bod [包家巷] - (2020) Music for Self Esteem

 

 Year0001 ‎– YR0107 

“PERPETUAL IMPLOSION OF CONCEPT,” Nich Zhu writes in the thesis for the first song on their new album, Music For Self-Esteem. It’s an aptly ambitious sentiment at the beginning of a project that encompasses a 37-track album, four short volumes of chaotic poetry, and a collection of carefully constructed videos. It could also a guiding principle for Zhu’s work under the name bod [包家巷], which has often jolted from tranquil ambience to grinding noise so quickly that the listener is forced to retreat from easy answers. Zhu is trying to communicate something, even if it does keep falling in on itself. In fact, the first song here is called “Please Listen to the Whole Album It'll Be Rewarding I Promise,” and at the end of their note on the song Zhu almost seems to be apologizing as they let go of their thoughts: “I promise not to draw any more lines. The thread is left coiled, the map allowed to fall in place as wind will take it.”

Music For Self-Esteem is still, however loosely, what it announces itself as. The project traces Zhu’s life from college in Portland through a punishing spell in Los Angeles to a more forgiving life in Berlin, where they spoke to me over the phone yesterday. (Full disclosure: Zhu and I attended college together, but neither of us were aware of that until after our interview.) Over the past few years, they have kept returning to the same core concept: “Self-esteem, at least in therapy for me, is the main issue — it was the ground floor of everything.” Whether or not this is music primarily for Zhu’s self-esteem or the listener’s is harder to discern. “That's the point,” they say, before discussing their desire to raze those sorts of boundaries — particularly between life and art — entirely.

However forcefully bod [包家巷] resists easy interpretation, though, Zhu’s music remains deft and affecting. There are crushing stretches here, like the three-minute barrage of “Periodical Acceptance of Chaos” and “LA Was Worth the Struggle but I Had to Leave,” but they always dissolve into some of the most blissful combinations of analog and electronic sound that Zhu has released in their career so far. Classical interludes mingle with dismembered Chinese-language interjections, all intentionally disorienting parts of a project that Zhu sees as a form of "worldbuilding." Listen to Music For Self-Esteem — out today via the Stockholm-based label YEAR0001 — below, and read our conversation after the jump.