Love Is In The Shit: otay:onii on the Alchemy of Hope, Transformation and Fragmentation

Interview by Parisa Eshrati

On her new full-length album, Love Is In The Shit, otay:onii creates an alchemic transformation of pain and despair into an act of love. Through a blend of experimental textures, folkloric performances, and deeply personal storytelling, the album embraces the sacred and profane as inseparable parts of the human experience. We caught up with otay:onii to discuss writing music between states of consciousness, fragmenting our ancestral stories into art, and the philosophy of finding hope in the even the shittiest places.

Before we get into the details of the new album, I want to start with a few questions on the larger theme that runs through the record. You've described it as an alchemic transformation - the process of moving through pain, despair, and the horrors of life and somehow emerging with love. Let's talk more about this transformational process. Are there examples of this happening in the natural world that have inspired your form of making music? You’ve described it as alchemy, so I’m curious to hear what you may think is happening to us on an innate level when we allow love to persist rather than harden into cynicism.

The first song on the album,“Have You Ever”, was written from the despair of losing a band that I truly cherished. I knew I had to leave in order to take care of my health and not do any further damage. It all happened very quickly with a lot of spite, anger and hurt. Several years have passed, and now when I think about it, I only have beautiful memories left in my heart. Of course, there are still moments where my heart tingles with hurt and sadness, and I still need to do the work of re-releasing those feelings. But in the end, it was a wonderful experience that challenged us to think more honestly about what we cherished and what we really want in life. 

It’s through shit that we know our true love. If there are only beautiful memories, then when shit hits the fan, there’s no way to know whether something can withstand the hard times. I learned a lot through these shit times, and through it I saw a lot of love. Those feelings will be forever in my heart, and those are the memories I will hold until my last breath.

In nature, I do like the decomposing process of a whale carcass and how it provides for a whole ecosystem after its death. I don’t think this process is so black and white. The ecosystem doesn’t depend on the whale dying, but once the death has happened, it’s inevitable that new life begins around it. The ecosystem wasn’t hunting or seeking death, but life naturally followed. It’s just like love. It does not need to be imposed. It inevitably happens.

I’m also very heavily influenced by Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain where human feces are put through laboratories. In the end, it’s only through your own salvation, your own breath, your own mind, and your heart’s strength, that the shit becomes a block of gold.

I do like the idea of shit - literally. In ancient times, people analyzed shit by its color, smell, and texture to tell the conditions of one’s health. It’s something very close and personal to us as human beings. Yet, you know, when people talk about shit they shy away. They say, “Don’t talk about shit! It’s unholy. It’s not clean. It’s not something you should be proud of.” Yet, everybody takes a shit. Nobody is not taking a shit! If you were to place the most holy, beautiful, untouchable object beside a pile of shit, I think it would be quite a scene. I want to be the kind of artist who can stand in the presence of both.
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I want to discuss the idea of fragmentation in folklore and how it appears in your art, both visually and musically. Folklore survives through fragments, yet those fragments still carry the integrity of the whole. You've explored that idea quite literally in your recent Roadburn Festival performance where you broke the moon into pieces and gave them away to the audience, as well as in the song “The Plaice” where you sing that “the fragments shine the biggest fractures of God”. 

I’m curious how this folkloric idea of fragmentation may pertain to your creative process. When you transform memories, experiences, and pieces of yourself into art, do you feel you are giving something away, or creating new forms through which the whole can continue to exist? 

Absolutely, I am fragmenting. Whenever I’m telling a story or drawing from folklore, I am telling it through my perspective lens. Whenever people do that, that’s fragmentation. In fact, everybody who lives in this world is fragmenting their philosophy, their concept of life, and their own mythology of understanding who they are. Everybody’s fragmenting by living here, period. 

For my Roadburn Festival performance, I took four mythological beasts as my influences and cast blessings to people who are experiencing helplessness right now. There’s a lot of loss within people’s hearts, especially as we’re witnessing wars and genocides. Those four beasts are the protectors that sit in the four corners of the world, constantly casting their energy to help people find their way home. Even what I’m saying right now is a fragmentation, right? Who knows what the original description of these four beasts was.But what I do believe is that through the eyes and heart of the teller, new energy can  be injected into the mythology.  I do think those mythological beasts existed in one form or another. They might have existed in human form. They might have existed in animal form. But the energy inside of them is the real core that we need to hold onto. The intention is the motivation and the real drive behind the meaning.

