Flora Yin Wong: The Forbidden Loop

The multi-disciplinary artist found inspiration in a dangerous gymnastics move

At the 1972 Summer Olympics, a 17-year old gymnast named Olga Korbut performed a spectacular maneuver at the uneven bars.

After a few swings, she stood up on the higher bar, launched into a backflip, grabbed the bar again and continued into a swing.

The “Korbut Flip” – sometimes referred to as a “deadloop” – was repeated by fellow Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina at the Gymnastics World Cup in 1977, adding another twist to the acrobatic move.

It was later banned from international competitions due to a high risk of severe injury, but it inspired the experimental artist Flora Yin Wong on her recent tape Dead Loop: The A-side is dedicated to Korbut’s legendary 1972 performance, while the B-side refers to Mukhina’s even more difficult 1977 iteration.

In this two-part piece, Wong bows and plucks an Eastern Mediterranean string lute – the Kemençe –, processing its sounds through a guitar pedal and GRM tools. The droning tension of the music mirrors the athletic movements of the bold women gymnasts.

Wong’s artistic journey started in the mid-2010s, but she really made heads turn with her 2020 debut album Holy Palm. With its isolationist soundscapes and ritualistic undertone, this slab of dark post-ambient perfectly captured the claustrophobic vibe of the pandemic.

Her music often combines field recordings and manipulated sounds of traditional instruments; she has explored multi-channel composition and spatial sound, written a book about faith and superstition (Liturgy, 2021), released records on forward-thinking labels PAN and Modern Love and launched her own independent publishing house, Doyenne.

“Dead Loop continues Wong’s work channeling historical narrative and personal resonance into sound”, the press blurb states. I felt inclined to dive a little deeper, and luckily, the London-based multi-disciplinary artist, DJ, writer and curator agreed to an interview.

photo: Genevieve Lutkin

Flora, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

It might be a false memory, but I feel like I have memories from before birth, being in the womb. It could be something that I dreamt about as a baby. Sonically, there is what you would imagine that sound to be like – a subby, heavy atmosphere. Maybe that's why I'm very drawn to subby, deep sounds. I find them quite comforting.

What kind of music did your family play at home?

I grew up with my mom, a Cantonese opera singer. She’s an incredible singer, really wide octave range. But she only listened to Cantonese opera, which I hated – and I still hate it. It's extremely dissonant, very high-pitched singing, to Western standards very atonal sounding. Even though I grew up with it, it's not something that feels good to the ear for me. But there are a lot of percussive elements to it, like gongs and cymbals and brass and traditional strings, and when they're more abstracted, I can appreciate those a little bit more now.

My dad, when I did see him, listened to The Beatles. My older brother listened to The Prodigy, and my sister, who was in and out of my life again at that time, was more into hip-hop. She would play DMX and stuff when I was a kid.

Your mother is Chinese, your father is from Malaysia, and you grew up in London. Is that right?

Yeah, I was born and raised in London with my siblings.

Could you describe the environment you grew up in?

I grew up on a council estate in Camden, quite a scary block. I went to this bad school – kids were carrying knives and getting into fights, quite an aggressive place. My childhood was a particularly difficult time. Around the ages of maybe nine to 14 was when I got the most creepy encounters with men who would approach me… you know, I’d be in school uniform, and they would do or say inappropriate things. It was daily. When I moved to a different school in Chelsea, my lifestyle, my friendships, my interests and a lot of things around me changed. It’s a more posh area, and I felt a lot safer there.

Did you get any kind of musical training as a kid?

I played the violin for several years, but I didn't get to very high grades. I felt very pressured, and I liked it more in a communal sense. I was in a quartet, and I found that a lot more fun than going for weekly lessons. I felt very shy in front of my teacher. We would have a lot of tests, and I just found it a very stressful experience, so I quit violin when I was 15. I also played clarinet and saxophone briefly, and then just self-taught guitar, but I've not had any official training, and I wasn’t good at it.

