'4th Dimensions' / ĀN JÍ [Interview]
Avant-pop artist ĀN JÍ releases their ethereal debut single ‘4th Dimensions’ carried by delicacy and bathed in the influence of their Chinese heritage.
The first single from their forthcoming EP No Mud No Lotus, “4th Dimensions” creates a warm space for deep reflection and introspection doused in shimmering piano lullabies and experimental drum programming. The track is an outstanding debut from a local artist that arises within us a suspicion that ĀN JÍ will ignite the world with the same force as avant-pop mastermind FKA Twigs.
In light of the magical track and EP Verve spoke with ĀN JÍ about their inspirations, how their Chinese heritage translates to music and the start of their wonderful journey into production.
Read the interview below.
Let’s start with your musical history. When did you get into creating and producing music? Where in your journey do you find yourself now?
I started creating music a long time before I started producing. I learnt piano when I was younger but I could never really sit still for long enough to take it seriously. I’m still not very good but I know what sounds beautiful now.
Lately, I’ve been trying to trace back to what originally inspired me to write music, and I think it was from watching my Waipo (Grandma) play piano when I would go back to China. She would write her own compositions and play them for me every time I was there. It was unlike any music I was used to listening to back in the West, and Waipo had shaky hands and played in pentatonic scales so I always felt her piano playing was very magical and strange. These are the memories I have which made me start writing songs on piano from around eleven or twelve years old.
In 2018 after moving to Naarm I started learning to produce music. At the time I didn’t really know anyone around me who produced music, so I think it just seemed natural to start learning myself. As soon as I started learning to produce music I found more of the music and sounds and textures that I connected with.
Right now I feel like I’m at the beginning of something very special. I’ve been experimenting with lots of different sounds over the last few years and I can slowly see these evolving into something in unison. Bending, wailing and heaving are words that encapsulate the sounds that I am chasing and finding within myself.
You’ve noted that solitude and introspection is central to your creation of music. Do you hope that “4th Dimensions” and the rest of the EP inspires listeners to access those same moods and emotions?
Yeah definitely. It’s not necessarily a conscious choice, but I do hope when people listen to my music they embody a sense of stillness and softness. I think it’s only when we find stillness that we can really listen. And when we truly listen, that's when we access magic.
After playing mainly experimental electronic sets in your duo Kettokai in club environments, what inspired you to return to the piano and play with more tender sounds once again?
There has been a long held desire to play piano before this, just as a feeling sitting in my stomach. I feel like I am my most honest when I write music on piano. Particularly because I usually will just start with chords or a really simple melody, so the rest is up to my voice at this stage of the writing.
This moment started with ache.. I was trying to release a part of my life that was really painful and the only way that seemed possible was to wail it out, on piano.
By chance, I was actually lent a piano around the same time. I also returned to writing this way because I felt a stronger connection to my voice and body. Singing feels like a similar experience to crying to me. Feels like shedding skin, rejuvenating. It also is such a grounding experience - like literally feeling your whole body vibrate while you push air out of it. Actually so weird and cool and beautiful.
Vulnerability feels safe to me now. My understanding of being vulnerable is just being one hundred percent honest. There’s a feeling – I’ve been signalled to return to an expression of sound that reflects that to me.
“Singing feels like a similar experience to crying to me. Feels like shedding skin, rejuvenating. It also is such a grounding experience - like literally feeling your whole body vibrate while you push air out of it”.
You’ve mentioned that your music is enriched by discoveries from your Chinese heritage. Can you explain the process of imbuing your music with cultural symbolism, for example whether you source particular samples or whether it is more of an organic flavour that evolves from your upbringing and heritage?
I think for the most part it just weaves itself into my music without much conscious thought. In saying that, there are so many aspects of Chinese expression through sound that I am deeply drawn to: the language, to me, is so much more potent and eloquent than English; pentatonic scales and Chinese melodic intervals are so interesting; Chinese plucked instruments are so striking and delicately beautiful. Ah, like I could literally keep going haha. In terms of process, I suppose there is a subconscious river of inspiration that is whirling around somewhere inside of me.
