You could count the number of intelligible words across IOWA on your fingers if you wanted to.
One of them is “January,” and another one is “snowstorm.” The new album from the Brooklyn-based artist Lia Ouyang Rusli, who records as OHYUNG, is both flush with the timbre of the human voice and almost completely empty of language. As OHYUNG’s first ambient album since 2022’s imagine naked!, IOWA joins a growing body of recent work — by more eaze, Lucy Liyou, even Ethel Cain on her more experimental ventures — that positions the voice not as an authoritative anchor at the center of a composition, but as a stray vapor trail daring listeners to draw meaning from its wisps.
Rusli, who lived in Iowa City from 2023 to…

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