Documenting the Presence Without Presence of Lucy Liyou
The experimental ambient pop musician discusses vulnerability, elision, and embracing the emotional immediacy of her own voice on her new record Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name.
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT DOCUMENTING a moment in time, what does that mean to you? Is it about the audiovisual reminders of the context—the snap of a picture, the brief filming of a video, an audio recording that captures the ambience of your surroundings or the voice of a person you know? Is it a way to recall the specific sense memories you wanted to hold onto in that moment? A way to look back on yourself—or the literal perspective with which you witnessed something—and allow yourself the ability to inhabit your being as it was in that precise moment? Or, can it mean something else entirely? Can it mean documenting the absence of something, or its negative space, as a means of actively compelling you to fill in the blanks, and retrace an emotional state from memory?
These are the kinds of questions Lucy Liyou has been rooting through for years. While her early records, like 2020’s Welfare and 2021’s Practice, found the experimental musician documenting her relationship with her parents via vividly written scenes from her life—often rendered, disarmingly, with text-to-speech voices in place of her own—she found herself drifting away from the impulses that drove her there the more she made music. “When I was making stuff for the first time at 21 or 22,” Liyou says over a Zoom call, “I was like, ‘I’m gonna put it all out there so I remember every detail about everything.’ But then I listen back to it and there’s so many things I don’t remember.”
This is, in a sense, the peril of selectively documenting things: There will always be things that exist outside the frame you create. And, no matter your best attempts to document everything, those will slowly fade from lucidity. “I felt like I’d put everything in [Welfare and Practice]—that I’d listen back to [them] years later and know exactly what I was feeling and thinking,” Liyou continues. “But that’s not it at all. I listen back to them, and I have so many questions and doubts about the accuracy of some emotions.”
Liyou’s newest album, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name, is many things: spare ambient pop, diaristic soul-bearing, experimental sound collage. But perhaps most significantly, this unexpectedly direct record from Liyou finds the Los Angeles–based musician taking an altogether different approach to what documentation looks like, and the effect it can yield. Gone are the days of grounded familial scenes narrated with the precision of stage direction or diary entries; now, emotions rather than actions are rendered the sharpest. It’s not just a shift in approach as much as it is an alteration in Liyou’s overall way of conceptualizing what documentation can look like as a whole: “I don’t think documentation is always necessarily the memory or experience outright. Sometimes, it’s that emotion, that intensity that I want to remember was there at that moment.”
Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name has no shortage of emotionally intense spells in its relatively short span, from “Arrested” swelling into pleas of “please learn to love what I am now,” to the refrain of “Jokes About Marriage” yearning for commitment in face of crushing distance. It’s far more spacious than anything Liyou has made before—unafraid to leave the negative space beyond her piano and voice fully exposed—but it carries a clarity of sentiment that feels as urgent and passionate as ever. For as murky as any scenic details may be, the emotions Liyou sings about are anything but. When Liyou sings about love and heartbreak, desire and melancholy, you feel it as sharp as a blade, slowly digging the wound a little wider with each new motion.
In part, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is so captivating because the way Liyou wields her vocals represents an altogether new realm of expression for her, one where her own voice—unadorned, devoid of any effects—is carrying the bulk of the words. But that’s not to say that voice as a concept has ever been insignificant for her. “It’s so integral to who I am and how I think about my music,” she expresses. “I was so afraid when I was 21, when I put out Welfare. I didn’t know anything about my transness, besides having an inkling about who I was. And so, I felt like the text-to-speech was this vehicle for me to work with different registers—pitch registers, but also timbre—to tap into narratives and ideas and fluctuations and inflections of the voice, to really examine these kinds of narratives I was writing about.”
AS TIME WENT ON THOUGH, Liyou felt more self-assured in her voice, and herself as a person. “It’s been this building of confidence and understanding myself, and not feeling like my voice was the end-all, be-all of my transness,” she adds. “I felt sometimes insecure about singing or speaking live without doing any kind of corrections or manipulations. I was like, ‘It’s not in the register I want it to be. It’s not presented the way I want it to be.’ But I also feel like…” She pauses and shrugs, smiling at the enthusiasm she feels in saying, “I don’t know, this is me. And that doesn’t change.”