Growing up in inner city London, I’m assuming you were a club kid and going out a lot in your teens?

I was more into indie bands at the time, so I was going to gigs when I was still underage. I recently found a gig ticket from the ICA. That’s so weird that I was at the ICA when I was 15, and I still go there. I started getting more into electronic music maybe around 18, 19, and we would start going to clubs. There were quite a lot in Soho at the time.

You started your professional career as a music journalist, right?

Yeah, so I was studying law at university. I felt like I had to go that path for career security. But at the same time, I was running a club night and writing a music blog, and then some bigger blogs asked me to write for them. A lot of those people are still around now, and they're musicians as well, like Martti and Ville, who are now Amnesia Scanner – they were writing for this blog Curb Crawlers, and I remember writing for them.

Then when I graduated, I was looking for an internship. I really loved writing and wanted to pursue that more, so I was thinking about going to journalism courses. There was someone on this blog network called Tony Poland, who used to write a blog called Slutty Fringe – terrible name – and he was like, “Oh, I have a friend at [lifestyle magazine] Dazed. You should reach out.” So I went in for two weeks and stayed for four years.

Back then, were you already making music as well?

No, not at all. When I was at university, my boyfriend at the time, who I ran this club night with, was a really good producer. I was trying to learn from watching him use Ableton, but I found it very difficult to access. There was always a fear that kept me back from generating sounds and recording live instruments. So I just stuck to DJing. That was something I understood and felt more comfortable with, because it was other people's music. Shyness really held me back a lot when I was younger. At that time, I was doing a lot of music-adjacent things, but I couldn't make it. It took me many years after that before I started.

So what happened in between then and the release of your debut album Holy Palm in 2020?

Actually, before I made that record, I was making club music. That was more what I was into at the time. It's not good though. (laughs) I made this one EP for PTP in New York.

Purple Tape Pedigree? Geng’s hip-hop/noise label?

Yeah, that was kind of accidental as well. I was working for PAN in Berlin, and Bill [Kouligas, the label’s founder and curator] was very encouraging to share my music. He made me feel like I should be less precious about it. So I just put a track up on SoundCloud, because I was gonna start sending it privately to a couple of people to get feedback. Then I put it on public by accident, and I didn't think anyone was following me so anyone would see, but Geng actually saw it, and he was like, “Oh, would you want to release this?” So I made an EP around that track, and I started snowballing from there a bit. Once I got something out, I realized that you can just do that and it's okay. You don't have to stress over every single detail. You'll never do anything then.

Wait, how did you end up working for PAN in the first place?

After working at Dazed, I moved to Hong Kong for a year and a half because I wanted a change of scenery. I was not having a great time in London, and I wanted to try a completely different life basically. I worked in a very corporate place, doing music direction for a luxury hotel chain. Because I've come from a very precarious working class background, I kept thinking that once I have a solid financial safety net, then all my problems will be fixed. Obviously it wasn't like that. It was the most that I'd earned in my life, and it was soul-destroying. I felt even more lost and unfulfilled.

So I moved to Berlin to work for PAN, which was the complete opposite – a very experimental, small label. I knew Bill from my Dazed time, and he was looking for someone to join the company. It was all very serendipitous. I stayed in Berlin on and off for a few years.

Field recordings were quite central to the sound of Holy Palm. How did that record come together?

I was always recording sounds around me, just out of curiosity and for memories sake. It's like taking videos or photos, it wasn't for the purpose of a record. Then I was commissioned by Somerset House in London to work on a sound piece for a new gallery that was opening, and the themes were around memory and radio.

I was thinking about this time that I went to the Arctic for Dazed, to this completely abandoned town that used to be a Russian settlement. Apparently they had found radio signals coming from there, even though there was nothing, nobody lived there. I liked this backstory of these mystery ghost signals. It's like how some people believe that energy might live on in certain places where things have happened, so I wanted to connect to that, ask what formed that, and apply that to this idea of the field recordings.

