Yu Su
Foundry
Short Span
Throughout her career, Yu Su has maintained an element of surprise. The Chinese-born, London-based artist has glided through passages of sublime deep house, Fourth World reveries and dubby abstraction, and her first album, 2021’s Yellow River Blue, showed little interest in formula, shrouding the many sides of her musical curiosity in an ambient haze. And yet, if you’ve caught her DJing recently, it’s quite possible that you’ve had your head blown off by some high-pressure techno.
This eclectic streak allow Yu Su to arrive at her second album with an open remit to proceed on her own terms. Foundry teases a relatively ambient experience in its opening stretch, inviting guest appearances from A Dip In The Pool and Memotone while drifting between sweeps of synth work and downtempo beat constructions. The gently arresting “Sunless” harks back to the Hassell-tinted swoon of her earlier work and “Cul De Sac” deals in dissected drums and dubby shimmers with plenty of nuance and depth.
The album’s title track lands at the midway point and makes for an unexpected shift in energy, veering towards densely packed, cloying acid with an organic percussive rumble and psychedelic flourishes on top. It’s incongruous, but frankly outstanding as a celebration of squashed club tackle that would sit comfortably in a set from someone like Carlos Souffront. Immediately afterwards, however, there’s another distinct vibe swerve, as Yu Su veers into the grainy shoegaze dub of “One Place After Another” with the principle architects of the style, Seefeel, on board as collaborators.
On paper, this patchwork approach to Foundry might seem disjointed, but as a listening experience, the album flows with a curious logic of its own. Noisy overtones and pronounced low-end undulations somehow bind together the record’s separate threads, but it’s ultimately Yu Su’s affinity for many different strands of music that gives the album a sense of coherence. While the usual risk with eclecticism is that many different styles get explored with only a surface-level treatment, you can hear a depth of understanding in Yu Su’s approach that makes each piece striking in its originality and sincerity of expression—regardless of what direction you’re being pulled in.
 | A guest post by
|