Bonus Post

A deeper dive into the work of W. Y. Huang

I’m jumping into your inbox for a second time this month with a surprise update. Last month, in my coverage of W. Y. Huang’s EP Knots, I hinted at an opportunity I had to interview the rock-turned-electronic-turned-folk artist. That interview was for a Bandcamp Daily article on Huang’s multifaceted musical career, and it was just published earlier this month. I encourage you to give it a read. There’s so much more to Huang’s story than I was able to fit into the No Chambers feature, and this piece in Bandcamp is my second chance to do it justice. 

I open the article by saying that Huang has been thinking about grace, but it’s hard to listen to Knots and not also think about pain. A band I like once described their own artistic project as an effort to “alchemize pain into light.” The line stuck with me, as I imagine it might with anyone who’s ever encountered pain and aspired to create something beautiful. The refashioning of suffering into beauty is an old idea, and one that can easily be mistaken as optimistic. It isn’t, except in the looser sense of optimism as a tool for survival. There’s no bright side to look to when everything around you is equally dark. In those moments, the only way forward is to forge your own light.

There can, of course, be great art without pain, and plenty of pain that begets terrible art. But when an artist succeeds in transmuting misfortune into something higher, it taps into a legacy that other great art doesn’t. It becomes not just beautiful but vital, an extension of the same instinct that created myth and religion and the other conceptual weaponry assembled to push back against a world that can be deadly in its indifference. Sad songs move us more than others not because they are uniquely beautiful, but because they repurpose beauty as a reclamation of life.

This is actually not far from Huang’s perspective on grace. I spend some time in the article exploring that perspective, as well as the particular experiences that informed his latest EP. This context is helpful but, frankly, not entirely necessary. Pathos tends to feel familiar regardless of what path an artist took to reach it. Even if listeners don’t know the exact moments that Knots is built from, they can hear echoes of their own movements in the crests and valleys that Huang crossed to collect them. The Bandcamp article sheds light on these moments, but it’s only a complementary glow. Huang has already alchemized more than enough himself.

Photo Credit: Zach Prebeck