2023’s Dog Dreams marked a pivotal transition in how Liyou embraced that side of herself. “It was really going for it for the first time,” she says of her vocal presence on that record, more pronounced than before, eschewing the use of text-to-speech altogether, “but also having a lot of vocal manipulations to allow me to feel covert, in a sense.” On any of that album’s three lengthy ambient tracks, Liyou’s voice could shapeshift into any number of forms, pitch-altered or not, but they would always be hers.
That is, save for a prominent sample from one of Liyou’s guiding artistic voices: Mariah Carey. “Listening to Mariah Carey for the first time was so mind-blowing,” she reflects, having been introduced to Carey via her cousins at a young age, when Liyou’s working knowledge of music at-large was mostly classical music or her dad’s CD of “classic songs,” like Lee Greenwood’s “I.O.U.” Immediately, Carey’s acrobatic vocal presence was a stark contrast to everything Liyou had heard before, and left a huge impact. “I didn’t know the voice could do that. I never heard songs like that before. I’d never heard people use melisma so expressively and gorgeously like that before. It changed and expanded my idea of what music could be.” Liyou has never lost sight of Carey as a guiding star in her own music: “I continuously go back to her for inspiration. Not just for the obvious ‘how should I approach the singing,’ but in conceptualizing the works and thinking about voice as this instrument of world-building, and the intentionality of how to sing certain words. When she uses sixteen notes to sing the word ‘love,’ that means something.”
For as much as Liyou’s music has shifted over the years, this is one of the most consistent throughlines, whether in the genre tags for Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name including “Mariah Carey” or that aforementioned sample on Dog Dreams, pulling from an interview where Carey talks about her success as a Cinderella story and the difference between outer selves and inner selves. Liyou cites several ways that particular quote resonated with her enough to incorporate it into the record: its relevance to transness, fame, and her music itself, and how each of these threads intersects with the others. “I was projecting so much onto that quote, and thinking about music and my voice as a vehicle for me to expand upon who I am,” she elaborates. “My transness is an ever-growing and ever-expansive understanding of the self. It’s not as simple as ‘I’m a woman.’ It’s a constantly arduous but also exciting examination of my life, my thoughts, my everything.”
At the same time as Liyou was reconfiguring how her voice factored into her music, she began incorporating a key piece of her musical upbringing back into her records: piano. After playing classical piano for most of her adolescence, Liyou turned away from it for a brief period to experiment in GarageBand; Welfare emerged as a product of her wanting to focus on making other things, such as electronic elements and text-to-speech, “very central.” But Liyou soon shifted back toward piano when she found herself taken by pansori—Korean folk opera involving only voice and drum accompaniment—and began looking at the instrument she had set aside in a new light. “I was thinking about how the piano can be a voice as well,” she explains. “The piano can be played in a way that can feel vocal and world-building. I think that’s what I was really trying to achieve in parts of Practice or most of Dog Dreams, where I really wanted the keys to represent voice and vocalizations.”
Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name’s earliest passages illustrate the shift immediately: In the quiet of “16/8,” only solitary piano notes and Liyou’s voice ring out as our entry into the record. Though the track eventually swells and grows, billowing with electronic elements and strings at its climax, these first sounds are a bracing reintroduction for the amorphous artist. Within seconds, the emotional timbre Liyou strikes is disarmingly clear, almost entirely due to how nakedly she presents these scant few sources of sound. When you hear Liyou’s voice on Every Video, you hear her truly uninhibited about it for the first time on a record. “When I was recording this record,” she says, “and super focused on what I’m singing, I wasn’t thinking, ‘Does it sound feminine enough?’ I was thinking about the words I’m singing, the notes I’m singing. To me, that means this space is safe. This is a space for me to explore. It isn’t a space for me to be hard on myself or discriminate my own voice. That’s been so especially wonderful for me to realize.”
THE TRIUMPH OF HEARING LIYOU’S voice in such clarity on this record is even more poignant given the long journey it took to get made. Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is Liyou’s longest-gestating project to date, stemming from song fragments and voice memos she had made at the age of 19, many of them written and recorded six or seven years prior. “They were kind of all over the place, depending on the song,” Liyou says of revisiting them. Some were very sketched-out—complete skeletons of entire tracks’ melodies and lyrics—while others were still in their earliest stages. But while the experience of revisiting past recordings of oneself might sound mortifying in theory, it had a different effect for Liyou. “For some reason, that was really affirming for me to hear,” she muses about hearing her voice front and center. “I think it gave me the confidence to really record with my real voice on this record.”
