WV Sorcerer Productions – WV101 181.55MB FLAC
The English title True Faith Ain’t Blind sounds like a declaration: genuine belief does not require ignorance, denial or closed eyes. The Chinese title, 信仰看見了我看見了它, rearranges that relationship more strangely. Faith saw me; I saw it. Belief is no longer something passively possessed by the singer. It is an active presence capable of looking back. The album lives inside that mutual recognition, eight stark performances in which voice and piano confront one another until neither can remain simple accompaniment. There are no electronic fogs, orchestral disguises or walls of processed noise. Otay:onii stands with the two instruments most capable of exposing her: the human throat and a large mechanism of wood, wire, felt and metal.
The cover stages this removal of protection. A figure pulls fabric away from the head, revealing one fiercely direct eye beneath a structure that could be clothing, costume, bandage or shed skin. Black crocheted material forms an irregular net across the torso. Along the left edge, the Chinese title descends vertically beside the small English instruction “UNFUCK THE PREPARED WORLD.” The image does not show a calm acoustic artist retiring from theatrical extremity. It shows somebody caught during transformation, partly uncovered but not domesticated. The equipment has been reduced, not the danger.
Otay:onii’s previous records often made production itself feel psychological. Voices passed through fractured electronics, ritual percussion, industrial pressure and unstable spatial effects, creating environments where identity could multiply or disappear. True Faith Ain’t Blind asks what remains when those environments are removed. The answer is not a purified singer-songwriter core waiting beneath experimental decoration. Her bare voice is already an ensemble of wounded characters, operatic projections, folk inflections, animal sounds, whispers and cries whose physical strain becomes part of the composition. The piano is equally resistant to gentleness. It can accompany, contradict, threaten, stumble, or erupt into clusters that make the instrument’s internal metalwork audible.
“Unfuck” opens as both command and impossible therapy. The Chinese subtitle 屈直膝關節 refers to bending and straightening the knee joint, an almost clinical description of movement attached to a violently informal English word. To unfuck something is not merely to repair it. It is to reverse damage whose history may be impossible to erase. The knee bends, extends, bears weight and allows the body to rise after collapse. Otay:onii approaches the piano with a similar physical understanding. Chords are struck rather than delicately placed, while her voice moves between controlled melodic shape and sounds that seem pulled from the body before language has fully organized them.
This is acoustic music, but it does not accept the conventional acoustic promise of warmth, intimacy or authenticity. A piano is a tremendous percussion machine. Pressing one key sends a hammer toward a stretched wire; pressing many keys violently creates an interior storm of colliding resonance. Otay:onii has joked that this can reasonably be called metal music because she is striking keys connected to large metal mechanics. The joke reveals the album’s method. She does not abandon heaviness. She locates it inside supposedly respectable instrumentation.
“Rickshaw Boy” is the album’s longest and most openly narrative piece. Its central image is the bent back, the body deformed by labor, grief and the effort to hide tears. Yet the lyrics continually answer curvature with lifting: raising the head, going home, touching the heart, continuing to dream. Dreaming becomes living, living becomes loving, and loving returns to dreaming. This repetition is not a motivational slogan pasted over suffering. It describes survival as a circular practice that must be continually restarted.
The piano gives that circle physical weight. Rather than offering a comfortable harmonic road home, it can make every step feel contested. The voice carries weariness without becoming merely fragile. Otay:onii sings as someone who understands that vulnerability may require enormous muscular effort. The track’s final tenderness, the idea of waking beside another person and ironing out the hunch in their back, converts care into bodily work. Love cannot erase what bent the spine, but it can place hands upon the damage without looking away.
“Good Fool” and “Intentions and Emotions” revisit earlier material in acoustic forms, but they do not behave like bonus unplugged versions. Removed from their previous production, the songs reveal how much of Otay:onii’s compositional identity was already contained in her phrasing and piano movement. “Good Fool” holds beauty and foolishness inside one invented figure, while the latter song turns apparent freedom into another form of captivity. “Isn’t it funny the wings are your shackles?” is one of the record’s central questions. The very thing identifying a creature as capable of flight may become the object that prevents ordinary movement.
This contradiction runs through the album’s idea of faith. Belief can liberate, but it can also become a structure through which somebody else controls the believer. Love can restore a damaged person, but it can also produce attachment to the source of damage. Freedom can open the sky, then demand constant flight. Otay:onii does not resolve these contradictions through doctrine. She places them inside the body and listens to how the voice changes while carrying them.
