Sook-Yin Lee has lived multiple lives as a musician, stage and screen actor, and broadcast journalist over the past four decades. Call her a maverick, a towering creative force, but even with such an expansive repertoire, don’t call her boundless. The space within material and abstract constraints is her playground. It’s where she flourishes. But as much as existing in that space is play, it’s equal parts work. Specifically, it’s field work, a process of exploration driven by the Vancouver-born Toronto artist’s insatiable curiosity.

Today, Lee releases her latest solo album, 72RHR, via Hand Drawn Dracula. The title refers to the human body’s resting heart rate, 72 beats per minute, but the 10-song suite inspires more than relaxation and contentedness. Her protagonists gaze inwards as they wrestle against societal expectations and the pit of pedestrian routine. Lee plays with time signatures, conjuring music that sounds precarious. Listening to each song feels like navigating a maze filled with abrupt cul de sacs and secret trapdoors along unstable footpaths, if there are any cleared paths at all.

In using antiquated technology such as flip phones and stripping their clunky video recordings of their distressed audio, Lee captures a portrait of the real breathing world, then further contorts and filters it through her unique perspective. But like Lee’s broader artistic practice, 72RHR is a collaboration. The photo work that appears as the album’s cover art comes courtesy of Dylan Gamble, the keyboardist in psych rock outfit Hot Garbage and her creative partner in improvisational noise art project Lee & Gamble Unlimited. More indelibly, 72RHR carries the spirit of her late life partner, Adam Litvotz. The duo released their debut self-titled album as JOOJ in 2015. (Under the same moniker, Lee followed up with the posthumous sophomore, jooj 2.) In the way that Lee and Litovitz cultivated a garden of serenity as JOOJ in their home studio, working at an unhurried pace, guided only by their whims, she continues to seek and discover crevices of calm on 72RHR.

These centred, soothing moments ballast an album that reflects Lee’s unease about the world’s accelerating collapse. Dubby beats, chiming guitars, clubfooted percussion, gnarled, hypnotizing vocal incantations, and electronics that buzz, saw, and zip like clatter emitting from the bowels of a light manufacturing plant collide in an interzone of menace and meditation.

Northern Transmissions spoke with Lee about discovering whole worlds within constrained environments, the generative potential of walls, art-making as antidote to merely intellectualizing emotions, and the existence of overlapping dimensions.

Northern Transmissions: One thing that struck me right away about 72RHR was its bold and unified visual aesthetic. What can you tell me about the album art?

Sook-Yin Lee: The album art is photographs by Dylan. He’s been developing this thing he calls “rendering” where he really bends the colour bars and changes the dynamic of every pixel. And then James Mejia from Hand Drawn Dracula (No Joy, Young Guv) is a really brilliant graphic designer. He put them altogether and did this layout and the graphic design of the album cover.

NT: One thing I felt when I looked at those images, and just hearing the way you described them, is that there’s a consistent tension between discord and harmony throughout the album. I think of how those colour bands overlap and how at first, they create a jarring effect, but ultimately, they work together as a harmonic whole. I don’t know if that was something you intended or if that was something you sense when you consider the music and the visuals altogether.

SL: Not really. I love the idea of trying to come up with songs all at the same tempo and the tempo being your heartbeat in your machinery, your body. When it’s at rest, the engine is going at 72 beats per minute. That’s the optimum space of relaxation.

It has to do with meditation as well. As a person who’s meditated and been through, like everyone, intensity in life, I know that meditation isn’t just a blissful, easy thing. It’s sometimes extremely challenging.

A lot of my work in music in the last decade has been a melding of technology and organic matter. [On 72RHR], I’m utilizing very strange and interesting sources. I will sometimes purposely take an obsolete cell phone with a really weird recording or video capture, then strip the audio from the video and loop and change and distort and bend it. This is like my broadcast journalism in radio, going around and finding sounds in the world. I would record them on a rudimentary apparatus and then interface them with a very current apparatus. All of these things are in the experiential world of living. It’s blissful and difficult and confusing and mysterious and joyful and scary and horrifying. All these things are coming to a head, especially at this point in time with how the world is spiraling with all of our technologies and wars.

NT: There’s a lot to be said for re-purposing old technologies. Everything now is being built in such a way that’s malicious. Or with streaming platforms and clouds, we’re all at the whim of the proprietors of the technology. The way you described some of the sounds that you’re stripping puts me in mind of something similar you’ve done in the past. I recall seeing you play this PVC pipe live that was filtered through electronic modules. And you played that ancient vibrator at the Slash Need show. Is that in the vein of the practice you’re talking about now?

SL: Yeah, it’s all there. I also love to manually go out there and gather and incorporate. Even when you say the word “malicious”—I love that word. “Malicious software.” We are all familiar with that. But why not take some of that malicious software and play with what that possibly is? To me, that’s meditation.

