London-born, Berlin-based producer Flora Yin-Wong aka || FLORA has today shared a full stream of her City God mixtape, featuring seven original tracks that range from ambient to club-attuned. The work arrives on PTP fka Purple Tape Pedigree‘s CELL Audio Codex series, which focuses on exploring how dominant systems of power operate through surveillance and healthcare systems.
Yin-Wong’s release is named after a tutelary deity in Chinese folk religion, and finds the producer using samples to explore intergenerational relationships, diasporic identity, and sound-as-lineage. She gave THUMP some background for the release via email, beginning with a broader definition of a City God:
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“‘A City God is believed to protect the people and affairs of the particular town or city of great dimension, and its corresponding afterlife location,” she wrote. “Originating over 2000 years ago, a City God was originally the name of a deity or type of deity believed to be able to provide divine protection to a city’s physical defences.’”
“The idea behind the mixtape was to focus around this theme of the ‘CELL’, using sounds or influences that might unconsciously resonate with me,” she added. “Having been born in central London to immigrant parents from different major cities, I’ve always felt entirely disconnected and ignorant to the language and culture of my familial links. It’s interesting now as I’ve grown to feel more accepting and in-tune with my bloodlines and partially aimed to portray that, for example, samples across the release have come from chanting monks in temples recorded during my trip to east Asia, to old Canto-pop songs, and my own vocal snippets.”
The mixtape is out today, and is available for purchase on PTP’s Bandcamp page.
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