Thriving in multiple mediums can mean you become a master of none. Not so for HWI, whose audio and visual art are equally arresting and complimentary. Her music videos are a marriage of the two. Here, she pushes herself with the detail and ambition you’d expect from a far larger budget.
Take the video for ‘너의 전생 (Your My Past Lives)’, where we’re introduced to an imaginary technology that creates orbs of pure light. She makes it real with shots of elaborate schematics. Clever lighting makes the set weighty and dramatic, while odd trinkets and pieces of metal become props for her vision.
The song works similarly: cheap and disparate parts forged into elegant shapes, all handled by an auteur with the taste to pull it off. Her musical references are wide-reaching, 2000s R&B, hip hop and various strands of techno and art pop worked into frenetic beats.
The video for ‘humanly possible’, the title track from her debut, is just as interesting. It’s a casually constructed video diary. A vertical phone camera captures spontaneous moments: a spider hanging on a succulent; a birthday party; finishing off a track on Ableton while getting a flight. There’s a looseness that works to its advantage. Her music can be similarly off-the-cuff and instinctual. The joy of this record is in how craft and instinct work together. Here on ‘humanly possible’, a hummed melody becomes the foundation of a groove, built up with broken sounds and splashes of texture.
Instinct and craft bleed through the record on macro and micro levels. It opens with a techno-futurist prayer, morphing gospel with a bit-crushed and doomy electronic palette. The macro themes are fleshed out and ambitious, with ecology and original sin mapped out through sonics. For the micro, the vocal layering is particularly impressive as the song curdles from major to minor in its second half. HWI has a beautiful vocal tone, but she allows her voice to become brutish when necessary. Like her contemporaries, Marina Herlop and Lyra Pramuk, the voice becomes a part of the landscape to sculpt with effects and contrasts. On ‘How God Cries’, she simply belts and lets that overwhelm.
On ‘New Man’, the voice becomes a piece of percussion, a raw solo part, and a group chorus. Sweet melodies are contrasted with odd and surprising bits of sound, spliced around her performances. Then on ‘Eh Ah’, the surprise arrives with a bed-squeak sample, a nod to Jersey club that highlights that instinctive curiosity as a producer. Whether she’s working from an Ableton grid or an empty studio shoot, HWI playfully fills the space with something to explore.