NT: To disarm it in a way.

SL: Or observe it. I did this 11-day silent meditation retreat. I’d never meditated before. I had had a mental breakdown. It was very difficult, having to sit for four hours at a time. Everyone was sitting around fine, and I was like, “Ow! This hurts!” It was unbearable. I was gonna have to leave. I was like, “How do you do it?” I am screaming my head off inside.

I said to myself, “Okay, observe this.” I remember taking an axe and cutting my feelings of attachment to it, and then I could go, “Oh, this intense pain in your back from sitting for so long is actually a knot. It’s your muscles.” I turned my attention to the actual phenomenon rather than the [pain]. It was really quite striking to understand that if I just observed it and looked at all the parameters of that pain and then don’t stay there but scan the rest of my body, that pain’s gone. But then of course, new pain manifests somewhere else in your body.

I’m interested in quantum physics. I think there are multitudinal realities, so I wanted to capture the idea [on 72RHR] that the resting heart rate sounds very blissful but is very challenging. It can go to very difficult places. Sometimes the sounds are very discordant. Sometimes they’re very beautiful. But hopefully I can offer an experience that you can surrender to.

NT: What you’re describing sounds like what I do sometimes when I feel distressed, which is sit with the distress and the tension, feel the feelings, be aware that this is happening, and try to move on from there. When I think of the initial reaction that you describe, when you’re suddenly aware and you’re panicked, when you react like that, it’s almost like control is the goal. You want to control those feelings and shut them down. But if you’re able to just accept that they’re happening, you relinquish control because you accept that there’s nothing you can really do about it right now.

SL: It’s very good to practice non-reactivity. Otherwise, you can get really sucked into challenging situations. These are tools to help us survive.

At the same time, when terrible things happen, I do end up feeling intensely emotional. Half of my family goes cold, and half of my family is hot, and I’m part of the hot family. The people who are hot in my family are missing the enzyme, so I get drunk really fast. I go red-faced. The ones who are alcohol-intolerant and go red are very fiery.

NT: They feel intensely, and they feel quickly.

SL: Yes. I’m reminded of making Short Bus with John Cameron Mitchell. My character was very, very confused, very messed up, and there’s a scene where she breaks down very publicly. I’m not good at acting. I usually have to feel it to have an authentic performance. John knows me well, and he took me aside and was like, “Do you remember that time a couple of years back, when you had the breakdown? I need you to go there.” So I did this scene, and as soon as I heard the word “cut,” I was gone from there.

Even though I could remember that time a few years previous in my life when it was hard, in the context of making art, I can use it as a kind of colour and not be destroyed like I was in real life. It was the different circumstance that pulls me out. In the action of art-making, I went there, I did what I had to do, I nailed the scene, and I supported the story, but I wasn’t there anymore.

NT: That switching sounded like it must have been quite the breakthrough for realizing your own capacity.

SL: It was very interesting to physically experience. Let’s face it. You can have therapy until the cats come home. I can intellectually talk about my situation. That’s one thing. But I found that I was so good about analyzing myself that I wasn’t doing the work. There was no action. It was all theoretical. I’m glad that I’m part of the red-faced Lee group, because if I was repressed, my guts would be fucked. I’d have ulcers. I’d have cancer. Art has been very helpful to navigate these high emotions and observe them like a scientist and see what they’re made of and also to have a relationship with them but also not let them play me.

NT: One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the concept that there is a difference between intellectualizing your emotions versus actually processing them. It’s what you’re talking about: thinking about them without actually doing anything about them. You can always have a plan for how you think you would react in a situation, but until you find
yourself in it, you’re not really putting yourself to the test. You could freeze in the moment. No matter how well you plan something, you really don’t know until it’s go time.

SL: Yeah, it’s true. Then you can really learn.

NT: I want to ask you about some specific songs on the album or some of the themes that I picked up. To me, there’s a theme of restriction, like the title of “Unlock the Pain” and “I Want to Tell You” alone. On “Locked Boy,” there’s a feeling of being unable to express yourself. And then on “Travelogue without Moving,” in a physical sense, broken bones are slowing down the narrator. On “Monkey Mind,” there’s the idea of leashing a dog so it doesn’t run away, or going through the motions of this professional life and being bound by all the promises of luxury. Restriction in all these different sense—was that something that just kind of materialized naturally as you were writing these songs?

SL: That feeling of being unable to express how you feel is very challenging. It’s one that many people feel. There’s the idea of parameters even just in the choice of having all the songs [on the album] restricted to a particular conceptual constraint. “Travelogue without Moving” was based on a period when I was housebound because I had broken two leg bones and had to really figure out how to expand the space of my house, how to move in the world with constraints. I love the idea that there’s an expansive universe in your space. Within a limitation, there’s expansiveness.

