In Tulpa, Charmaine Lee distills years of experimental vocal research into her most expansive studio statement to date. Known for redefining the limits of the human voice through improvisation and electronics, the New York-based, Hong Kong–born artist constructs a sonic organism that merges vulnerability and volatility. Produced and mixed by Randall Dunn and released on Kou Records, Tulpa amplifies Lee’s ongoing fascination with the relationship between voice, embodiment, and technology.
Across eight pieces—including The Loading Zone, Overlevered, Water Margin, and Noh Age(featuring woodwind virtuoso Ned Rothenberg)—Lee creates a language of near contacts: breath colliding with static, syllables folding into resonance, frequencies blooming and collapsing in space. The voice is at once human and cyborgian, capable of startling intimacy or sudden rupture. Dunn’s production preserves the tactile tension between proximity and distortion, letting each fragment of pitch and air vibration pulse as a microcosm of emotion. While Lee’s previous recordings such as Ggggg and Knvf captured the raw immediacy of improvisation, Tulpa offers a broader narrative arc. Its structure—equal parts composed gesture and spontaneous drift—evokes the psychological notion of the “tulpa”: a self-created thoughtform that attains independent presence. Here, every vocal contour seems to oscillate between agency and dissolution, suggesting that identity itself may be an act of continuous invention.
The album’s sensibility resonates with the spirit of avant-garde predecessors from Joan La Barbara to Holly Herndon, yet Lee’s practice remains defiantly singular. She treats amplification as an extension of the body, not merely as effect. What results is less a collection of songs than a living ecology of sound—dense, porous, and resolutely alive. Through Tulpa and the founding of her new label Kou, Lee builds an ecosystem where radical sound practice meets community, collaboration, and deep craft. It is both an assertion and an invitation: a reminder that the voice, in all its fragile multiplicity, remains one of music’s most boundless instruments.
