Zoe Elaine, Author at Irvine Weekly

TheKhue and the Experiments of a Working Stiff

Zoe Elaine — Tue, 21 May 2019 06:00:46 +0000

The daytime hustle of an artist does not define them. Ask them what they do and their secondary answer may include terms like “day job” or “paycheck,” but rarely “career.” It carries too much weight. It suggests that so-called work life is fulfilling and secure. It pretends that there is only one path in a world of infinite possibilities.

Small-time musicians often tend to confine their creativity to off-hours, usually after dark. Such is the case for Irvine’s Khue Bui, a graphic designer for boutique business development agency. When off the clock, he operates as electronic stalwart TheKhue. His recent album, The Quiet, was a product of the night and serves as his proudest release yet.

When looking to satiate his musical curiosity over a decade ago, Bui found a program called Acoustica Mixcraft on his desktop. For Mac users unfamiliar with it, Mixcraft is a Windows program like “Garageband, but a little more advanced,” according to the tinkerer himself. This was where his first forays into music production began. Through a great deal of trial-and-error, he eventually emerged with quantifiable skills that he would continue to hone ever since.

Bui’s earliest work is not available online, but a scroll through his YouTube page will reveal an artist who is constantly learning and changing. He first became interested in electronic music through artists like Swedish House Mafia and Deadmau5, who are both known for simple yet aggressively danceable rhythms. Bui’s first remixes took on this style. From there, he slowly edged into the niches of the genre, emulating artists like The Glitch Mob.

Courtesy of Lauren Schorr

On some releases, Bui has described his music as experimental, but he is careful to explain what he means. “I like to experiment,” he declared, “but I also know that the term ‘experimental’ has become more and more weird, because there is less and less uncharted territory in music these days.” His “experiments,” then, are closer to sonic science. After testing several figurative hypotheses, he discovered what sounds he is most comfortable making; today, his music is practically cinematic.

His early remixes and first batch of original material came under the name Caro Music, which was just one arm of a fantasy entertainment conglomerate Bui had dreamt up as a kid. ‘Caro’ translates to ‘checkers’ in Vietnamese, which has little significance other than a succinct, trendy name. Aesthetics and maturity as a musician are what ultimately drove him to change it. “I only kept that name as long as I did because people started listening to my music and I didn’t want to change all of a sudden,” he said.

Self-preservation is often at odds with building notoriety. Change is natural, but it’s not helpful in our age of personal branding. Bui’s move from Caro to his new moniker marked a significant change in the way that he saw himself, and it taught others how to perceive him: as the one and only. He is TheKhue.

Without resources to participate in an industry-standard “album cycle,” Bui has changed his perspective on the process. He told me, “I like to release things and pretend they’re albums, but I’ve never released anything all at once.” He sees his ‘albums’ as eras, reflecting a certain period of time of his life. Before The Quiet, each was fairly arbitrary.

His story begins with an EP in January 2015 which features a title that may sound completely made up. And it was — it has no relevance to the music, but came up when Bui was hanging out with his brother one day. He was on his laptop, contemplating what would become his first body of work while his brother was lost in a video game. “‘Okay, I need a name for this EP,’” he recounts saying at the time, “‘Just say a sentence.’ The map [my brother] was playing [in his game] was tunnel, and so he said ‘tunnel is a good map,’ and I was like, ‘well, Tunnel is a Good Map is a good title,’ then it turned into Tunnel is a Good Map is a Good Title.”

He took his next release more seriously, in every way. Bui fosters curiosity across a range of subjects, and Good Prisoner reflects an interest he’d taken in sociology, particularly the concept of a ‘prison nation.’ To oversimplify the term, it is the idea of governing a populace in order to keep them down. The subject became the heart of that 2016 record.

Granted, only the collaborative single “Prison Nation,” made with Evil Americans, truly addresses the namesake topic. That’s because of the haphazard lifestyle of an underground musician. Some songwriters will hole themselves up in a cabin for weeks to write a dozen songs, but artists like Bui can’t take that time off, away from their regular lives. To come up with that many songs may therefore take a year, maybe longer. Sure, that doesn’t inherently detract from the quality of the music, but listeners seeking a concept will be left disappointed.

Yet, with The Quiet, Bui breaks this barrier. He describes it very loosely on Bandcamp as an embodiment of the small morning hours, adding that there was “a plan for the ultimate package since the first song that I released. The idea was pretty simple: I wanted every song to be at least loosely connected to the inspiration for that song, which was ‘New Being.’” That track appears last on the album’s tracklist, acting as the grand finale for this era of TheKhue.

Courtesy of Lauren Schorr

With that, “New Being” provides prescient insight into the rest of the album’s ten tracks. A pitched wail cries like an extra-terrestrial and conjures alien abduction folklore. The title track opens the record with a piano melody and a drone. The first key change is the real start of The Quiet, illuminating the darkness like a dying flashlight — enough to see that we don’t exist in a void, but not enough to discredit our demons.

It took Bui over two years to write and arrange his latest LP. The concept never lost its stamina, and the songs that appear on it were all created in the period between 2016 and 2018. The Quiet was finally ready for release last July. It wasn’t until we had been talking about the record for several minutes that Bui revealed its secret. “If you read the name of each track on the album, it forms into a weird sentence.” A poem, if you will, about how the nighttime can open us up to new sounds and new ideas.

Where will he go from here? “I’m still figuring it out,” he admitted, acknowledging that his graphic design work takes priority — and a lot of his time. But this is certainly not the end; his curiosity will always lead him back to his experiments.

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The post TheKhue and the Experiments of a Working Stiff appeared first on Irvine Weekly.

