Wong, Flora Yin: Cold Reading LP

Flora Yin Wong's ravishing interiority finds lucid expression on an absorbing second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes with hyperrealist, concrète sound design. Through ten parts, Flora crystallizes the ennui that followed an uncanny, disorienting trip to East and Southeast Asia. She spent solitude in a haunted house during the quiet snowfall of Kyoto, where she might have offended some spirit, and nights in mountain temples with South Korean monks, and an equally strange feeling return to the Island of the Gods. Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief, Flora read about Giuseppe Tartini's Violin Sonata in G Minor, aka the "Devil's Trill Sonata," a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe music heard in a dream, which the composer felt he could never fully bring into reality. It's this soporific motif that binds and underpins Cold Reading, finding Flora chasing the dragon of fleeting fantasy through passages of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory. From her use of the "Devil's Trill' Sonata" in "All My Dreams are Nightmares" through evocations of subtropical humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of "Konna" and "Banjar", to a breathtaking dreampop denouement "Nectar Dripping" and the Enya-like lush of "Beautiful Crisis", Flora blooms her ideas with an open-ended ambiguity so often missing from so called ambient music, ushering the listener into a sound world that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms. Clear vinyl.