UPC: 0309272739831 Vital NYC experimental solo artist Ohyung explores their own gender transition with arresting new album of trip-hop laced, rave-inspired electronic songwriting You Are Always On My Mind . Lia Ouyang Rusli describes their new album as Ohyung as "my trans self and my former self in conversation, from both perspectives." The record represents their lengthy, complicated, but crucial journey between lives, strewn with both doubt and excitement. It is an ecstatic, pop-oriented shift in direction from an artist primarily known for noise, experimental hip-hop, and ambient music, but carried with sleek confidence, maturity, and a silvery, hallucinogenic shimmer that reveals Rusli's experimental background. It is, writes Rusli, "sometimes written from a dark place and other times from a place of happiness." Throughout, darkness and light rise and fall in layers of phased strings, trip-hop drum production, and earworming vocal lines. Also a film score composer, Rusli's songwriting craft is meticulous and nuanced. You Are Always On My Mind was, perhaps surprisingly, formed primarily from processed "generic string loops" found in online sample packs - a strange and wilfully jarring reminder that what seems to be is not always what is. Recontextualised, these string loops enshadow the simplicity of their origins and reveal a grace and purposefulness perhaps not even imagined by their authors, subtly drawing out euphoria and tension in equal balance. Rusli also writes of the influence of rave culture central to their transition, and of the record's production and theme. "It's a declaration of love for raves and the dark hazy rooms that helped me to be free and true with myself-- seeing other people who are so free and beautiful and thinking that one day that can be me-- that's me in the future." But there is also a fear and unease present. Key moment "no good" explores "the worst version of myself as a trans person, feeding doubt to my pre-transitio...