So yes, I am fragmenting myself into the music. The lyric you mentioned is exactly that. All folklore is just stories spreading among people. In fact, Christianity is folklore to me, just as Buddhism. I’m actually involved in an opera called Sancta by Florentina Holzinger that’s heavily influenced by Christianity, and Jesus is played by one of our sisters. In this version, Jesus is a naughty little bitch. I do think in many of the scripts lost in history, there’s a version of Jesus that is, in fact, childish - so childish that people can’t really handle him. Or them. Or who knows.

The fractures of God we carry are the true sense of what a god might be. If we don’t exist, if we don’t live our life, there’s no god. There’s no god to exist and fulfill the sense of god. I normally don’t like to touch the word “God” because it’s so far away from me, and usually when people talk about God it’s always in the Christian sense. But it’s significant for me because I would like to tell my fragmentation, my own perspective for what God is, and how this God is for other people that are not Christians.

Funnily enough, my grandparents are Christians because Christianity had spread quite a lot in China, especially where I’m from. They have a lot of followers there. My grandparents went to Sunday mass every week and. My grandma doesn’t know how to read or write, so for her to be sitting there every Sunday, opening the Bible, it’s clear that she’s following something beyond the words. For me as a kid, though, it was the food that I was following. 

How do you find yourself staying grounded in wholeness while working through fragmentation?

That’s a hard task. Whenever I’m feeling love, I give 100% of myself. I can hear fragments in the echoes. It’s a very thin line, a stretchy boundary, in how I handle those fragments of myself and how I’ve learned to seek no expectations or echoes from others when I show myself or give love.

Ultimately, I think there’s one myth that kind of grounded me and made me feel relieved throughout all of this - the back and forth of exchanging love, taking care of each other, sometimes feeling disappointed in each other, and so on. There’s a myth that if we humans express more love or give more love to the world, it attracts good spirits to return to Earth. Everybody has a dark side and essence of evilness, but it’s a matter of magnifying certain parts of ourselves. If we express more of the evil side, then the evil spirits will land on Earth and do their work. 

So for me, it’s crucial that I give honesty to the world so that I don’t suffocate beneath  explanations of my own behaviors. These days, I feel pretty relieved because all of my actions and behaviors are true to myself.  I have nothing to hide. Even when joking - whether it’s funny, witty, or full of curses - I know that love is standing strong behind me. 
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Going off that - you’ve spoken before about the idea that people are born inherently evil, and love is something that is formed through our lived experiences, which is a philosophy that stretches back centuries. I’m curious about whether this idea plays into your artistic vision, and perhaps how creating an album or music video or performance piece can be viewed as a ritual to transform the inherent darkness.

It’s interesting - I believe it was Laozi’s view that people are born with kindness. I personally think people are born with evilness, yet now I realize we’re talking about the same thing. Laozi said that before people are even born, there is already a kind of hope for kindness. Then they enter the world bringing kindness, but maybe through challenges in life, it changes.

For me, I’m saying that I think people are born with evilness, and through the lessons of life, perhaps there’s a possibility of being kind. But kindness still fits in the realm that Loazi is talking about. It’s like a triangle, right?  You are first born with kindness, then you become evil, then you regain your power to be kind again. Personally, I skip the first step. I think it’s powerful to believe people are born with kindness, but for me that concept makes human nature harder to understand. It’s easier for me to think of people being born from ignorance, and that throughout life, you learn that there are better ways to treat people, animals, and even yourself. I don’t know about you, but for example, when I was a kid I was a huge insect collector. I don’t consider that very nice now!

I love how you explore this idea sonically on the album as well, the way you emerge the melodic, triumphant moments out of the harsh, industrial soundscapes. I think a lot of people might think being born “evil” as a negative idea, but the way you intentionally craft these movements throughout the album seems to suggest something far more hopeful.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s hopeful. If we weren’t born as humans, that means we’d be born into an animal. In many cultures, that means in a past life you did something really wrong and deserve to be an animal. But of course, that’s a very simplified interpretation of reincarnation. 

You’ve stated that when writing music, you follow the narrative of the song and guide yourself through emotion rather than setting a standard structure to follow. Did following that process lead you to unexpected places or surprising discoveries while working on this album? 

I really like the ending of “Tears Won’t Tell” because I use a sample of a saw cutting wood. It’s cutting the ties to old emotions and deep memories,  making way to rebuild new ones. It gives hope to a life that I want to walk towards, a new path that I want to explore. I love the fact that it all melted together very well. That’s definitely a very nice surprise. It gave me new challenges for my live show on whether I’m going to use a saw or not. It’s in the works for sure. 

This album has a really surprising and fun element of humor in it, like the song “World Class Citizen” where you modulate sounds using a self-made 3D-printed noise machine that resembles a pile of shit. This song rearranges and recontextualizes the recording, much like the idea of a “world class citizen” being this absurd and backward notion.  I want to talk more about humor in your work. How do you use elements like humor, playfulness and distortion to amplify the themes of the song?

