YL Hooi - Untitled (2026 Repress) YL Hooi

Initially conceived as a short-run cassette for Altered States Tapes, YL Hooi’s nameless collection of textural apparitions oscillates between icy DIY minimalism, FX-drenched atmospherics and nang chamber dub. A ghost-like transmission, Hooi’s voice anchors an array of sonic abstractions and impressionistic melodic motifs while a purgatorial ambience dominates throughout. Co-produced with alleged fellow Kallista Kult member Tarquin Manek of LST and M. Quake, Untitled ultimately exists in a suspended halfway state, as if caught between worlds.

The album’s final form speaks directly to its origins, recorded intermittently across a two-year period between 2017 and 2019. That extended passage of time seeps into the structures of the songs themselves, spiralling and mutating from the same centre. The elegiac pulse of opener Title foreshadows the hymnal drift of Straight Thru, before evolving into the inverted bossa nova of W/O Love. The result is a constantly shifting tableau of shared liminal spaces.

These songs seem to emerge like plumes of smoke, magician’s tricks conjured from the ether. The vision crystallises at the midpoint of Untitled with a cover of Stranger by Love Joys, the lovers rock original transformed into the transportive intimacy of Hooi’s own hazy inner world, a perfect embodiment of the LP’s amorphous and deeply sensuous qualities.

A sound both from down under and somewhere far out in subspace, Untitled stands as an inspired masterstroke of experimental mysticism. This 2021 Efficient Space edition is remastered and presented with new artwork honouring the Melbourne-based artist’s Chinese and Russian heritage.