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The concept of the familiar stranger — someone we see regularly but don’t know or speak to — is reworked in Bolis Pupul’s Letter to Yu. Here the role is taken by a city, not a person. It’s Hong Kong, birthplace of the Belgian electronic musician’s mother. The album is about him going there after her death and feeling at once foreign and intimately connected to the place.
Bolis Pupul’s real name is Boris Zeebroek. His stage name joins together his Chinese grandmother’s pronunciation of Boris and a nonsense word that his Belgian father recited to him to help him fall asleep as a child. His father is Luc Zeebroek, aka Kamagurka, a well-known Belgian cartoonist and comedian. Pupul is best-known himself for Topical Dancer, a witty collaborative album with Charlotte Adigéry that appeared in numerous best-of-year lists in 2022.
Letter to Yu is his solo debut. Its punning title is addressed to his mother, Yu Wei Wun, who moved to Ghent from Hong Kong. She died in a car accident in 2008. Ten years later, Pupul made his first trip to the city. The opening song, also the title track, is about the grief and regret he experiences in the Kowloon neighbourhood where she lived. “I feel so lost being here/On the corner of Ma Tau Wai Road/Without you looking for my roots,” he recites in an oddly slowed-down voice.
A sense of fogginess turns up again in “Completely Half”. Pupul is on a train when he sees someone “who looks a lot like you”. He’s ashamed when “people talk to me like I am local” as he can’t understand them. But alienation is offset by singsong vocals and beguilingly catchy synth-pop. Transit passenger hubbub adds to the vivid sense of a familiarly strange destination.
Co-produced by Pupul with Soulwax, the dance music duo to whose label he is signed, the album’s audio balance is fantastic, from the lush melodies and lithe rhythms of “Spicy Crab” to the abrasive techno of “Doctor Says”. There’s an intriguing blend of languages too.
In “Ma Tau Wai Road”, his sister Salah Pupul sings about the sounds of Hong Kong. Her lyrics are in English, while several other tracks are in Cantonese. Closing number “Cosmic Rendez-Vous” switches to Dutch and French, spoken by Pupul’s mother in an old recording. Linguistically divided Belgium, her adopted homeland, is the terminus for this engrossing album about doubleness and identity.
★★★★☆
‘Letter to Yu’ is released by Deewee