“World Class Citizen” is playing directly with the vocal tapes from “No Talent”. The two songs have several correlations. One thing I think is that “world class citizens” themselves mostly have no talent, despite all the praise I see given to them. And in “No Talent”, I don’t literally mean talent. I mean the sensibility to feel, give and preserve love. So there is an element of sarcasm. 

The songs also correlate in the way I manipulated the recordings. I played around with the cursor in Ableton, moving and looping chunks of audio to expand on them.The tape I chose has all the details that people normally don’t want to hear in a recording; for example, a little cough or throat clearing, the kind of noises that would normally be cut during production. I highlighted those intentionally because I want people to hear that there’s a lot of information behind a “world-class citizen”. There’s a lot of dark history behind a person who becomes a world-class citizen. There’s a lot of blood and sweat behind status, power, and fame. That’s another message that I want to draw on.

The third correlation is that it’s just fun to be able to involve humor. I experienced a lot of big difficulties living in the US and obtaining visas. During the last Trump presidency, I was denied my green card twice. I still had to pay my lawyer $10,000 even though I didn’t get my green card. I couldn’t afford to pay it, so I was blacklisted and debt collectors started chasing me. It was a very difficult time, especially because there were fellow musicians I had looked up to who wouldn’t even reply to my messages, despite openly saying how much the projects I was working on meant to them and to the underground music scene. All of that shattered my faith in a lot of things.

So when I think about an idol, a hero, or the typical Hollywood structure of a savoir, I literally tremble. The way this ideal has been set up is very intentional. I have no idols, no heroes to worship. The title itself is sarcasm. I wish there were no world-class citizens. Absolutely not. I wish that everybody could be equal. There’s so much sacrifice behind the survival of a “shining” person or group of people…kind of like a whale dying so that an ecosystem can survive.

And yeah, that song is my favorite song to play because there’s literally nothing to do except noodle my shit.  

In "No Talent," you speak about talent not as some innate gift, but as something that “grows through transforming memory into wisdom and contributes to a larger collective consciousness”. I love how the music video seems to visualize this process. It begins with a sense of childlike wonder and whimsy, but spins into a world of shadows and violence. Can you talk more about how the video visualizes your ideas about "talent" and the collective consciousness?

The music video is closely related to my experience living in the U.S. I came to the U.S. when I was 16, quite young. I loved the experience even though it was also traumatic for me. I still love the U.S. as a whole entity only because I have love for the world. Anyway, the music video is me exploring the country as a teenager. Throughout the video, there’s a golden beam, which is a light that everybody has within themselves. It’s your vigor of life - your breath, your motivation, your inspiration, how you pursue life, how you talk about yourself, how you become you, and all the power behind that. That vigor is expressed as a tiny, little shining beam.

Whenever I find myself running towards a community or other musicians, I always show them my light. Maybe I overdo it sometimes, but I always want to show what I’ve got and my interest right on the spot. The music industry, however, is a whole other thing. It tries to dim your light. I think a lot of the music press is lazy when they talk about me because they will just say, “Look, she’s very talented!” It’s also  lazy when people will compare me to other women artists. It’s quite funny how many times I’ve seen people compare me to Yoko Ono. It’s not only racist, but in the Western sphere, she’s only viewed in a negative context, or in relation to The Beatles. They always shrink down her identity as an artist. I also get a lot of comparisons to white women because I don’t think it’s on people’s horizon to reach the Eastern artists who have actually influenced me - for example: Sheena Ringo, Wang Fei, and Su Rui. These are female singers that I’m deeply inspired by, yet never seen myself compared to. Ultimately, I think it’s best that people stop comparing artists and lazily describe someone as talented. It means nothing. The word “talent”, like I express in the music video, can easily become a question of money. I’ve experienced situations where all of my work went to earning money for others. There’s no transparency. It’s a cruel experience.

When people talk about talent, it almost sounds sarcastic to me. It’s like there’s an underlying question about what my talent can do for them. For me, talent is just the ability to connect with yourself better - to feel the rhythm, the melody, the sound, to make things to create. There’s no more you need to do. There’s nothing more you need to be trained on, period. If you create art with love, you’re already training yourself automatically. The more you connect with yourself, the more you retrieve memories from your ancestors, from thousands of years ago, from a collective memory. You can access any music that you want to be influenced by. It’s all overlapping and shared.
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I want to ask about the relationship between conscious and subconscious thinking in how this album was created. You’ve mentioned that when you write in your native dialect of Haining, as heard in the opening track “Have You Ever”, that it feels like “the underwater of my dreams,” which I thought was a beautiful way of describing it.

