Katya Yonder - Cure
Returning with her second release on Métron Records, the Baku based Russian multi-instrumentalist and producer, Katya Yonder, reveals her most deeply personal and emotionally layered work to date, Cure.
Fearlessly exploring themes of personal struggle, love, heartbreak and divorce, Cure is an introspective and candid record that delves into questions of self-understanding, acceptance, and growth.
“This is an honest story, it is about happiness and heartbreak, excitement and disappointment, about what and how I feel, how I love, cry, how I perceive this world.”
The album continues to expand upon the diverse sonic and cultural forces found on Katya’s first Métron Records release, Multiply Intentions, channeling the influences into a more concise and reflexive expression.
Mixing Baroque aesthetics, Soviet-era ballads, classic Hollywood music, electronica, rap and timeless pop, Katya’s unique palette provides a dynamic backdrop for capturing the journey through adversity towards healing.
“To cure yourself you just have to look inside, see what you really are, fully feel and experience everything as it is. And be kind and honest to yourself.”
Written and Recorded by Katya Bruk.
Mastered by Brandon Hocura.
Artwork by Sofia Hjortberg.
© + ℗ 2024. Métron Records. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
Lucy Sissy Miller - Pre Country
Lucy Sissy Miller is a French/British singer-songwriter, performer and artist based in Paris. On her latest release for Metron Records, Pre Country, she renders her own personal take on country music, an ambient and airy ode to her love of Americana. Across 16 tracks, Miller recollects about love-like friendships, breakups, mermaids and missing girl mysteries - the album acting as a movie-like homage to girlhood and desire.
“With this album I really enjoyed blurring the lines between fiction and reality, a bit like what movies are able to do to us. I hide a little bit of personal truth behind each song.”
Influenced by the tones of Laurie Anderson and Imogen Heap, as well as the imagery found in Twin Peaks and Paris, Texas, Pre Country is a rich and explorative record that mixes a wide range of sonic sources. Though very much rooted in folk music, Pre Country is laced with layers of autotune, bringing an other worldly and haunted presence to the work.
“It’s an album about memories and how we stitch up these moments, making them movie-like to make sense of these experiences.”
The record was crafted with notes from journals, poetry, voice memos, transformed and collected sounds and here it carries the many layers of desire, loss and fear that Miller wanted to convey in the songs, communicating an unsteady, explosion of feeling whilst remaining delicate and personal.
Written and Recorded by Lucy Sissy Miller.
Mastered by Brandon Hocura.
Artwork by Lucy Sissy Miller.
Additional vocals by Owen Barnell (Autopilot)
Additional production by Sarah Terral (Florida Mermaids)
© + ℗ 2024. Métron Records. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
Li Yilei - NONAGE
“Growing up has always been a solitary journey, marked by forward-looking anticipation, anxiety, unripe potential, aspirations, and closures.”
London based Chinese composer and multi-instrumentalist Li Yilei returns to Métron Records with NONAGE, their second full length release following 2021’s OF. An introspective reflection on the journey through childhood, this new work brings together samples from old Chinese TV shows, mechanical children’s toys and an array of acoustic and electronic instruments - some of which were designed and built by Li themselves.
The Chinese title for "NONAGE" is "垂髫", which translates to “childhood” or “disheveled hair”, and refers to the carefree phase of life when children let their hair down, both figuratively and literally. For Li, nonage is a place that they always revisit - to learn about fear and fearlessness, love and despair, grief and glee, curiosity and mistakes.
“I remember pressing piano keys like touching flowers, reading scores like looking at paintings, writing like how I would talk to myself, greeting death like how I would greet life.”
Initially conceived as an archiving project, the record retraces and reimagines fractions of Li’s childhood memories through smell, location and colour, and brings to life the lingering feelings that remain into adulthood.
Compositions are built around a variety of unusual sources: damaged instruments such as a toy piano, a hand cranked music box, bird whistles, a broken accordion and anything else Li could find that evoked nascent recollections. Interspersed throughout are samples from Li’s childhood piano jams, moments of contemplative transmigration where previous incarnations of self and memory meet the present.
Written and Recorded by Li Yilei.
Mastering by Brandon Hocura.
Artwork by Li Yilei.
P & C Métron Records 2024.
© + ℗ 2024. Métron Records. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
Dasom Baek - Mirror City
Dasom Baek is a Seoul based composer and performer of traditional Korean instruments, specialising in the daegeum and sogeum, types of ancient Korean bamboo flute that have a deep historic and cultural significance.
‘’I think the charm of wind instruments is that their sound is based on how you breathe. The stories I’ve kept in my mind I breathe into the instrument - they become music’’
On her latest album Mirror City, Dasom explores ideas of solitude and community within cities and the effects this has on inhabitants. Wishing to hold a mirror up to modern life, she uses music to express the emotions of the people living in the city.
“People have plenty of choices and the convergence of all these choices create infinite possibilities in the city. What impact have I left on my city through my choices?”
Dasom’s contemporary expression of these ancient instruments bridges the gap between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary sonic experimentation. Sparse and spacious, Mirror City layers textured ambient sounds and chopped dusty vocal patterns, all set to the rasping and rich timbres of the daegeum and sogeum.
Mirror City also features the incredible work of Minseon Choi who plays ajeang on the album; a zither with twisted silk strings that is played with a slender stick. Collectively the sogeum, daegeum and ajeang represent a part of Korean musical culture that is starting to regain more attention. With Mirror City, Dasom Baek hopes to showcase the power these heritage instruments can have in contemporary music.
As an accomplished soloist, Dasom has performed all over the world with esteemed orchestras, played international music festivals including SXSW and has received academic recognition from prominent Korean arts institutions as well as a PhD at Seoul National University.
Written by Dasom Baek.
Ajaeng by Minseon Choi.
Recorded and mixed by Sanghyun Cho.
Mastered by Brandon Hocura.
Artwork by Sukyeong Jeong.
© + ℗ 2023. Métron Records. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
Audrey Carmes - Quelque chose s’est dissipé
Audrey Carmes is a composer and artist based in Paris, France. Having graduated from the Paris School of Fine Art, she found herself drawn towards the city’s experimental electronic music, developing a sound practice that she combined with her poetry and writing.
On her spellbinding debut album Quelque chose s'est dissipé, Carmes creates spacious worlds that shimmer with subtle intricacy. Inspired by krautrock, ambient and avant-garde electronic music, the French artist draws on a range of sonic elements to create her own distinct blend of sound design and composition.
Songs build through evolving layers of synthesizer, easing the album seamlessly through its eleven tracks, surrounding Carmes’ delicate vocals and spoken word segments with bass guitar, vibraphone and flute.
“This album was conceived as a contemplative journey, a remedy spelt with whispers, hushed soundscapes and repetitive patterns, it hosts the wish to find both appeasement and peaceful strength”
For Carmes, the making of the album became a path towards healing. Examining her thoughts and experiences, she treated the creative process as an experiment in care. Indeed, the rough English translation of the album title reads ‘something has dissipated’.
“Through this project I entered into movements of introspection and reconstruction. It was a kind of a meditation on the vertigo of our existence by approaching the void, getting lost and finally coming back to familiarity’’
Quelque chose s'est dissipé will be released on July 26th on LP and digital formats via Métron Records and features cover artwork drawings by the artist.
Written & Recorded by Audrey Carmes.
Mastered by Brandon Hocura.
Artwork by Audrey Carmes.
'Printemps' composed with Vadim Pigounides.
Bass guitar recorded at studio La Mami
with Bertrand Fraysse.
© + ℗ 2023. Métron Records. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
