Easily among our favorite records of the year - issued by Cortizona and STUK - Pak Yan Lau's latest, ‘Bakunawa’, is a truly stunning thing to behold. A continuation of her long-standing Book of Toy project, expanded for the first time to incorporate the contributions of a five-piece ensemble, it's a sprawling expanse of deep harmonics and percussive rhythms that channel the magical and poetic into the realms of experimental music, deftly nodding to minimalism and gamelan music, while existing in its own singular world.

First emerging within the Belgian experimental underground during the early 2010s, over the last few years Pak Yan Lau has delivered a number of incredible solo and duo efforts that have placed her at the center of our consciousness.

Pak Yan Lau is a Brussels based sound artist, improviser, musician, and composer, who first appeared within projects like Going - a quartette with Giovanni Di Domenico, João Lobo, and Mathieu Calleja, Eggstream - a trio with Di Domenico and Norberto Lobo, and the large-scale ensemble Dream & Drone Orchestra. Over the last decade, she has developed her own singular sonic universe, blending acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic approaches and working both as a vocalist, as well as with prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics and various sound objects across a number of solo efforts, in addition to live and recorded collaborations with Chris Corsano, Akira Sakata, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Tetuzi Akiyama, Rie Nakajima, Toshimaru Nakamura, Susana Santos Silva, Lionel Malric, Darin Gray, and numerous others.

Bakunawa is a continuation of Pak Yan Lau’s solo project Book of Toy - first issued by Silent Water within the triple 10” release, Solo Books, in 2015 - an effort within which she built upon the natural overtones of toy pianos and pendules. Bakunawa takes this already dynamic sonic palette one step further as work for a five-piece ensemble, featuring Lau on gong bars, toy pianos, metal objects, and electronics; Giovanni Di Domenico, João Lobo, and Mathieu Calleja on gong bars, toy pianos, and metal objects; and Vera Cavallin on harp, gong bars, toy pianos, metal objects, as well as further electronics / sound interventions by Christophe Albertijn.

With the album’s title as a conceptual clue - Bakunawa is a serpent-like dragon from the Philippines, who eats moons, an act that is prevented by playing on pots and pans to scare her away, while instruments are used to lull her to sleep - as the work slowly evolves across the LP’s two sides, it emerges as a staggeringly beautiful intertwining of the magical and poetic within the realm of experimental sound. Dissonances dance with harmonics as the ensemble generates resonant, sustained overtone ambiences with the gong rods, prepared harp, and metal tubes, before giving way to a hypnotic rethinking of ritual ceremony music, as the distorted toy pianos and percussion played by the ensemble issue rhythms and patterns that simultaneously nod to minimalism and gamelan music.