YU SU - Foundry

Born in Kaifeng, China, and raised in Vancouver, Yu Su builds her music in the interstice between worlds. “Foundry”, her second album, grew out of projects written for Mutek 2025, the Montréal festival devoted to electronic music; but it was her move to London that shifted her axis toward dub and techno minimalism: territories she's long haunted as a DJ, but which she here makes fully her own. The title is no accident: for her, the foundry is a shared space where different materials melt into something new, an idea also reflected in the record's visuals: “Not linear layering, but horizontal,” she said, “like interweaving metal wires, from which a granular sphere eventually emerges.” The album translates this logic into a sum of synthetic elements, dub granulations and sounds of physical origin: the result is an amalgam that moves between floating moments, dancefloor stompers, and the introspection that has become her trademark.

The tracks slip in like streams without climax, a web on which to build an ecosystem of sonic research and rhythmic asymmetries. The voice is an element Su doesn't hesitate to arrange: looped and manipulated through filters and spatial effects, or left as spoken word shaped by sentient machines, and at other times dissolved and impure in a chant that loses its contours; the result is a weave of percussive mantras and lost lullabies with a shape-shifting nature.

The record finds its strength above all in the contrast between its vocal moments and a dense run of instrumentals, a shift in mood that marks the producer's ever-changing personality. Unlike other releases on Short Span, the Sheffield label at the forefront of dub techno's revival, “Foundry” ventures into more textured territory: not a reworking of what Basic Channel already laid down, but a redefinition that pushes the genre toward new margins.

"Sunless", built with Memotone, bears the imprint of Chris Marker's film "Sans Soleil": no synchronization between layers, everything slides and stratifies without ever resolving. "One Place After Another" finds Seefeel, back with their first album in fifteen years, carrying their dub-shoegaze guitar into a structure that nonetheless remains entirely their own. "Ripe Fruits", inspired by Frederic Leighton's painting "The Garden Of The Hesperides", closes the record as a point of synthesis between the debut's identity and the new path taken. The tonal softness sustains a constant presence of subcutaneous frequencies, but something almost slips into aimlessness; and the title track remains the crux of the matter: more formulaic, less intense than the deep textures that characterize almost everything else. The work is in progress and the raw materials are there: what's still missing is full fusion.

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16/06/2026