#letter to yu

[grrlmusic]

Bolis Pupul - Letter to Yu

[seanmorroww]

Bolis Pupul - "Causeway Bae"

Letter to Yu [Deewee, 2024]

[dustedmagazine]

Bolis Pupul — Letter to Yu (DeeWee)

Bolis Pupul’s mother died suddenly in an auto accident in 2008, leaving the artist bereft in the ordinary way but also beset with questions about his own identity. She was a native Hong Konger, married to his father, a well-known Belgian cartoonist, and although Pupul grew up biracial, he had never fully connected with his mother’s country of origin. Not that he hadn’t thought about race and colonialism and prejudice. “Blenda,” from Bolis Pupul’s Topical Dancer album with Charlotte Adigéry included the repeated line “Go back to the country where you belong” (difficult to do when you’re half Belgian/half Chinese). Still with Letter to Yu, Pupul immerses himself in his heritage, weaving the sounds and culture of his mother’s world into thumping, memory-haunted elegies. It’s an extraordinarily moving tribute, propulsive and dreamlike at once.

The disc begins with distant whoosh of traffic sounds, and Pupul reading a letter he wrote to his mother when he finally reached her birthplace. (Pupul’s mother is the “Yu” in “Letter to Yu.”) He reads through a voice alterer against a backdrop of ghostly bells and restless percussion, an elegant setting for pure loss. Murmurs the artist, “My heart is in my throat/My eyes filled with tears/This is where you were born 59 years ago/and I’m finally here/why did it take me so long.”

This cut sets the tone for an album that uses the sounds of the dance floor and busy Hong Kong to explore deep human longing. “Completely Half” flutters silkily on disco percolations, while contemplating alienation from one’s own language and culture. “Mau Tau Wai Road (with Salah Pupul)” folds the sweet female-voiced romanticism of Chinese pop into a syncopated dance beat; it commemorates the address where Pupul’s mother was born. The instrumental “Spicy Crab” splays Eastern-sounding string plunks across eddies and cascades of synth arpeggios. Then Pupul turns the singsong, tonal sounds of spoken Chinese into something like a riff in “Doctor Says.” Against a pounding, pulsing club beat, a man speaks a phrase, maybe something ordinary, but by repetition it becomes part of the melody. “Frogs,” too, intersperses brief, Chinese language phrases into blotchy beats. Peering over the language barrier, we catch glimpses of the familiar wrapped in the unknown. It’s also catchy and dance friendly as hell.

There’s something very moving about Pupul’s attempt to understand his mother by vacuuming up the sights and sounds of Hong Kong and fitting them carefully into his Western-style DJ art. It works on a human level — we can all relate to losing people that we love — but also as music. Letter to Yu is poignant and powerful.

Jennifer Kelly 

[reckonslepoisson]

Letter to Yu, Bolis Pupul (2024)

Hooks and beats sheeny, shiny, and sharp, all with an emotional, personal edge dipping into Pupul’s Hongkonger heritage. There is pretty much nothing not to like in Letter to Yu. 

Pick: ‘Completely Half’

[romanceyourdemons]

whenever prince yu needs to get his father to love him again he’s like fuhuang i found a big fucking rock shaped like a letter. and every single time his father is like (pupils widening like a cat’s) my god. a big fucking rock shaped like a letter. my god.

[kaiatase]

putting my kuwameshis in one spot

first two were commissions i did for @szfiction! love u :D

[notacatdown]

Old Lin - Who are these people?

Don't remember where I first saw this meme. Seen it multiple times in douyin comments. On the left, is Ziqi telling MiaoMiao he sent her letter to her dad. The top right is her letter and his. With his saying: I like MiaoMiao. I want to marry her.

Lin Yu's dad doesn't know her by MiaoMiao (her name in real life) or Mu Sheng's courtesy name, Ziqi.

