it feels a little surreal, trivial—sometimes even guilty to be promoting an album as we descend into what feels like scorched earth right wing fascism. one of the scary feelings i’ve been having as i’m inundated with upsetting news is that i / we are are more and more alone in dreaming of a more just, compassionate world. someone reminded me that one of the ways of counteracting a culture shift is through art, and while my gut reaction is to think that art doesn’t matter and we just need to go full luigi mangione (tho actually what luigi did is art in its purest form..), i do think there are truths to this…art has saved me many times in my life and taught me and reminded me of what i believe in, and so i do think making music in times like this has a purpose. also it’s not all binary— we can both release a record and luigi if we wanted to! i hope to get to that point soon out of despair and into more action (while i’m on that mental thread, go support zohran mamdani for mayoral candidacy).
i have a new single out from my upcoming record, the song is called dancing on the soft knife. dancing on the soft knife is set on the verge of self-discovery. That moment during transition when you accept the truth of who you are, and plunge into your new life. That self-realization during the rave, while being obliterated by sound and the throngs of people, when you are finally born anew.
And now, under this new regime, I feel that the song takes on a new meaning: in an era where trans people are attacked every day, we’re forced to constantly dance on a knife’s edge. And yet musically, the song’s euphoric quality encourages us, and undercuts this dark sentiment, hinting that we will survive, we will be okay.
Stream the song on all platforms as well
It’s accompanied by a beautiful music video (not even sure to call it a music video, it’s almost just video art) by april forrest lin 林森. they’re one of my favorite video artists, a pure visionary in my opinion who realizes new empathetic worlds in every video they make.
they wrote this beautiful description for the video as well:
Who remains after years of living on autopilot? Who has been treading water in the liminal pond? What does crafting a life worth living look like in the aftermath?
Braiding together videos from their phone storage into a cut scene, april forrest lin 林森 experiments with the visual novel video game form as autofictive vessel. Here, the visual novel’s interactive possibility, with its branching storylines and multiple choices, is approached as an exercise in the narrativisation of one’s self. This cut scene symbolises and marks a rite of passage, with both the character and the player ever-loading and ever-emerging — once the loading bar is full, we are on the other side, and the next stage can begin. Created in response to OHYUNG’s song “dancing on the soft knife”, the film coalesces both artists’ journeys in rehoming their bodies, of claiming transness as theirs, into one.
…
Back to promoting music in the darkest hours…if this isn’t what you need to see right now i understand, i’m pretty sure there’s an unsubscribe button and i’m aiming to put more calls to action in these posts in the coming newsletters. and idk, maybe the album launch keeps me tethered to the world— if i didn’t have to send these and post on social media to let people know about the music, i might succumb to the urge of lying face down in bed forever.
also a random thought but i’m moving from substack to ghost (remember when substack was under heat for platforming nazis a year ago? well that hasn’t changed i’m pretty sure). and looking for other ways to divest from horrific global trillion dollar entities like moving to protonmail type shit so if you have recs please let me know.
anyways thank you for reading and listening <3
love ohyung