You’ve been traveling quite a lot, haven’t you?

Yeah, for the last few years, I was mostly touring, and I don't really embark on tours the way that big artists do, where they have 20 shows in the country, day after day. I'm not on that scale, so when I go to further flung places, I prefer to stay there for a bit, so that I can immerse myself more.

At the beginning of this year, I spent a month and a half in Japan. I was going to specific rural places to get certain research done for a book I’m working on. I'm very privileged to be able to do that. It's been a big part of my life since I was young. I was on planes when I was four years old, going to Hong Kong as a kid by myself at times. I’ve been used to moving around, and if I feel confined, then I start to get antsy.

Did you go to your parents’ home countries frequently throughout your childhood and youth?

I was going back and forth from Hong Kong a lot, because my mom wanted me to be able to keep my Hong Kong identity. I think you can apply to be a national if you spend time there, but you have to keep that regularly. If you stop going, you lose your citizenship. So I don't have a Hong Kong passport, but I have an ID card, which means I can live and work there, because I went every year as a kid. There was a time when my parents left me there for a little bit to acclimatize or something.

But Malaysia, I didn't go as much because my dad didn't really go that much. I've only been there a few times, and I really like it there, but it feels wildly different to the UK or to Hong Kong as well.

Do you still DJ a lot?

Not as much anymore. Now I tend to get booked for live shows. I've been seeing this shift – before I was on a lot more clubby line-ups, and now I'm drifting further and further away from that.

Your music has been drifting away from the club too.

I guess. My tastes veer a lot. I wouldn’t say I listen to more experimental music now. I still listen to a lot of club music, but people don't perceive me in that way, so I just don't get those bookings.

In the last few years, you did a bunch of artist residencies, mostly in the field of avant-garde music and electro-acoustic composition.

Yeah, I started doing these spatial sound residencies. I did one at GRM in Paris and one at EMS in Stockholm, which were both really amazing experiences. I like working with multi-channel and spatial design. I find that very stimulating in a creative sense. I guess that's ended up helping me build how I make music as well.

Your newest work Dead Loop is a 17-minute piece in two parts for tape. Tell me about making it.

I really like tapes, and I do collect them, but I hadn't made a record specifically for that format before. A lot of my work is extremely layered, and I like to put a lot of details and nuances in there, because I like to play with the ear in that sense. This one felt more stripped back, and I thought maybe this exists enough as itself, just by itself. It allowed me to do that.

This was recorded in a terrible way really. I just put a mic into my guitar pedal, and the pedal into an amp, and then I recorded that out into my laptop. It gives it this other layer of distortion and this rudimentary-ness that feels very DIY. And it is, because I literally don't know what I'm doing. (laughs) Most of the record is just sounds from a looping function on this multi-effects pedal and the Kemençe, this Turkish string instrument that I've been using a bunch for the live shows. It was nice to explore that in a longer form.

How did you get in touch with that instrument?

It was a gift from a friend a long time ago. I always liked weird folk instruments, but recently, I've been playing more with other strings. Just last month in Kyoto, I picked up a Vietnamese mouth harp, and it's extremely long, a very basic-looking plank of wood with four strings. You're supposed to play it on your cheek as the resonance box. I actually dislike the sound of that harp, but I connected it to these GRM tools, which just make everything sound amazing, just really out of this world. Obviously I could just get a violin, but it's always more interesting when you look at something and you're not really sure how it functions, and then you just discover it.

Do you feel drawn to string instruments because you initially played the violin?

I guess so. There must be a reason why I picked the violin as a kid, because I do like the sound of a piano but I'm actually quite adverse to brass and wind instruments. I remember reading a quote from [avant-garde composer Iannis] Xenakis, who said he thinks that the flute sounds silly. No offense if you're a flute fan, but it doesn't resonate with me the same way as when I hear strings – they literally bring me to tears.