“They Said That’s FREEDOM and I Laughed” is the album’s most explosively unstable performance. The title already refuses the offered definition. Someone has presented a condition as freedom; the response is laughter rather than agreement. That laughter could be joyous, contemptuous, disbelieving or close to hysteria. The piano moves with a dark improvisational force, sometimes recalling free jazz more than classical song accompaniment. Chord clusters create constriction while abrupt openings give the voice space to turn theatrical excess into direct emotional information.
Otay:onii’s singing repeatedly crosses the line where trained technique is expected to remain beautiful. Clean notes can sound painful; screams can possess exact pitch and structure. Opera is not invoked as a museum tradition of perfected projection but as a method for making a solitary body fill architectural space. Chinese folk elements enter not as decorative markers of heritage but through phrasing, melodic turns and an understanding of song as something transmitted bodily across generations. The traditions collide without becoming a polite fusion category.
“They Said That’s FRIENDSHIP and I Mourned” answers laughter with grief. At only a little over two minutes, it is the album’s smallest chamber, but its emotional scale is immense. Friendship is named by others, then experienced by the singer as absence. Calls go unanswered. Seasons fail to arrive properly. The moon becomes an object stared at long enough for fortune itself to seem temporary. The piece recognizes that language can be socially assigned while the actual relationship underneath it has already died.
The paired titles reveal how public words can conceal private reality. Freedom may describe restriction. Friendship may describe abandonment. Faith may be presented as blindness even when genuine faith requires looking directly at what hurts. Otay:onii keeps returning words to the body, testing whether they remain true when spoken under pressure.
“You Do” begins through anxious conditional questions: what happens if morning light reveals greater coldness, if a smile becomes sharper, if a murdered god shouts back? The answers arrive as commands and affirmations: stand up, puncture, shine, burn. The language is fragmented and sometimes cryptic, but its physical intention is unmistakable. Rising is not graceful. Light must pierce. Survival has an abrasive edge.
The album’s final bonus track, “Brave New World,” is an appropriately suspicious conclusion. The phrase promises a transformed society but carries the history of utopias that become systems of conditioning and control. True Faith Ain’t Blind has spent its length questioning every prepared definition offered by the world: freedom, friendship, beauty, strength, tradition and faith itself. A genuinely new world cannot merely replace one vocabulary of obedience with another.
The performances were recorded live, and that decision gives the record its breathing architecture. Piano and voice share one unfolding time. They cannot be endlessly corrected into separate perfection. Otay:onii may hesitate, strike too hard, allow a tone to fracture or let silence remain longer than conventional arrangement would permit. These are not failures left behind for authenticity. They are evidence that the composition is being physically discovered while performed.
Recording engineer Rabih Beaini preserves enough dryness and proximity for the room to feel present without becoming decorative ambience. The listener hears a person negotiating with an instrument rather than a voice pasted over a piano part. Rashad Becker’s mastering maintains the sharp contrasts between fragile passages and sudden percussive force. The quiet sections do not feel weak, and the loud ones retain shape rather than collapsing into generalized impact.
The album was created after Otay:onii’s move to Berlin, during a period in which she has described needing clarity and trying to determine her place within a new society. That context explains the reduction without turning every track into autobiography. The record asks a formal question with personal consequences: what is the core of this music when production is removed? The answer includes migration, grief, tradition and damaged relationships, but it also includes the practical pleasure of hitting a piano and discovering that one body can generate an enormous world.
The cover’s act of uncovering therefore does not reveal a final stable identity. Beneath one layer is another arrangement of fabric, hair, netting, skin and shadow. True Faith Ain’t Blind does not claim that stripping music down makes the artist transparent. Reduction creates new mysteries. With fewer sounds, every breath, impact and pause carries more possible meaning.
This is an album about endurance without the polished language of triumph. Its people remain bent, abandoned, skeptical and confused. They laugh at false freedom, mourn false friendship and keep touching their hearts so that dreaming may continue. Faith does not protect them from pain by refusing to see it. Faith sees them inside the pain, and they recognize it there.
The prepared world expects acoustic music to be softer, opera to be elevated, folk tradition to be preserved, metal to be amplified and faith to supply certainty. Otay:onii unfucks that arrangement. She turns the piano into struck metal, the trained voice into exposed flesh, tradition into active inquiry and faith into an eye staring back. Nothing here is blind. Everything is listening.
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