[lilacerull0]

biochemistry enthusiasts in fiction... i can live in peace now

[skrunksthatwunk]

hiei jagan surgery hallucination wip

[f1lms4ever]

Letters from Kanai Nirai [2005] dir. by Naoto Kumazawa

[marvelousbelladonna]

Stop betraying my poor baby

I swear if Pate somehow betrays Laudna, I’ll scream

[wangxianficrecs]

Do you want to hear by allollipoppins, dameauxgentianes

Do you want to hear

by allollipoppins, dameauxgentianes

T, 12k, Wangxian

Part of Dark Lan Zhan Week

Summary: — about the deal that I’m making? Lan Wangji goes back in time to save Wei Wuxian. This changes everything. Day 4: Righteousness | Time Travel Kay's comments: This story is for all fans of Dark Lan Wangji, who love to see him do whatever is needed to ensure that Wei Ying lives a happy and comfortable life. In this story, he travels back in time and makes the Lan Sect save little A-Ying from the streets, with Lan Qiren promptly adopting the boy. Of course, this leads to conflict with the Jiang Sect. At the same time, Lan Wangji also makes sure his sick mother receives help from medical prodify Wen Qing. Major divergences follow! The entire story is told through beautifully-formatted letters, very creative! Excerpt: I didn’t even know A-Zhan was aware of A-Niang’s sickness. I say this, but really I should not doubt his perspicacity. He may be young, but he is much smarter than he looks. It sometimes feels as if my brother were an entirely different person. Some days it seems as if he is growing so fast — much too fast for my liking. I feel powerless in such moments, as if no matter what I do I will never be able to protect him from the world. What does it say of me and my ability to be a good brother? But then A-Ying came to the sect and I do realize that I have been thinking about it too much once more. With A-Ying here, I have nothing to worry about. A-Zhan is as he has always been, but he acts more like his age now, and has not left A-Ying’s side since they met.

canon divergence, time travel, time travel fix-it, somebody lives/not everybody dies, madam lan lives, epistolary, letters, minor character death, dark lan wangji, dark lan zhan week, wei wuxian is a lan, bad parents jiang fengmian and yu ziyuan, good uncle lan qiren, no sunshot campaign

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)

[mengyan]

“两情相悦”: to have a mutual love and affection for one another, to be like-souled and like-minded.

wu jiayi as shen yu | gu yi & fu jing as zhou yue the letter from the cloud 云中谁寄锦书来 (2022) | EP 2

[dkniade]

Hmm, I found a playlist of Childe themes. I haven’t heard the tracks “Foul Legacy” and “A Letter from Afar” before but the motifs (or, leitmotifs?) are immediately recognizable

If I have to guess, these two are probably from his Story Quest, which would then link the themes to Teucer. See, what’s interesting is that (I’m basing my interpretation off of this assumption, so I could be totally off the mark hahaha)

“Foul Legacy”

“Starts the same slow, tense and ominous way as “From Snezhnaya With Boldness” (Story Teaser PV theme)”

“Suddenly electric guitar comes in… with the typical demo PV motif??? (Many pre-2.0 Mondstadt/Liyue four star characters’ demo PV themes have their version of the “demo motif”) He’s probably doing a “cool epic protagonist” attack in Foul Legacy here”

“…Strange. This sounds very heroic and energetic in a bright way, almost like a character Demo PV theme, yet it’s not HIS Demo theme (stylistically, musically)”

“…Ah, this must be how he wants TEUCER to see him. This is like, the music you’d use if you want to make a video about Tartaglia for Teucer, haha”

-

“A Letter from Afar”

really similar to “Letters from Ajax” from his Demo PV, and starts with the exact same distant piano motif

But it’s a lot more hopeful and it’s all piano and swelling strings

Meaning, the “tricky” flamenco (?) guitar never comes in at 0:19 and the agressive electric guitar never comes in at 0:23, neither the religious chanting

Main motif here might symbolize: Snezhnaya, Ajax, Hydro, perhaps even some semblance of innocence

(I think I vaguely know what’s going on in his Story Quest but I’ve never seen it personally so let me know if this is anywhere close or completely unrelated to his quest haha)

-

This is really good. Each motif introduced in the tightly packed “Letters from Ajax” is expanded in his other (non-boss) themes

“Letters from Ajax” is his Demo PV theme, likely a first impression when he first released in 1.1

“Letters from Ajax” as a character theme is really hard to read at a first glance because there’s so much going on: gentleness/friendliness, undercurrent of (his love for) conflict, (anime-like) heroics & gentleness again simultaneously, schemes, religious devotion/background & violence, gentleness/friendliness again

(All this you can get from listening to the soundtrack alone without the context from demo video)

Also I think the progression of his Demo theme is similar to how his Character Story is revealed

This is going to be interesting (wrote a longer thing analyzing/interpreting them)

[kaoharu]

ohh but i did find a gif i loved when looking st ur old blog.. i had the best gifs sigh

TRUE ibloved ur gifs <3