The titles on Dead Loop relate to the years when the infamous gymnastic move, the Korbut Flip, was performed for the first and last time at an international competition. What fascinated you about it?

For the record, I don't know anything about gymnastics. I'm not a gymnast, not even a sports fan. I was just thinking about this idea of the “forbidden loop”. So I go on a lot of these Wikipedia holes, and there was one page listing different kinds of loops. It's weird when the internet collects things that connect to each other in this fairly loose, abstract sense. So this came up, something that was very dangerous and potentially lethal, performed by these bold and confident women.

I just thought that was a really interesting play on this idea of the loop, also because there's two sides to the tape, and these two years and are almost like different iterations. The maneuver was banned for safety reasons, but these limitations feel very arbitrary, so performing it feels almost like an act of defiance, at least one of extreme cockiness. There have been gymnasts who have done it since – they know that they're going to lose the point, so they're not even going to qualify, but they're still going to show off. They're like, “Well, I can do this anyway.”

If you watch original footage of the first Korbut flip in 1972, one commenter asks: “Has this ever been done by a girl?” And his colleague answers: “Never, not by any human that I know of.”

Exactly. It's also something that happens in such a short timeframe, it's literally seconds, and it obviously completely changed these people's lives, which can apply to a lot of things. We probably take those moments in life for granted. A lot of things that we do in daily life can feel quite inconsequential, or you can't really see the decisions that you make. With these moments, it's really make or break, literally in an instant, and you cannot reverse this. I thought this idea of permanence and the linearity of time which is shown in these moments was really interesting.

Did you have the videos of Korbut and Mikhina in mind when playing and recording the Kemençe parts?

No, it wasn't that literal in terms of the musicality of it. It was more in my body, the feeling of this connection, of the tension, because the strings are very tense. When you’re playing string instruments, there's that tightness and you feel like if you go too far, if you play too hard, if you just pull the peg a little bit too much, it will break. That was the connection in my head with this idea of the flips – that it’s kind of a delicate balance.

For the last two years, you’ve also been running your own label and publishing house Doyenne. What’s the vision behind it?

The way that people end up running labels is often that they want to support their friends, their music and their projects. I just wanted to have a platform because I know a lot of artists who will have several mediums that they wish to work in. I like to have different outlets for myself, so I wanted to provide that for other people I've encountered and felt inspired by as well.

I really wanted Doyenne to be as open format as possible. The fourth release by Vesta Payne was these melted pewter objects which are used as a method of divination in certain cultures. Sarah and Tom [of Vesta Payne] melted the pewter into water, recorded the sounds of that process and made an EP from that, but we also sold those objects. There's no function to them – they're not jewelry, they're not proper sculptures, they're just things, artifacts.

I also wanted it to be very communal. I got quite into this idea of the Buddhist sangha community, and having this on a global scale. I don't it want to be too London-centric, because London is already very saturated with platforms and activity, which is great, but there's so many other places that don't get that kind of support.

As you mentioned the idea of the sangha, are you looking for it to become some sort of spiritual community too?

In contrast to the general vibe I’m giving, I’m actually an atheist. I don’t like subscribing to organized religions, but there are parts of religions that do really interest me in the way that they can connect people, or tap into something unseen. I guess I feel more spiritual than religious in essence.

I was reading this book [by feminist writer Sophie Lewis] called Abolish the Family. It’s looking at alternatives to the nuclear family, different systems of support that are not blood family, which can often be limiting and abusive. Those are supposed to be the most safe spaces, but in reality, often family isn't. So it’s this idea of your found or chosen family, and about building those connections with people that you meet as an adult.

Maybe it's a bit idealistic, but I'd like to have a space where I can do that. I've had encounters with a lot of mental illness and just different experiences in life that I feel like there needs to be more support for people, especially artists. So many artists are living on certain fringes, and they have to work in their own ways to survive. I'm trying to navigate that as well.

Flora Yin Wong’s Dead Loop is out now on Paralaxe Editions.