Yu Su, Francis Inferno Orchestra: YUF-O - You Eff Ohh

- Yu Su and Francis Inferno Orchestra bring so much together that calling their collaboration a melting pot is kinda low-balling it. It’s a YUF-O, that’s You Eff Ohh, a strange and otherworldly artefact that has arrived to show us all what electronic music can be.

I like how this EP came together: two itinerant producers -Yu Su, a Chinese Canadian and Francis Inferno Orchestra, an Australian- met on a hot day in LA in 2019, waiting to see if their visas would come through. Even pre-Covid, entry into America was a bit of a nightmare and, to fight the heat and the stress, the pair spent a couple of days making some breezy music.

The pair have a lot in common when it comes to beat-making, at least at a meta level. They have eclectic sensibilites stuffed with diverse styles and sounds and in both cases they're influenced by an experience of place. Yu Su grew up in the city of Kaifeng in Henan province in China, but moved to Vancouver in her late teens, where she started making left-field electronic music, a skill-set she brought back to her homeland, discovering and drawing influence in turn from a broad and welcoming rave scene; contemporarily you’ll hear all sorts of things from both Eastern and Western musical traditions, constantly transforming each and every track she puts together. Francis Inferno Orchestra started in slomo disco house in Melbourne, but got bored with the sterility of the scene. He diversified into techno and as he moved around the world to Berlin and London, discovering how liberating it could be, no longer confined to a scene, he added ever more styles to his playbook. The dance world doesn’t always reward experimentation and it’s to FIO’s credit that he’s managed to amass a really sizable following doing … just what he feels like.

Coming together, it’s like Yu and Francis have emboldened each other even further in their eclecticism. These four cuts jump about all over the place, through multiple styles in any given track. To the point where it could be overly precocious. There’s a great quote from FIO: “I love Theo Parrish and Floating Points—they can go in the strangest direction and people will still love it. But if you try and do that in Melbourne, everyone's just like 'What the **** is this?' and goes home.” Well, what will the Melbournites make of YUF-O, I wonder?

Do You Ever D.R.E.A.M. Of Flying meanders off the starting block with samples of birdsong and wind chimes over lilting, ambient synths and a laidback welcome vocal, lazily reiterating “hello!” at random intervals. Tuned percussion and loping bass melt into strange electronic chirps, before a guitar riff upends things with gentle insistence. It’s almost like a happily stoned channel-surf before the pair find something they’re really into. They find that in Rebuild, Recharge: a fully integrated meld of dub-techno and ambience and it’s a head-trip that music which bottles along at a teeth-rattling pace can, at the same time, be so relaxing. You know, it’s not like we haven’t heard this sort of fusion before, but R&R sets a benchmark, makes you wonder if they were really doing it right in the past.

S.O-S.A pulls the pace back but amps the power with a thumping electro, mutilating spoken word vocals to industrial effect before deploying some of the same scalic pitch shifting on the beats that we heard in the previous track. Different synth melodies get tried on before we hit the deeply satisfying main game, about three minutes in. Yu Su and FIO are more than happy to ride that final form to the end of the track, squirting strange industrial sounds in as they go. To finish Yu and Francis decide to prove again that breakneck pace can still be as chill AF, dusting a speeding garage / techno hybrid with more of those cool and sugary ambient synths. It’s a scintillating dash to the finish line.

Will YUF-O have Melbournites staying home for the night, or be a surprise hit in Chinese underground rave? I can say that we have more filthy hot days in Brisbane than LA does and it can make a night at the discotheque a bit of an ask. For me though, the shared vision of Yu Su and Francis Inferno Orchestra is revitalising and, hell yes it makes me feel like dancing.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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