If you’ve recently listened to Okkyung Lee’s just like any other day, take a minute to collect yourself and reset expectations before diving into the South Korean cellist’s new record. While Lee’s 2025 collection of charming and bright-eyed, keyboard-focused ambient miniatures wouldn’t feel out of place in pastoral passages of a JRPG soundtrack, Signals, a commission by London’s Explore Ensemble, is stark, grave, and sharply abstract from first note to last.
The first sounds we hear, in fact, on the opener ‘Siwan’ (named for pianist Siwan Rhys) are the echoes of a resounding yet dangerously unstable piano stab. The sonic shape feels at once awfully close and impossibly distant, as if we were peering into the instrument’s guts…

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