Contrary to this, I also feel a very tangible, conscious resonance with Chinese dance/experimental music labels like Svbkvlt and Genome 6.66Mbp - whom I think are oozing with pure magic. I’m always inspired and in awe of the other-wordly production that comes from these artists. Feels like I’m bathing in the sonic realm of another alien planet that also feels really familiar at the same time.
I would like to write more music in Chinese, which I’ve just started doing. My Chinese isn’t as fluent as my English and I’d like to change this. I feel the more language I learn the more connected I feel to myself and my ancestors. So many secrets of the past are hidden in language.
"I feel the more language I learn the more connected I feel to myself and my ancestors. So many secrets of the past are hidden in language”.
On the same note, how important is it for you to connect to your heritage & culture through your music and why?
Well simply put, it’s literally in my DNA. It seeps through everything I do and make. Music connects me to myself and my deeper past. It's important because I feel like those sounds are within my body, asking to be unhatched. At the present moment, the feeling that is most notably simmering in me, is curiosity. I’m so curious to see how my culture will present itself through my music because, at the moment, it feels like mystery. It feels like I am not really in control of the subtle ways it permeates.
What can we expect from the rest of the EP?
You can expect being softly pierced with a sword through your stomach, and then tenderly held afterwards. Gutting yet gentle. Ethereal and abrasive.
The EP is a reflection on a gruelling year of metamorphosis. It is a tangible realisation of a lesson in suffering and that it transforms to bring beauty with it. The EP is called ‘No Mud, No Lotus’, which is a translation from a Chinese proverb “出污泥而不染”. This saying reveals that lotus grow from mud, and still bloom untainted. I have grown such an affection for the lotus since the EP. They are such a resilient flower and emerge even in the harshest conditions. By example, lotus show that despite the chaos, the suffering, the debris - there is breath and bloom at the surface.
The EP carries an uncomfortable truth about the relentlessness yet fruitful necessity of the darkness we face, as a catalyst for growth. In saying that, it is a shedding of a time in my life I am very ready to let go of. I finished all the songs over a year and a half ago and obviously so much has changed since then. When I think about the time in which I was creating the EP, the words ‘womb space’ come to mind. Being in the womb of where I am now. I feel like I have grown more than I have ever grown in my life since finishing the EP so it feels that ‘No Mud No Lotus’ was some kind of self fulfilling prophecy. I feel like the days of growing through mud are over, and I am only to blossom from here.
What’s next for ĀN JÍ after this EP?
A storm. I already have a lot of new songs I’ve been working on. I feel like my sound has shapeshifted already so I’m excited to share this new energy. I have also been slowly working on the visual incarnation of ĀN JÍ - I promise this will be other-worldly. This is a monumental and special part of ĀN JÍ and I’m really excited to reveal this over time as it reveals itself to me. I’m excited to collaborate with more artists in the future too - there are so many I want to work with. Expect shows that hold space for your sorrows, your ecstasies and your divinity. But most importantly, what’s next is a continuation of healing, creating without an end goal and relishing in moments of creative treasure.
Stay up to date with ĀN JÍ on Soundcloud and Instagram.
Interview by Margarita Bassova https://www.instagram.com/(@rxtabass)
Images taken by Rospure (@rosepure)
Thank you for reading this article. Before you leave the page, we’d like you to take a moment to read this statement. We are asking our readers to take action and stand with the BIPOC community who fight and endure the oppression and injustice of racial inequality.
Here in ‘Australia’, Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population on Earth. Countless lives have been murdered by white police, white government policies and this country’s white history, institutionalised colonialism and ongoing racial oppression. Racial injustice continues today under the phoney, self-congratulatory politics of ‘Reconciliation’ and the notion that colonialism is something that must be denied and forgotten, an uncomfortable artefact of the past.
Feeling guilty is not enough. We must take action, pay the rent, educate ourselves and acknowledge that empathy and sorrow for past actions is insufficient if this does nothing to prevent our current reality from extending into the future.
Please consider making donations to the following organisations (the list is so small and the work to be done is so large, do your research to find more grassroots, Indigenous-lead community organisations):
Indigenous Social Justice Association - fighting to stop Indigenous deaths in custody
Firesticks Alliance - who campaign for Indigenous land management, cultural burning and looking after Country