What To Make Of These Mortal Hands – her first solo album since 2019, following collaborations with The Bug and The Body – expresses itself vehemently as a confrontation between humanity’s capacity for beauty and destruction. It's seemingly constructed to document collapse, but tries to find tenderness within the wreckage.
From the opening notes and subsonic frequencies of “Arrival” and the rapped dream preachings of South London's Eldon Somers (aka The wind between) who features on “The Account”, there’s an immediate sense of apprehension, lending the album a theatrical dimension, framing its explorations of cruelty and self-deception.
Plucked strings and mechanical clatter blend into industrial electronics on “Psaltery” further establishing the album’s peculiar grammar. It's like listening to an ancient ritual conducted inside a malfunctioning machine; Chen’s voice hovers at the edge of audibility throughout, right before pounding rhythms and distorted shrieks rupture the mood.
What follows is a cinematic work of extremes, from tender and terrifying, switching up from track to track. “Vorago” is a descent into the depths accompanied by groaning strings, boiling into enormous, molten waves. “Ginko’s Way” showcases Chen’s vocals – perhaps her greatest instrument – with fragile choral harmonies that lend her singing an almost devotional beauty.
Meanwhile “Mystic One” distills the white noise down to a solitary vocal performance and distant piano. Neither song feels far away from the album’s darkness; indeed their exposed vulnerability makes the surrounding brutality almost more painful.
The curated tensions reach a breaking point on “The Snake You Built”. With Lee Buford of The Body on drums and Liam Andrews of BIG|BRAVE on bass, Chen unleashes an incredibly dense collision of percussion, strings, and vocal distortion, providing a cathartic and emotional release.
On “The Stone Awakens”, guest vocalist LUηG joins her in a confrontation of harsh screams, their two voices working as antagonists and survivors of the same catastrophe. Chen's careful production makes all of these ideas tangible: heavy bass presses against the listener, traces of power electronics twitch and dissolve, and moments of stillness feel precarious and uncomfortable.
Searching through the aftermath “I’ll See You In The Burning Sun” seeks something worth salvaging from all the dramatic exhaustion. Hope is there, without sentimentality, in closing tracks “A Hundred Hands” and “Komorebi For Ele”, and it’s hard-won because What To Make Of These Mortal Hands is oppressive by design, but its extremity has purpose. Devastation coexists with beauty, surviving alongside each other.
This collection of experimental pieces may at times feel frightening in its scale, but it’s also reassuringly compassionate in its refusal to surrender.