Alex Lilly Confronts Ambivalence on 2% Milk

Zoe Elaine — Mon, 06 May 2019 17:03:46 +0000

Alex Lilly’s new album is called 2% Milk, but she would never touch the stuff. “I’m trying to drink less [of it]…But when I do have milk I definitely have whole milk.” Two percent is just watered down anyway. It reflects a part of society that bothers her; throughout our conversation on a frigid afternoon at Echo Park Lake she gives wry examples: “Tinder is the two percent milk of dating.” Or, our perpetual connectivity is “not what the creator had in mind.” Ultimately, she tells me, “we take too much for granted.”

The record’s title comes from an impromptu poem written by Jacqueline Suskin. Lilly was at the Bootleg Theater with her then-boyfriend for an event a couple of years ago when they came across Suskin sitting with an old typewriter. He gave the prompt of “lowfat milk” and a short while later she delivered a provocative few stanzas about the chemical homogenization of our society. The poem came to mind after Lilly had written a keyboard melody for a new song — in fact the words fit perfectly.

The title track of 2% Milk sets the tone for the record, which turns out to be astonishingly ambivalent. Astonishing because, at least with regard to her music, Lilly herself is decisive. Of course, she earned that confidence after years of studying.

Her first memories are not of piano practice but of checking out books from the library, wanting to understand why songs like “Julia” by the Beatles were so compelling. Her mind has always been analytical, especially as she studied music in college; it’s satisfying to break down the structure of a song mathematically. Like applying the scientific method to music.

Courtesy of the artist

In the same vein, Lilly describes her fascination with the Danish documentary, The Five Obstructions. In it, Lars von Trier asks his friend Jørgen Leth to re-do the latter’s 13-minute short The Perfect Human — five times. Each iteration has to clear a specific challenge, or obstruction, which results in vastly different products each time. The film gives insight into how an artist may problem-solve their own work, but in the end it is simply an experiment in psychological torture. “I’m inspired by that,” Lilly says with a laugh.

Her interest in performing came when she began to learn guitar at 15. Today she is a seasoned multi-instrumentalist, having been part of several high-profile touring bands, most notably for Beck. “I got to get better,” Lilly says, as she describes how her experience helped her grow as a musician. “I enjoyed figuring out how I can fit into the genetic material of a project,” and from there she decided to strike out on her own.

The newfound trust that she put in her own instincts led her to create the emotive enigma that is her new record. It doesn’t take itself seriously but is plenty thought-provoking. Lilly contrasts light-hearted philosophical ideas with saccharine alt-pop. Listeners may hone in on one side or the other, but it is the symbiosis of these elements that makes it a memorable, if also surprising, album. “In the past I might have wanted to shave some of those rough corners off,” she explains, “but I gave in to my impulses.”

To remove the unique details within the record would neuter Lilly’s voice entirely. That is to say the album is filled with her brutal and blatant honesty. It may not have all the answers, but that is reality; Lilly embraces a steadfast ambivalence across 2% Milk.

It opens up with a conversation with her therapist, a figure implied to have the wisdom of Confucius; their advice is met with a frantic energy. The title may suggest that she has gone blue in “Pornographic Mind,” but instead she describes microaggressions that could eventually constitute harassment. Strings collide with synths on “Boomerang,” while MIDI sounds run rampant across most of the rest of the tracks. On “Night Drive” questions about an eternal life bubble up through lyrics that could be taken literally to describe a cruise around the city: “ ‘Hello, where do you wanna go?’/ Oh driver, I don’t really know. … Eternity is taking me on one long night drive.”

Courtesy of the artist

Each song exists in purgatory. But Lilly insists “these things don’t have to be bad!” She also examines many sides of love on the record, from friendly pestering in “Distracting Me” to the communicable melancholy of “Cold Snap.” Then, the closing song describes its fleeting nature. “My love is a firefly/ He only lives for just one night.” It describes an idea of love rather than a particular person, though the ambiguity is intentional.

This is no slight to the concept of romance, but accurately reflects her own contradictions. Lilly explains that falling in love is rare for her, despite her dedication to romance. It is a force that keeps her going even as she mocks herself for feeling this way. “I’m not jaded about love itself, I’m jaded about my interactions with it.” She gives her voice a comical lilt as she jokes, “I’m loyal to my pain.”

Soft splashes against idle paddle boats at the lake house contrast Lilly’s often sarcastic quips. Speaking to me today, she is comfortable. Not that she had hidden herself while she was on tour — she tells me, “Beck’s music resonates with me a lot. It was just nice to work on my own project. It was nice to…”

“Indulge yourself?” I offer.

She nods. “When I was in Paris last year, instead of saying ‘je suis désolé’ [‘I’m sorry’], what I started to say was ‘laissez-moi’ [‘indulge/let me’], and then I would start speaking French. I felt like people were so much more friendly when I did that. ‘I’m sorry’ is a given — we’re all sorry, or we should be.” She pauses to laugh, and continues, “It’s a given that I’m hoping people listen to this and I’m hoping that it’s liked, so let’s just do it. Let’s all indulge ourselves.”

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The post Alex Lilly Confronts Ambivalence on 2% Milk appeared first on Irvine Weekly.

In Praise of the Firm Soundation’s Gospel Brunch

Zoe Elaine — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 01:35:51 +0000

As you learn in the introductory video at Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues Anaheim, the Biblical music genre has unique roots. Dan Aykroyd, co-star of Blues Brothers and co-founder of the House of Blues chain, narrates the short film to a background of scraping forks and humming mouths. He describes the history of Gospel as a cousin to the Blues – begun by African-Americans who used it to cope with the reality of living in a country that once enslaved them. A history of shared trauma united them and Gospel music lifted them up.

Music moves us because it is art and because it makes us reckon with our senses. When it is coupled with exuberant hymns, it can ignite a live audience.