In our culture, it’s a contemporary phenomenon where we’re always like, “Break down the walls around you!” or, “Build a wall! We’re building a wall to keep the immigrants out!” Walls are a really potent symbol. Oftentimes we look at it as a binary. I don’t think it’s a binary. I really love Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.” He says, “Good fences make good neighbours,” so there’s a deeper level to his poem that I think is acknowledging the possibility of walls both good and bad.

We’re oftentimes talking about the need to express our boundaries. It’s a healthy ideal. Those boundaries are a kind of wall. Especially right now in the political realm of where we are in the world, the wall is very politicized and contentious. It has a lot of tensions. To me, there’s incredible possibilities of walls, of barriers, of constraints.

And there are generative things. I mean, who wants to live in an open concept house? They were very, very popular in the turn of the 2000s. Everybody wanted to live in a warehouse that was open concept. I was just hanging out with Art Spiegelman in New York, and he and his wife, François Mouly, I think they found their SoHo warehouse in the ’60s or early ’70s, and it was a big factory space. It wasn’t a cool area of New York City. It was light manufacturing. And now, however many years later, that open space has several walls, many rooms, because they had to bring up their two little children there, and they needed little alcoves and little nooks. Everybody loved the idea of the open concept even a few year ago. I think many of the condominiums were open concept because walls are more expensive. But I don’t want to walk into your house and see you in your underwear! You can have a wall there!

NT: Everyone needs some degree of privacy. Open concept spaces are an ideal, but they’re not always practical.

SL: Yeah. There was always tension at MuchMusic. This radical concept made it very confusing to navigate. It was extremely chaotic. But I loved that. There is some binary, and there’s potentiality and a generative quality in walls, in being locked in, to push yourself to that moment of what we were talking about in meditation or on the film set where you actually have to deal with how to transcend this constraint within yourself. There are all these parallels paradoxes.

NT: What we’re talking about here is an example of past future, where there was this ideal of what the future would be, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. Is that something that comes up throughout the album? On “Locked Boy,” it seems like there’s this conflict between past and present. Is there anything on this album that touches on the idea of past future not living up to ideals?

SL: I don’t know if I really think about the past and the future. I do think they’re simultaneously occurring. I’m more inclined to believe in the dimensionality of quantum physics in a fourth and fifth dimension and perhaps even more. I think we’re really limited by the constraints of our bodies. Our bodies are kind of flesh machines, and they allow us to interpret the world, but every manifestation of life has its own frequency, its own parameters of their physical machine. That dictates what we’re able to perceive. Essentially, we’re an in-between technology. We’re like a 3/4-inch tape.

There is a possibility that there will be other species that have a much different filter that are picking up many things, but do I think life is extremely mysterious. I like the idea that all of these things are happening at the same time from another perspective.

All the species are taking in signs and energy and extrapolating meaning based upon our [biology], but I think we are all connected to this larger constellation of energetic force of which we have no fucking clue what it is. We can call it God. I feel like I’m a spiritual person, but I don’t adhere to a particular faith. But it’s pretty astounding.

And of course, Adam Litovitz is a profound force in my life. He’s passed, but it’s impossible for me to extricate my experience of the world without him. He just is there. There was that book, [Joan Didion’s] The Year of Magical Thinking. She was bereaved of the passing of her husband and spent a year imagining him there, but for me, it’s a lifetime of magical thinking. But I don’t even think it’s magical. I just can’t help but feel him or his energy.

That continues to be one of the most difficult experiences that I’m dealing with in life. I mean, we go swimming at the community centre, and I’m a fish, so I would usually be swimming longer, and then Adam would go into the hallway and meditate sitting on his blue chair. There’s a photo of him looking at me right now. Living with him not being here and yet embracing his presence because he is around me and within me in so many ways also has forced me to realize this collapsing of these systems.

NT: When you say that he is in you and around you in so many ways, that ties back into “Travelogue without Moving” where you sing about noticing the expansiveness of your immediate space. That’s a song on which you mention him. You brought up swimming and how Adam is connected to that. I remember from JOOJ’s video for “Ghost of Love” that for you, especially at the time, swimming was such a meditative practice even though it requires so much physical exertion.

SL: You’re definitely right. Yes, I was a competitive swimmer. As a 13-year-old girl, I spent six hours a day in the pool from 4-7am in the morning and then after school from 4-7pm. I had the number one time in the 200-metre breaststroke for a 13-year-old girl and the second fastest in the 100-metre.

Swimming, unlike other sports, is never about the gold. It’s always about personal best and your own time, so there’s something very meditative about my relationship with sport and physical movement and the challenging nature of being a kid having to train so intensely.

order 72RHR by Sook-Yin Lee HERE