Big tip! Laptop electronics pioneer Ikue Mori joins forces with vocalist Charmaine Lee for their highly anticipated debut release, Elevator Music, on Lee’s newly launched Kou Records. This 7” record marks the first official recording from the duo, whose collaboration began in 2019, and showcases their extraordinary blend of laptop electronics, modular synthesis, and the voice.
Elevator Music captures the duo’s omnivorous imagination, merging Lee’s unique vocal techniques with Mori’s ever-evolving electronic landscapes. On “Royal Flush,” Lee’s idiosyncratic vocalizations and Carollian-inspired lyrics (“the Mad Cat and Prickly Duchess”) lock tightly inside Mori’s vortex of granularized textures and explosive sounds. “Legacy (Rifted)” takes inspiration from Ozu’s dramatic scenes of torrential rain in Floating Weeds, while “Three Shades and a Lime” highlights Lee’s use of cassette tape players and feedback to stochastically slice through Mori’s dense, textured pads. Elevator Music stands as a bold artistic statement from two intergenerational outliers, each pushing the limits of their craft and setting new standards in the contemporary avant-garde scene. Accompanying the track “Royal Flush” is a special commissioned video by Chilean artist Aníbal Bley. The digital release also includes a bonus remix of “Three Shades and a Lime” by jondownload.
Ikue Mori was born in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to New York in the late 1970s. Her additional recordings include Painted Desert (1997), One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (2000), In Light of Shadows (2015), Highsmith (2017), and Archipelago X (2021). She has composed soundtracks for filmmakers, received numerous commissions, and led workshops at institutions such as the New School, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, the New Music Conservatory at Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Gothenburg. Mori performs in venues such as Roulette, The Stone, and Park Avenue Armory in New York City and at international festivals.
Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is an Australian vocalist based in New York. Using the voice, feedback, and live processing, Lee's practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation. She has been recognized as “extraordinary” by New Yorker and has been featured in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wire Magazine. As a composer, Lee has been commissioned by leading institutions including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and HBO Max. Lee is an Emergent Ventures winner (2024) and was a Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021) and an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019). Her long-standing collaborators include Conrad Tao and Ikue Mori (MacArthur Fellow). Lee also runs a record label & distribution platform, Kou Records, dedicated to pioneering artists in music & sound.
