You Are Always On My Mind OHYUNG

Vital NYC experimental solo artist OHYUNG explores their own gender transition with arresting new album of trip-hop laced, rave-inspired electronic songwriting You Are Always On My Mind.

Lia Ouyang Rusli describes their new album as OHYUNG as “my trans self and my former self in conversation, from both perspectives.” The record represents their lengthy, complicated, but crucial journey between lives, strewn with both doubt and excitement. It is an ecstatic, pop-oriented shift in direction from an artist primarily known for noise, experimental hip-hop, and ambient music, but carried with sleek confidence, maturity, and a silvery, hallucinogenic shimmer that reveals Rusli’s experimental background. It is, writes Rusli, “sometimes written from a dark place and other times from a place of happiness.” Throughout, darkness and light rise and fall in layers of phased strings, trip-hop drum production, and earworming vocal lines.

Also a film score composer, Rusli’s songwriting craft is meticulous and nuanced. You Are Always On My Mind was, perhaps surprisingly, formed primarily from processed “generic string loops” found in online sample packs - a strange and wilfully jarring reminder that what seems to be is not always what is. Recontextualised, these string loops enshadow the simplicity of their origins and reveal a grace and purposefulness perhaps not even imagined by their authors, subtly drawing out euphoria and tension in equal balance.

Rusli also writes of the influence of rave culture central to their transition, and of the record’s production and theme. “It’s a declaration of love for raves and the dark hazy rooms that helped me to be free and true with myself— seeing other people who are so free and beautiful and thinking that one day that can be me— that’s me in the future.” But there is also a fear and unease present. Key moment “no good” explores “the worst version of myself as a trans person, feeding doubt to my pre-transition self” with its core lyric anyone can see / I’m no good for you, delivered over a relentless beat, swooning strings, and glistening synthesis.

Later, “i swear that i could die rn” renders a Spectreish Motown beat lamenting and lush with breathy synths and knife-edge melodies that eventually yield a hazy, gliding string section, created again from mutated, spliced, and transitioned royalty-free sample packs. The track is about “seeing my beautiful friends at raves and feeling at home appreciating the harsh noises of hardcore techno and acid. Feeling that I could die at this moment and be happy.”

OHYUNG is Lia Ouyang Rusli’s alter ego and solo project. They are an Asian American musician and artist based in Brooklyn. Their first album Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame) was released by Deathbomb Arc. In 2020, OHYUNG released their sophomore album PROTECTOR (Chinabot), an experimental rap cross-genre collision through distorted 808s, pitch-shifted rapping, frenetic pop energy, and ambient loops. In 2022 OHYUNG released their collection of ambient soundscapes on NNA Tapes titled imagine naked! and was described by The Quietus as a “masterful selection of muscular, shuddering, trembling ambient excursions” and was hailed by NPR as one of the best 50 albums of 2022.

As a film composer, formerly known as Robert Ouyang Rusli, they have scored A24's Problemista and HBO's Fantasmas by Julio Torres, Neo Sora’s Happyend (2024 Venice International Film Festival), and the Gotham Award and Independent Spirit nominated films Bruiser on Hulu and Shatara Mitchell Ford’s Test Pattern. They also scored short films Bambirak and Rest Stop which won Jury Awards for International Fiction and US Fiction at Sundance. You Are Always On My Mind is a worldwide co-release between Brooklyn’s NNA Tapes and the UK’s Phantom Limb.