FROM LULLABIES TO TRANCE: YIJIA'S TU BRIDGES GENERATIONS

Maisie Daniels
6 minutes ago
2 min read

It had been one of those weeks, the sort of week that ends with me in the bath with a Babybel (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it). With one soapy hand dangerously close to dripping my laptop, I pressed play on Yijia’s new album TU. There’s something about the thrill of risking breaking your laptop while discovering new music that makes it feel extra alive.

The opening track, Willow Flowers, eases you in softly - a gentle, transportive piece that sets the tone for a record that feels like a journey through memory, time and ancestry. Then comes the stand-out single, Yi The Sun - a post-apocalyptic club anthem that fuses futuristic ambient-psychedelic trance with the ancient sounds of the Yi ethnic minority from Southwestern China.

The story behind the song is just as compelling. Yijia was captivated by a rare field recording of Yi music a friend had shared with her, only to later discover (via a DNA test) that she herself is more than a quarter Yi. What began as curiosity became an act of reclamation. Yi The Sun is both a symbolic homecoming and an artistic experiment, blending pulsing trance beats with echoes of ancestral song. As Yijia puts it herself: “Sometimes I refer to this song as taking my ancestors clubbing.”

The lyrics mirror that sentiment, placing us in a post-apocalyptic return to Earth - searching for connection in a world forever changed. When she sings, “Hey, hello, is anyone home? I’ve been gone for too long,” it hits like a message to both the cosmos and the past, equal parts lonely and hopeful.

The record closes with Lullaby, a gentle, almost weightless melody carried by Yijia’s butter-smooth voice, the kind that had me teetering on the edge of dozing off in the tub. Its lyrics translate to: “Holding and swinging my little baby, Baby needs to go to sleep. Gently rocking my baby to sleep. You fell asleep, you wake up, when you wake up there will be cake, gently rocking my baby to sleep.”‘Lullaby’ is a song passed down through the generations from Yijia’s great-grandmother. Even as Alzheimer’s claimed her grandmother’s memory, this song remained a shared language between them. “Whenever I sing it, I still feel connected to her,” Yijia says. “It’s like we’re still singing together… somewhere in a space that exists only through music.” It’s tender, hypnotic and comforting, the sort of track that makes you wonder if the review should come with a “not safe for bathtubs” warning.

Already an award-winning singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Yijia has performed everywhere from the Royal Albert Hall to WOMAD Festival, and recently gave a TED Talk on how music transcends time, space and memory. Her TED Talk about the project also recently went live for more info you can watch here. With TU, she’s not just preserving tradition; she’s igniting it - transforming folk memory into something futuristic, timeless and utterly her own.

Music that soaks you until you forget whether you’re in a bathtub or orbiting another planet.