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For the past decade, US musician Helen Yee has been honing her craft. By live looping her violin with various other instruments and electronics, she creates otherworldly and delicately balanced compositions, collected carefully on her debut album, Orchestrope. While Yee ostensibly put much effort into the composition and production of these tracks, there's an element of abandon in the way she plays. Perhaps this is because of her training in jazz.
Originally from Long Island, New York, Yee now calls Kalamazoo, Michigan home. There, she joined The Birdseed Salesman, a self-stylized "gypsy jazz" string ensemble, and developed a home studio—where she recorded Orchestrope. Her compositions are based on live loops created in Ableton Live, and while her style is built around manipulating the violin with electronic effects, the core explores how emotions can build and layer over time. Through the cumulative effects of sonic layering, Yee expresses both the beauties and the challenges of inspiration.
Yee has an obvious passion for her instrument. In a recent interview with Cara Lieurance on WMUK, she stated; "The violin is, in a way, my second voice." The album's title reflects her ability to transform traditional stringed instruments into something more luminous. For example, using specific delay tones, Yee shifts the violin’s pitch to a near-cello depth, creating rich, sepulchral tones that add emotional weight to the compositions.
The equally dulcet and ominous tones of the opening title track indicate the proceeding work. Atop reverbed pizzicato string strikes, endless violin swells, and electronic flourishes, Yee supercharges her contemplative neoclassical compositions with frenzied allegro musings. And though it becomes replete, Yee consistently finds new pockets to layer more harmonies, sometimes brighter, sometimes less grande, but always compounding the mood.
"Noche de Julia" seeks calm amid more complex yearnings, rhythmic plucks offsetting the heart-break of the violin, which, through unshy performances, expresses something dramatically bittersweet so emphatically it's hard not to be moved. It also takes on some compelling key changes and shifts in rhythm, with experimental scratches thrown in for good measure. Thankfully, for the listener's emotional battery, not all tracks search for the same levels of profundity. The two-minute "Square Root of Paradise" seems uninterested in lengthy musical ideas, preferring to create an effortlessly bouncy piece with the kind of atmosphere and gentle electronics that befit the serenity a rainy morning.
Elsewhere, the spaciousness of "Sprung" is expanded by its celestial synths and traditionally-minded musical passages before arriving at revelatory silver-screen-ready moments. "Kicking Up Dust" is a roguish sally with harmonising violins laying a rhythmic bed for Yee to express change, and "Ferromagnetica" is a more exotic fare, musing around the Phrygian mode with earnestness while discordant electronic touches permeating the environment.
Yee opts for a curious shift in mood on "Ancestors", a fever dream of tribal hand-percussion tribalising sullen spoken word, the only instance of human voice on the album. This could be jarring for fans of solely instrumental music; those who like to throw on a record of fine music unencumbered by the human voice. In that way, this track feels like a billboard in a meadow, albiet an interesting billboard. To close the collection, "Noche" is a forlorn but beautous experiment in key changes and minimalism, and "Tanoura" exudes jubilence; drones phasing in around the jagged violin screeches that coax your unconscious mind into waking up.
Orchestrope by Helen Yee is an enriching collection of emotionally-loaded music with a mischievous side. Working at the intersection of classical and experimental feels a natural place for Yee, whose work is primarily serious, but often seriously uplifting and perenially a delight.
★★★★