What stands out to me is how that song opens the album in such a direct, abrupt way, confronting the listener with the question, “Have you ever lost it, cry out at night dawn,” before shifting into that more dreamlike state in your native dialect. I’m curious about that movement within a single track. How does shifting between these modes of consciousness open up different ways of writing? And how do you see language itself functioning as a tool for moving between those states?

I think the consciousness that moves between states is exactly from the social context in which the language is used. Consciousness within that social context is always moving from one state to another. There are a lot of emotions and memories tied to the languages I speak. Whenever I speak English, it comes with a lot of joy, but also a lot of difficulty. I lived in the U.S. for 14 years and had to navigate a lot of challenges in a language that wasn’t my native tongue. 

It comes with a lot of sincerity, but also a lot of pressure. For example, in “Have You Ever”, I cry out because my emotions are flowing through those lyrics. The experience of loss. To cry deeply for something. To fall in love with someone. To look at the moon and think about your dearest friend in a foreign country. All of those moments in the song happened while I was living my life in English. Because of the intensity of those emotions, I need to reset. I have to lie down, close my eyes, calm myself, go to sleep, start dreaming, and not think about anything. 

The second part of the song is where you sink into that childlike state of consciousness, where you surrender completely and release yourself from stress. Speaking in my Tuhua dialect brings me mentally back to my hometown. I don’t normally write in my dialect, I usually only speak it with my family back in China. When I work in it, it feels like I’m existing in a memory underwater. It exists so innately, but it doesn’t come out every day because I’m physically living in a different environment.

There’s an urgency to reset because of my trauma, so I need to mentally return to my hometown. I need to dive down to my subconscious, stay there for a while, and live again as a child. That’s how it feels. It all exists simply between that movement between those two states.

I want to also talk about some of the more literal aspects of the album, the production behind it, and how it came together. Was this all self-produced and recorded? You said in a caption regarding one of your performance art pieces that your standard to join anything nowadays is that “if this is the end of the world, is this group of people I can run together with?” Does that also extend to your creative collaborators as well? 

I definitely did it solo. Funnily enough, though, I’m thinking of asking some of my friends to join for future projects. I already asked Dave Bland from Full of Hell if he’d like to play drums for my Roadburn Festival next year, so we will see how that comes together. 

To be honest, when it comes to working on my own album, it’s more of a question for myself of “am I someone that’s worth running with?” It’s a little bit of both, for sure. That quote you read is from when I was working with Florentina Hozinger for the opera, because that’s absolutely a group of people that I would run with. Everybody is so lovely. Whenever a problem occurs, everyone thinks about a solution where we all benefit. I find strength in humanity in that group and how they work together. It’s been deeply inspiring for me and my work.

Earlier in the year, you did a workshop in Rabat, Morocco on screaming and mentioned that it’s not something you do based on formal technique, but rather is driven purely by emotion and acts as a release. I want to talk about your screaming relating specifically to this album. If your screaming traces your own evolution over time, what do the screams on songs like "Love from Survivors" or "Tears Won't Tell" communicate beyond the emotion of that particular song? What parts of you are speaking through them now that perhaps differentiates from earlier works?

I think in “Love from Survivors”, I scream as much as I possibly can to release my emotions. There are no words, only pure screams, and it comes from a very deep place where all my pain has gone.

In “Tears Won’t Tell”, the scream is almost like a scene in itself. That scream is really fragile because it appears right before I sing. That state of screaming feels as if I’m holding the last grave of myself. I’m letting the anger settle and allowing the grace to arrive in me. I’m letting in the possibility of reshaping my memories and remembering them beautifully, rather than holding onto their spikes. I begin to see that chance emerging. It also reveals my vulnerability a lot, and I would like people to hear the not-so-beautiful side of my voice. I like people to hear that screaming can be quiet and silent as much as it can be outburstingly powerful. Both are valid ways of touching reality and expressing how our emotions reflect different experiences.

“Love from Survivors” is a good example of how I vocally communicate my thoughts because, at the end of that song, I begin to sing. I don’t want to lie down in a grave. I want to live my life dancing. Even if I’m falling off a cliff, I want to be in love. That’s a feeling I’m carrying with me always. 

In another interview from a few years ago, you described the process of making music as “Solving a puzzle with another puzzle that can't be seen or touched, but must be felt.” What questions does Love Is In The Shit leave you with to be solved for a later piece of work?

If we’ve tested our friendships through a lot of shit, and we know someone is truly our friend…we’ve gone through shit and we’re still here, so then we’re friends.
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My question is: can we trust strangers?
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Love Is In The Shit is available via Pelagic Records and Bandcamp.
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