Hearing these older recordings of the songs that would become Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name was the catalyst that cracked open the project for Liyou, one that let her trust the emotional immediacy and honesty she put into these tracks years ago, when they were still about the relationship she had with her parents and her desire to be loved and accepted by them. But while Liyou was revisiting this past work, something unexpected happened: She found an emotional overlap between this familial songwriting at the age of 19 and the romantic relationship she was in at the present moment, one where her partner was due to move away, effectively bringing the relationship to an end. “I revisited these sketches that were about my parents,” she says of the moment when everything clicked into place, “and the parallels between the sentiments and emotions I had between the two were… ‘Woah. This is the intensity, and this is also the sentiment.’”
“It was a no-brainer,” she says of the immediate certainty she felt. “I had to rework and re-record this.”
Recognizing this thread as the thrust of the record didn’t just help Liyou sharpen the clarity and intensity of the emotions she wanted to channel—it also streamlined the process for her, and bypassed the prior trepidations she had about using her own voice with such transparency. “For the first time, I felt like this record wasn’t fully just about me. It was also about my partner. And I felt like, ‘What’s the point in feeling so hidden about something that’s so real and so important in front of me?’ I didn’t even think about anything in relation to the voice—I just knew I had to sing it.”
Liyou’s process on Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name became more intuitive and instinctive, compared to her past records’ more deliberate conceptual implements. “This is the first time I’ve not been thinking about these songs in a larger context. I’m just writing what I’ve been feeling. That felt so different—before, I had whole documents written out, in terms of what I wanted to achieve on a record. This time, I had nothing of the sort.” This approach sits in contrast to what Liyou herself even considered this record becoming at the age of 19, when these songs’ focus on her relationship with her parents—not unlike Welfare or Practice—put her in that very intention-driven mindset toward documenting every meaningful moment. “I was wondering a lot about how 19-year-old me would’ve wanted this to sound when it was finished, and how that compares to me now, and how I can respect both approaches in the music and still make it feel very present. That was the main hurdle.”
This overt grappling with past and present selves—the ways we reckon with our in-development art when we return to it later in life, and how we view art that is very much about a previous era in our lives—is something that’s always been deeply fascinating to me. As a writer who falls into the standard artist’s trap of being aggressively self-critical of her own past work, this question is always on my mind. How do we learn to be at peace with our prior output that we feel differently about with age, and how can we learn from our older creations?
As our conversation progresses, Liyou brings up the idea of baring the same parts of yourself at different ages, and what results from the differing ways you see those parts of yourself over the years. She mentions the refrain at the end of “Arrested,” where she repeats the line, “Please learn to love what I am now,” and the open-endedness that lyric contains. “There’s an ambiguity about what this person can’t love at the moment,” she explains, “but I think the more key question for me that stands out is, ‘What am I right now? And how has that shifted since I first started writing the song?’ For example, in that song, learning to love what I am now all those years ago is learning to love someone who is just so afraid to tap into any kind of understanding of my identity and feeling worthy of being loved in that identity. Now, it’s very similar, but it’s a different stage of fear. I feel a different sense of confidence, but it doesn’t mean that fear is gone. It doesn’t mean that person is gone, either.”
To illustrate this point, she brings up Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name’s intertwining themes of longing and shame, where the same sources can incite both confidence and fear in a person, sometimes simultaneously. “I always feel like shame and confidence and pride are hand-in-hand,” Liyou explains. “The more confident I get in certain parts of myself or areas of my personhood, [the more] it unlocks new fears and new areas of shame that I didn’t even know were possible for me. I feel like yearning and the aching I feel in the moment is sometimes more indicative of who I am in that moment than anything else, because it positions me in such a place of vulnerability. I’ve veered away from this idea of conquering shame, and now it’s more about, ‘How do I let it exist beside me and within me?’”
“There’s so much shame around what I’m writing,” she continues, “and [whether] what I’m saying is enough about myself. Contextually, a lot of these songs were written when I was talking about my parents as a closeted trans person. It’s weird to see these sentiments and ideas transmogrify and hold different areas of my being as I get older.”
