mui zyu – Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century (2023, Hong Kong/UK)
As randomly chosen via Fedi survey,[1] our next spotlight is on number 318 on The List, submitted by eva.
A life skill I unfortunately have not quite mastered is the ability to successfully drink a beverage without choking and/or spilling it all over myself. And though my failed drinking occurrences are far from uncommon, I often have whole episodes of my life boiled down to resulting memories of what clothing got ruined or who saw my face turn purple.
One such episode was somewhere between the dusk of my teenage years and the dawn of my 20s, driving down from the outskirts of Vancouver to Portland with bf in his old brown truck worth only the value of its CD player. The first stop of the road trip was to see my favourite aunt, a classy woman with great taste and a spotless house. At that stage of my life, I still possessed enough youthful abandon to tempt fate by wearing white tops. And so, there I was, barrelling down the I-5 in the passenger seat of the shaky brown truck, wearing a white baby t, flipping through a large wallet of scratched-to-shit burned CDs with one hand, open bottle of frappuccino in the other… The scene, of course, ends with unbottled frappuccino all over the white baby t like some sort of soggy abstract art, us driving farther and farther away from a clean top and closer to an aunt who had probably mastered the ability to drink beverages when she was half my age.
This album makes me think back to that memory.
Which is kinda sorta ridiculous, reader, because I wrote the above before I listened to the album, hoping the memory could somehow relate to the album.
BUT, then I listened to the album and found that it did, in fact, remind me of that memory. The video game-laced lo-fi keyboards and drum machine give the album a nostalgic feel that makes me think of how road trips such as this one now seem like long-ago levels passed and achievements unlocked. The bedroom/dream pop recalls the early afternoon light as we drove south. The wistful vocals recall the simpler times that I fear I didn’t appreciate enough. And then, the shift in the tone/vibe of the last two songs plays out the memory as it shifts, changes, disintegrates, fades… Indeed, I’m no longer sure how the episode ends – was I able to change my shirt before we showed up at my aunt’s door? Is my memory correct that the next day I inexplicably bought another white top? Did the no-longer-white baby t even make it back to Canada with us or did it get abandoned to our neighbour’s landfill? And then, of course, there are the world and family politics that have since coloured this and other earlier, cross-border memories…
Perhaps I simply preempted my listening experience by hoping that a daft piece of writing I essentially mentally wrote in the shower could work so I could possibly forge a new way to write these spotlights as I’m working through some hormone-affected word retrieval issues. Regardless, I loved this album so much I immediately refilled my coffee, imagined myself wearing a spotless white t, and hit that Play button again…
The survey choices that led to this spotlight were: “Now everybody clap your hands, come on!”, “Let’s jam, y’all, let’s jam”, “Don’t wait for your neighbour”, and “Green eggs and ham!” (following 2 surveys that had “We gonna show you what to do”/”You put your foot down on the two”/”You jump up on the one”/”Now you’re having fun” and “You’re doin’ the Housequake”/”Hey question – does anybody know about the Quake?”/”Bullshit!”/”You can’t get off until you make the house shake”). The last option was the winning selection, and so the survey result was translated as picking an album in The List that contained a (part of a) word in the phrase – in this case, “eggs”. ↩︎
#bedroomPop #dreamPop #EvaLiu #HongKong #indiePop #loFiPop #MuiZyu
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