Yu Su (Interview)
Today we’re listening to Yu Su, a Chinese electronic musician based in London. She started piano lessons at age 4, practicing two hours a day through age 17. She listened to Chinese pop growing up, and upon moving to Vancouver for college discovered electronic dance music in the local club scene (primarily at Mood Hut).1 She started producing her own music, influenced by Larry Heard and Chicago House first, and later artists like Laurie Spiegel and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Her latest record, Foundry, demonstrates a fastidiousness toward sound design, and punctuates contemplative ambience with club energy (the title track in particular). On her 2021 record, Yellow River Blue, she incorporates melodies and instruments of Chinese folk music into EDM. A conversation with Yu Su follows the streaming links.
Foundry - Yu Su (40m, chopped Miyako Koda vocals on track 1 and Seefeel vocals on track 5)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Yellow River Blue - Yu Su (40m, light vocals on track 1)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
What’s your earliest memory of music?
Technically it should be hearing Bach in my mother’s belly.
What albums/artists early on inspired your musical taste the most?
Bach and Debussy, very early on and very profoundly. Then Steve Reich. What connects them for me is texture and the transcendental power of repetition. Debussy dissolved melody into atmosphere: harmony became colour, sound became environment. It is about in between movement and stillness. This feels connected to something much older than Western classical music, to Daoist thought, to meditation, to the way water shapes stone.
What were your first recordings like? What did you use to make them?
I learned producing music with an old partner, we had a project called you’re me. There were Akai samplers, some Roland synth, and a Korg M1 that I remember was a key piece of gear in the studio.
Tell us about the notion of “in-between music.”
I’ve always been interested in the fluxus movement the unknown, non-verbal (in which not to be defined), perceptually projected. So as a musician I don’t start from a defined place or move toward a defined end. I exist in the transition itself because I’m constantly being inspired by new aspects of life. In this case the meaning of any new styles of music I write isn’t found in grand gestures, but in flow, in attention, in what’s already present.
What instruments/gear/software did you use to create Foundry?
Mostly Ableton and a MiniFreak, one of the greatest pieces of modern synth ever made in my opinion. Lots arp and sequences were created on that little synth.
“Sunless” was inspired by the film Sans Soleil. What did you see and hear in that film that connected with your music? Have any other films influenced your work?
There’s no synchronized sound in Sans Soleil, image and music are layered over each other, with voice, synthesized sound, and narration weaving through footage from all over the place. Rhythms, clusters, layers all shift and dissolve. Kind of going back to that “in between” concept I’m a bit obsessed with. Two other films that have lived in me for a long time are Edward Yang’s Yi Yi and Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues. The music and soundscapes in Yi Yi don’t try to explain the emotion, instead just hold space for it. In Kaili Blues, sound shifts without cuts: a train’s rhythm dissolves into Miao reed-pipe music, and the camera pulls back to reveal a man waking, disoriented, in front of an image of a pond that may be memory or may be real. That blurring is what connects it to how I think about my own music.
You’re also a creative chef. What similarities have you observed in the crafts of cooking and music making?
Both are acts of composition, not in the technical sense, but in the deeper sense of bringing things into relationship with each other. What Polyphonic Eating taught me is that the deepest connection is about attention. The practice of cooking with full intention: building a complete arc from cold to warm, from lightness to depth, treating multiple courses as a single continuous composition, is the same discipline as making an album or a long piece of music. You’re calibrating a journey through time, trusting that something will accumulate that can’t be named in advance.
Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.
