YL Hooi - Untitled

YL Hooi debuts for Efficient Space with a ten-track collection of dub-orientated home recordings that oscillate between a texturally-rich palette of smoky atmospherics and a distinctly icy Annie Anxiety-style post-punk minimalism. Keen listeners will note that YL Hooi splits her time performing in Kallista Kult, a somewhat mysterious outfit with equally dubwise instincts, and with band member Tarquin Manek sharing production duties here, that same sense of purgatorial ambience dominates throughout. Indeed, the overriding appeal of Untitled is its halfway state, as if caught between worlds, like you're catching it just as it passes through the Stargate, Hooi's voice a ghost-like transmission that serves to anchor an array of sonic abstractions and impressionistic melodic motifs. These are songs that seem to emerge in plumes of smoke, magician's tricks conjured from the ether. It's a vision that ossifies at Untitled's midpoint with a cover of the Love Joys' 'Stranger', the lover's rock of the original transposed into the claustrophobic drone of Hooi's own hazy inner space, a totem of Untitled's amorphous and, ultimately, sensuous qualities. The in-sound from both down under and way out there in sub-space.