Track By Track: Sook-Yin Lee – 72RHR’

5 Minute Read

Music

72 beats per minute, and every kind of heart in between

Sook-Yin Lee: ’72RHR’ Track By Track

Sook-Yin Lee has spent decades refusing to stay in one lane – Vancouver art-punk bands, a screen career that’s taken in SHORTBUS at Cannes and a Canadian Screen Award for JACK, feature films she’s written, directed and scored herself, songs Neko Case has covered and Brandon Cronenberg has put in horror movies. ’72RHR’ is her latest solo album, titled after the resting heart rate, with every track built around that same steady 72 beats per minute even as the subject matter swings from quantum physics to a titanium leg plate.

That range is the point. Across ten tracks, Lee sets a Robert Frost poem next to a Buddhist mantra, a tiny balsa wood guitar next to a synth rig tuned toward Yellow Magic Orchestra, and a surreal acid trip selling frozen meat door-to-door in Surrey, B.C. next to a recreation of the anxiety of sheltering through real air-raid alerts. Gritty, industrial, and disarmingly personal by turns – Lee talks us through where every track actually came from, track by track, below.

MENDING WALL
Season: Late spring

Named after the poem by Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” explores the tension between nature and artificial barriers. Do walls protect or separate? Beyond a binary, quantum physics asserts that multiple dimensions may allow us to experience different realities, and drift between them, while superposition means a particle can be in all states at once.

Setting: On my butt, on a donut pillow, in front of a computer, singing a response to a churning bass. If I stop thinking, I can channel melody.

A HOLLOW
Season: Fall

According to English writer and philosopher, Colin Wilson, “the robot” symbolizes our automatic and habitual way of thinking and acting that functions as an internal autopilot to manage everyday tasks. “A Hollow” offers a warning against unconscious routine. Wake up and escape the maze!

Setting: I’m in my eleven-foot-wide-turn-of-the-last-century row house, on a pine floor painted in intricate geometric patterns. A donut pillow on a melded green chair I found in the garbage, protects my tail bone, allowing me to sit for longer and make music.

DIGITAL FIRE
Season: Winter

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yello, King Crimson. Heavy beats, low harmonies, and elephants.

Setting: Where I organize sounds until I realize I haven’t eaten all day.

GREEN TARA
Season: All Seasons

The Green Tara Mantra is a sacred Buddhist chant to invoke compassion, protection, remove obstacles, overcome fear, and bring peace.

Ohm Tarré
Tuttarė Turė
So Ha

Setting: I’m in pain from a knot in my back, and scanning my body like mental embroidery. I’m about to give up when I imagine lifting an axe and swinging it down hard to sever my root attachment to pain. Now, I can observe without complaining. The pain disappears and reappears elsewhere.

RESTING HEART
Season: Mid-summer

I came up with what I thought was Peking Opera music until my dad said it sounded more like Cantonese Opera, a style that comes naturally to me without ever having studied it. Thin metallic strings convey the heaviest blues. Dirt and bone.

Setting: On a tiny balsa wood guitar with a crushing sound, I improvised one long take with no idea where it came from.

LOCKED BOY
Season: Fall

When you’re trapped in a mental and physical prison and you can’t express yourself as completely as you wish, it’s easy to feel isolated and alone. Remember that you matter, you have an effect. You are loved.

Setting: An open and clear channel to receive and send.

MONKEY MIND
Season: Summer

I dropped acid on a farm and had a severe allergic reaction to horses the night before my first day on the job selling meat door to door in the suburb of Surrey, B.C. Like a boxer with punched out eyes, I roamed the suburbs with two teenagers enticing seniors to buy hundreds of pounds of freezer meat, in exchange for a juicy filet-mignon. Each house was protected by a “Knills Alarm System” and the pathways seemed to stretch forever with yapping chihuahuas clawing behind locked doors. It was evil work, and we all quit and watched a baseball game. Though we were never paid, months later, I received a T4 tax slip from “Canada Fancy Foods.”

Setting: In a luxury condo with textured knock-off Van Gogh sunflowers, air conditioning burns as you breathe in. You have been playing and losing video games for days when you lock eyes with a tear-stained bichon with a yeast infection and a plastic cone around its neck, and you scratch at the tender folds of skin on the inner bend of your own right arm.

UNLOCK THE PAIN
Season: Summer

Trance and repetition, on the 49th day of Bardo Thödol.

Setting: Lights flicker and the power cuts out. Electricity surges through my body.

TRAVELOGUE WITHOUT MOVING
Season: Dead of winter

Two broken leg bones and a titanium plate.

Setting: At home, tasked with endless bum stairs, up and down and up and down, I pivot on a stool with my good knee.

I WANT TO TELL YOU
Season: Fall

Adam.

Setting: We run into each other in a crowded train station and embrace, not letting go.