毁了 (Ruin)

[Brachliegen Tapes; UK; 2022]Tape

‘Electricity, as my usual instrument, is like another individual in existence. I ruined it, and it ruined me’.

RUIN is 33 minutes of haptic noise improvisation from Beijing’s SUN YIZHOU. Building on recent releases for Bluescreen and the upcoming ‘focus’ for Jack Chuter’s Hard Return label, RUIN finds Sun using their own body as a resistor in a circuit of faulty and misfiring equipment to create searing surges of electrical noise.

The album’s simple palette of broken cables and no-input technique builds a textured and extreme world of embodied sound design, indicative of the artist’s creative process which seeks to forge ‘powerful works with the simplest materials and methods’ available.

RUIN opener ‘er’ builds a fog of mains hum, from which there emerges hot streaks and flashes of lumbering, pure tone. The current flows into ‘tm’, where a rhythm almost builds itself out of direct current, before melting into the tinnitus tones of frying fish. Finishing of the A side is ‘,’ , which with its mains electric pop and scrape brings to mind Disinformation’s classic ‘R&D’ series of electrical field recordings and other Ash International signal wranglers.

Side B cuts in with the clean high tones of ‘if’ giving way to stereo grind, like a building site half a kilometre away burrowing slowly into a closed off synapses, slowly prising it open by pure sound. Closer ‘te’ is Hodgson’s electric storm realised, a great subtropical venting of pure static as it all gets washed away in pulsating swathes of energy.

For Sun, the focus of the work is on the ‘flaws of electronics devices – the broken bursts below 70kz when the electronic device is rebooted, the white noise inside the device, the signal interference when the human body touches the circuit’. RUIN is the decaying echoes left by broken audio cables, unstable adaptors and the body as both an active and passive resistor. Calling to mind the haunted drones of ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’ and mind warping mistake-as-process transmissions of ‘Worship the Glitch’, RUIN is the sound of SUN YIZHOU stretching out a limb to craft electro-acoustic noise from decaying and unpredictable signal chains.

Our thanks to electricity for making this possible. And to the potent stereo master by Jack Chuter.