Eastern Resonance, 4th Harmonic: An Interview with OHYUNG

Eastern Resonance, 4th Harmonic: An Interview with OHYUNG

by ESS Curatorial Fellow James Gui

Leading up to Eastern Resonance, the October 30 Quarantine Concert featuring experimental pop and club musicians from Asia and the diaspora, Curatorial Fellow James Gui sat down with each of the performers to get an idea of their background and thought process behind their music. This is an interview with Brooklyn-based composer and artist Robert Ouyang Rusli, who makes experimental rap as OHYUNG. They have scored films that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, LA Film Festival, among others, and have released music with the UK-based label Chinabot.

Photo by Marion Aguas

Can you talk about the different musical projects you have and how you got your start with making music?

I grew up playing the violin and my cousin taught me how to use Logic and Garageband, so I was always just recording myself in high school. Then I went to college for classical music composition, met a lot of filmmakers in school and ended up just scoring a bunch of people's films. I never studied film scoring, I just sort of started doing it. 

And I listened to a lot of hip hop in high school and middle school. Because I learned Logic, I was just producing beats for myself all the time. So they've always been this parallel thing in my life where I've been working on films and also working on my own music, which is largely inspired by hip hop and rap. I’ve always been drawn to rap because of its political nature, which has really helped me understand myself as an Asian American.

I started making music as OHYUNG in about 2015. That's when I made a specific intention to make music that felt very personal to me. I didn't get into experimental music until like five years ago also. And so I feel like my music just started to get a little stranger, a little more experimental.

So was there a specific moment, or an album or a sound that you heard that really inspired you to start listening to more experimental music and incorporating that in your own work?

There's certain things that I've listened to that dabble in the experimental world, sounds that have had big influences on me. The soundtrack to Akira is one of my favorite film scores. The way [Geinoh Yamashirogumi] blends genres had a big impact on me. Also Flying Lotus's production, a lot of it is really textural and changed the way I thought about production.

I feel like it's been this slow life thing for me where the older I get, I'm starting to understand that there aren't any rules with my life, with gender, with sound. I feel like it's all connected for me. And so when I listen to experimental music, and as I grow, I feel like I'm unlocking my brain, unlearning all of these things that were ingrained in me when I was a child.

Do you find yourself unlearning a lot of the stuff you learned in college as well?

I mean, I definitely appreciate what I learned in school. Especially as a film composer, it gave me a solid foundation, and I definitely believe in learning rules before you break them.  I don't think there was anything specific about school that made me think a certain way. Because there was a lot of experimental music in college, but I just wasn't open to it. I grew up in this small white town and I just wasn't ready for a lot of things in college. Like I studied Beethoven, like 18th century, 17th century music. I just stayed away from experimental music because I didn't understand it. 

I feel that. And you said that you've been exploring your identity through sound, and how it's all connected for you. I think that's really cool because part of the reason that I put all these different artists from Asia and the diaspora together is trying to get at this thing that's really hard for me to put a finger on. This relationship between identity and sound. You have collectives like Eastern Margins and like Eternal Dragonz doing this sort of curatorial work already. And one of the things I'm trying to work through is like what this means. So I guess for you, what does it mean to be like juxtaposed with these other artists who like making this pop and dance music that's sort of experimental?

I think we're doing all these things because we don't see ourselves in a lot of things, that we don't feel represented in the culture in certain ways. So we're trying to create our own, what we imagine or what we want our community to look like and what our culture to be. Like what is Asian diasporic music, you know? We're sort of like defining that now in a way.

Yeah, I’m thinking of that Pitchfork article about tracing Asian American music through the coinage of the term Asian American in the seventies, as a political identity.

A Grain of Sand, or something...

It’s like the folk album-- what are your thoughts on that? I'm curious.

It was cool to listen to it! I'm like, oh, this is something instead of nothing, this is something, right? But obviously it's not my kind of music. I think it's cool that it exists. Yeah. *laughs*

I guess it's similar to what you mentioned before in that it exists, but it doesn’t sort of, you don't feel like it represents your experience.

I guess it feels like white protest music of the seventies, but just talking about Asian issues. Sonically, though, it's very folky. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, honestly it's not my kind of music, white or not. There's not enough screaming.

I feel like the debate around appropriation sometimes gets a bit fraught, but I guess in your, in your mind, is your usage of hip hop or rap because you feel closer to those forms than the white, folk forms of, say, A Grain of Sand? I also feel like your usage of rap is different from say like a Rich Brian or an Eddie Huang,

I'm hyper aware of misappropriation. I don’t know how to describe it, but when I make rap music as long as it feels authentic to myself, like I'm not trying to be something else, that’s an important barometer for me. Another important practice in my music is supporting Black artists and especially queer Black artists. 

Also content-wise, I try to make it understood what my politics are. Like in my one songs I'm like “RIP Akai, don’t give a fuck about a killer cop”, referecing Peter Liang. I feel like rap is an art form historically that calls out injustice and I try to be true to that.

Has the pandemic influenced your music making and the way you consume or produce music?

When clubs reopened, I think I just needed to be crushed by music. So I started listening to the highest BPM stuff possible. I think more about the live experience when I'm working on music, though I haven't worked on music in a while. I've got this Pioneer residency coming up in November and that'll be the first time I'm working on music for myself in half a year, because I've just been working on film music.

