Yetsuby chooses her own adventure

Discover Blogly is The FADER’s curated roundup of our favorite new music discoveries.

Yejin Jang’s latest project is surprising in every sense. With Uman Therma as Salamanda, the Seoul producer makes synths that flow like silvery streams, plinking across pebbles of percussion, melting and reforming into weird structures along oddly angled riverbeds. Alone, as Yetsuby, she’s steered toward clubbier environs, leaning minimal on her 2019 debut album Heptaprism before shifting gears into glitchy overdrive on its follow-up, last year’s My Star My Planet Earth. With her newest release, the six-track B_B — labeled an EP despite running the same 22 minutes as My Star… — she takes a nearly 90-degree left turn, charting a plot whose every twist is unpredictable.

B_B opens on its longest song. The searching, inquisitive sounds of “Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place,” including its titular chimes, are like glinting dust particles dancing on a rug that’s being shaken in all directions, never settling where they started. A wheel of arpeggios keels over in its first attempts to roll but finally finds traction, establishing a sense of pulse that lends some order to the chaos. As soon as it begins to gather momentum, though, its path is beset by high winds, causing it to quiver and wobble. Nevertheless, its center holds as it drives us frantically into the next track, where we’re once again thrown into a state of total darkness.

“If I Drink This Potion” is a percolating pot of raindrop percussion that recalls the work of Olof Dreijer and chirping synths that bring to mind the latest Kate NV record. Its shifting punctuation, always lilting up in the direction of a question mark, evokes a curious feeling similar to what Jang’s work with Salamanda provides, but its textural maximalism hardly gives one time to wonder.

The needle seems to lock into a groove on “1, 2, 3, Soleil,” hinting at Salamanda’s naturalist tendencies through a more manageable rhythm, sparser layering, and less future-facing timbres. But this state of stasis only lasts a minute; soon, a rambunctious synth ushers in pedal-to-the-floor drumline mirrored by a manic arp. “Maxilogue: Potion, Materials” introduces Jang’s fragmented voice to the mix — a gentle eddy of unlike sounds, spinning toward a climatic crescendo that never fully arrives. And on “Poly Juice,” we’re flying dark through a storm of breakbeats. By this point, though, the presence of Yetsuby’s guiding hand is reassuring; whichever way she turns us next, there’s a safe landing somewhere ahead.

Her finale doesn’t disappoint: “The Sublime Embrace” is a thing of pure beauty, an open sea of lush synth swells teeming with choral fractals and other glistening entities that pass subliminally, gone too fast for the ear to register. In the middle of the track, the bottom drops out, leaving us suspended in a state of sudden uncertainty as Yetsuby plans her next exploit. When she returns, we’re swathed in perfect harmony again, carried home on the slippery back of an unexpected saxophone.

“I want to put comfort into the music and give some message to people who blame themselves,” Yetsuby writes in B_B’s bio. On an album where the next note is never certain, the comfort comes in letting go.