BUT JUST AS EXCITING TO Liyou are the ways this vulnerability opens up new avenues for the relationship she’ll have with her work over the years, once the music of Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name too becomes a document of her past. It comes back, once again, to her willingness to be so free and open with her own voice on the record, making the parts she sings more of a grounded record of her voice in the moment than any album she has previously made. “When I listen to the text-to-speech stuff, it feels so permanent in a weird way that I don’t feel about the singing I’ve done before, because I know I can’t recreate that or even attempt to with my own voice. That kind of crystallization also deters me from trying to examine and critique my remembrance of that time. But when I sing…” She pauses, and softly smiles. “It’s funny.”
As an example, she singles out the song “Unni” from Welfare, a rare fully vocal song from that first full-length record, written in the same period as Liyou’s first dalliances with the material that would eventually become Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name. “I want to sing ‘Unni’ so differently now. And I ask myself, ‘What does wanting to sing this differently signify for me? Why do I want to sing these specific words differently?’ Those live, real vocals invite that for me in a very strange way. I’m not going to have the same vocal register in 10 or 20 years as I do today, and then I’m going to have to sing these songs differently, if I ever want to sing these songs again. That, within itself, is an examination of my transness and myself.”
But there’s yet another angle that Liyou sees as significant to how Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name acts as a documentative time capsule—that of her artistic bonds to others. Every Video is the songwriter’s most collaborative effort to date, boasting backing vocals from her friend Mingjia Chen across multiple tracks and saxophone from Cole Pulice on the penultimate stunner “Jokes About Marriage.” It’s a new realm that Liyou is especially animated talking about, her voice rushing into excited shouts as she speaks on how major it was to her to have her songs bolstered by others she’s inspired by. She describes Pulice’s playing on “Jokes About Marriage” as “sing-songy” and another voice in conversation with her own, and recalls enthusiastically encouraging Chen to “fuck around” to let vocal parts naturally emerge.
“It’s funny,” Liyou muses. “I talk about documentation, but I never talk about the fact that it documents me working with other people. I’m building this world, and it’s as if someone adds new dimension to the world, and it’s my job to see how it fits into it. Their addition of these dimensions comes from their world and their world-building. That’s my favorite part of all this, knowing that these people who are singing on this—Cole included—are making this something it could never be, and have expanded this world in ways I could’ve never imagined. It gives me new insight—that’s the most exciting thing. It makes me feel new things that I hadn’t felt before about the situation, about the music, about myself.”
In time, perhaps Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name and its suggestive negative spaces will be like this as a whole: a record whose shape will invite new projections, new insights, new ways of remembering the people and feelings held within it—for Liyou and the listener. At the very least, Liyou herself ends the album with an invitation for it to become just that, via an experimental sound collage of elision. Voice memos and videos play out briefly, only to just as quickly be cut off, with silence always overtaking them. As the title of the record references, Liyou pointedly only included clips where her partner’s face and name were absent. “It’s for privacy, of course,” she explains, “but I felt like that negative space was an opportunity for me to work harder to remember this person, who we were together, and myself in that context.”
“A theme throughout this record is this idea of ‘presence without presence,’” she continues. “I think that’s why there’s so much space in this record. I wanted to really know what those silences meant for me, and what they could mean for me.” She ties this intentional blank space in documentation back to that experience of revisiting Welfare and Practice, where all the vivid scene-setting and details left more questions than answers for her years later. “This negative space actually invites those questions in a way that’s so much more fruitful and full of meaning, rather than that very definitive, ‘this is what happened’ [approach]. It made me think about what plot holes—or holes in my memory or emotions—I could leave out and work harder to remember and think about in different ways.”
With time and hindsight, Lucy Liyou hopes that a work like Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name can be something that embodies this slippery space: a forever active, living memory, a record whose deliberate exclusions can encourage her to fill in the emotional spaces with greater accuracy than ever before. “I hope that, if I listen back to this record five or 10 years from now, I’ll be able to confront it with the same questions,” Liyou says, “but at least feel like I had the space to ask those questions.”
Natalie Marlin is a freelance music and film writer based in Minneapolis with writing in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork and Little White Lies. She was previously as a staff writer at Allston Pudding. She is always at the front of the pit. Follow her on Twitter at @NataliesNotInIt.
