thu 12/12/2024

Album: Rui Ho - Lov3 & L1ght | reviews, news & interviews

Album: Rui Ho - Lov3 & L1ght

Album: Rui Ho - Lov3 & L1ght

Dayglo experimental pop from Chinese artist in Berlin

'It can feel like cramming yourself with brightly coloured sweets and energy drinks'

A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus.

It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition psychedelic aesthetics, and dominated by female and non-binary musicians. 

It’s given a platform to some of the most vivid and fascinating characters in music today, from Beijing’s 33EMYBW to Margate’s BABii, Washington DC’s Swan Meat to Montevideo’s Lila Tirando a Violeta, and most prominently Glaswegian SOPHIE and Caracas-via-Barcelona Arca. It’s crept into the mainstream, too, via various pop and rap acts, too, most consistently in Charli XCX’s recent lockdown album how i’m feeling now.

Into all this neatly slots Chinese expat in Berlin, Rui Ho. Her first few releases were instrumental: borderline industrial on Shanghai’s Genome 6.66Mbp label, and stunningly beautiful ambient on Planet Mu sister label Objects LTD, both incorporating traditional Chinese instrumentation into the sci-fi constructions. 

This album, on Planet Mu, feels on first listen like a radical shift from these – on it, Rui Ho has dived fully into pop, with zippy beats, highly synthetic sounding AutoTune vocals, and insistent hooks throughout. And that can be quite a jolt. The tempos rarely let up, the vocals are constant, and it can feel like cramming yourself with brightly coloured sweets and energy drinks.

But in fact, that jolt is part and parcel with her previous experimentalism. Underneath the hooks, the vivid expertise of the production is still there – every surface is sculpted, every texture crackling with imagination. And the pop elements themselves are bittersweet: puzzling, dancing around the future visions of the music.

Like the echoes of the past in her earlier work, this constantly brings a sense of the small and human into the depictions of a terrifyingly fast-moving, information-overloaded world. For all its catchy melody, this album is not easy going – that sense of all pervading sweetness and brightness can be overwhelming, even as it’s tempered with melancholy and strangeness – but it really rewards deeper listening.

@joemuggs

The pop elements themselves are bittersweet: puzzling, dancing around the future visions of the music

rating

Editor Rating: 
3
Average: 3 (1 vote)

Share this article

Add comment

The future of Arts Journalism

 

You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!

We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters