bandcamp.com/album/modulisme-session-041) is an exploratory album of synthesizer music: part minimalist patterning, part brutalist industrial noise-making

Loitering in Video Games

A virtual walk through Night City

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Uncanny Valley gets all the press, but there is another valley nearby, a Hyperreal Valley located in the Goldilocks Zone between the discomforting and the mundane, the failed experiment and the all too familiar. In place of the awkwardness of some neural network’s syrupy, glitchy, pixel-flesh puppetry, there is the sprawling atmospheric environment of broad-geography video games, places where you can stroll and get to know not only the neighborhood but a semblance of a world.

Here are two more sequences from *Cyberpunk 2077*, one shot [by day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm5VJw0NVkA), the other [at night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqEGrKlpSsg), in both cases the position of the sun having nothing to do with astronomy and everything do to with a game-state variable deep in the code. In contrast with some of the others I’ve posted recently, these are motion-intensive. They aren’t records of loops shot from stationary corners. They are half-hour walks through fantastic imaginings of urban places. We don’t only hear the layered elements — traffic, conversation, machinery, advertising, etc. — but we hear them in relative position to each other, and from various vantages.


At 15:15 in the daytime video, there is a deep surge, part whale song and part industrial drone. What there is is a giant freighter hovering overhead. Then another comes into view, followed by a similar guttural utterance that veers on the atmospheric in scale. The taken-for-granted facts of the narrative are well beyond our own humdrum reality, and yet the result in the videos is disarmingly natural, very much the opposite of the Uncanny Valley. In fact, if you turn down the streaming quality to 480 on one of these and on a real-life walk around Tokyo or Manhattan, the differences would become even less recognizable.