I'm not sure what's gonna come out of it, because I like making all these different kinds of music. I think you can hear it on protector, I was getting more into clubby sounds, and that's only gotten more intense. So I imagine if I make more music, it'll have clubbier, harder techno elements mixed in at some point.

Even in Godless, I think it kind of was moving in that direction as well. 

At the same time, during the pandemic I made an ambient record and that's coming out next year. So I'm moving in different directions, I guess.

Going back a bit, I did have one more question about politics and music for you. You said you had some guidelines in your mind in terms of making rap, but when it comes to putting politics or thinking about politics through your art, are there any frameworks that you think of that sort of guide you?

I do try to use absurdity a lot. I definitely am aware that if you hit the nail on the head too much, it becomes ineffective. If you're too on-the-nose with political art, or art talking about social issues, it feels heavy handed in a way where it's not effective. It's not interesting. So on Untitled, “ALL UNIQLO” is just one giant, horrific ad, sort of calling out like Asians’ (and my own) obsession with UNIQLO.

I think I've moved more internal now, maybe because of anxiety and depression. Before I was so angry all the time and calling things out and now I’ve shifted to trying to create space for like Asians and people of color. Like okay, I don't need to talk about like white people and capitalism all the time. I'm just gonna talk about us or make songs for us. Also, sometimes I dunno how to even articulate the rage. And so “shenme gui” [on Protector] is just like, “what the fuck” in Chinese. And in “i hate myself” I'm not even saying words in the first half, I'm just rambling nonsense because I just didn't have the words for what I was feeling at the time.

Because you mentioned carving space and doing stuff for “us” as in Asian diasporic people, I guess that relates to your show on The Lot Radio as well?

Yeah, I guess Yasmin and I were talking about a radio show and she was the one who submitted it. ‘Cause I was like at a mental place where I was just like, I can't like, I can't deal with forms *laughs* I feel like the main thing is I don't see a lot of curation of Asian diasporic music the way that I would like to see it. And Yasmin and I think very similarly about a lot of things with music. So I knew we could, if we had the opportunity, have an interesting radio show, bringing in experimental Asian artists, new and old, traditional, just this blend of sound that has this undefinable nature. And for myself, my whole project with OHYUNG is to be undefinable in this way. 

100%. Was there something specific that was lacking in other attempts at curating Asian diasporic music, and how is your show an intervention in that?

I think it's trying to connect and combine different genres. Maybe this is me as a film composer, but in the sets that I do, I try to approach it like an experimental film where the sound goes on these arcs, and it’s the same with my album Protector. I think it's tapping into older traditional music that feels comforting, combining that with experimental, strange, noise and hip hop and pop, I don't know, really highlighting the range of Asian diasporic music. Also trying to keep it Pan-Asian and not just East Asia, Southeast Asia, bringing in more contemporary South Asian artists or Bollywood music, music from “West Asia”.

I think it's really fun the way your show is structured, because on one hand you'll have like someone like Sunik Kim and then you'll play like just straight up Olivia Rodrigo *laughs*.

I've also been thinking about, as someone who is a very nostalgic person, that the way people talk about art in the diaspora is very nostalgic. We’ll talk about how much we love Teresa Teng, for example. Luis Lopez Carrasco made an interesting film called El Futuro where the soundtrack is clearly sourced from 80s Spain but they’re all obscure post-punk songs. He was talking about how he made the soundtrack unrecognizable because he sees nostalgia as a conservative force. That made me really think about how nostalgia is used in a lot of art, especially in the diaspora. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about the use of nostalgia, especially by the diaspora, because you’ve also sampled stuff like Totoro and Teresa Teng in your songs?

The Teresa Teng sample was sort of like an anti nostalgia where, you think it's gonna be one thing and then it turns into this really dark and gritty song. But actually I'm not a super nostalgic person. I didn't grow up with a lot of these songs. I grew up in a white town in central Pennsylvania, but I empathize with nostalgia. I think it's an important thing for diasporic people to feel identity, to feel connected to culture. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for a parallel life, if I never came to America, if my parents never immigrated. I can see myself growing up with these songs. 

The Totoro one was just for the weebs, though. I was like, they love this shit. I gotta do it one time *laughs* But I don't know. It's fun to play with and I'm really happy with how that remix turned out.

*laughs* No, that one was bonkers. And when you say you can imagine a parallel life where you didn’t immigrate or your parents didn’t immigrate, I totally get that because I had that same thought too when I visited Taiwan two years ago. I went and explored the music scene there, and it really made me think. I mean, my family is not even from Taiwan, like they're from mainland China, but I was thinking, what would it have been like if I grew up not with Pavement, but I don't know, Carsick Cars. It's a whole different canon so when I first experienced it, I was super drawn to it. And like that made me think of how diasporic identity is so tied to this idea of imagining this thing that isn't necessarily connected to your actual roots.

Yeah! Whenever Carsick Cars comes to New York, that's like my favorite show. I've gone to two Carsick Cars shows in New York. Every time they come it's so fun.

Well, I think that's pretty much all I have in terms of questions. Thanks again for the interview and I’m looking forward to the set!

Likewise! Thanks for having me.