For the last three million years glaciers have smoothed their way across a square of land near the center of the continent, God’s zen garden. People lived there for thousands of years, then the United States bought it in 1803, followed almost immediately by violence and mass extradition. In that distinct American fashion, they named it for one of the people their ownership eradicated, misspelling it in the process, a beautiful, vowel jumble of a name. In 1956 a federal highway bisected it. It is home to the world’s largest truck stop, strawberry, and garden trowel. It is the origin of both Arthur Russell and Slipknot. And once, for eleven months, OHYUNG lived there, a silhouette in leather against the miraculous petrochemical watercolors of a 21st-century prairie sunset.

Iowa: pork steaks and screaming hog farms, transcendental meditation, one of the most prestigious writing programs in the country, the lynchpin of American political forecasting every four years. That avowed club rat, alt pop star aspirant, and sophisticated film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli hauled herself and her two parakeets there from Bushwick unto the relative quiet and spaciousness of the plains felt truly surreal, stirring. Vastness of landscape, tornado sirens howling, a brutal winter, corn reaching for the heavens. Kind of an ambient album of a state, really - so much space. She listened. She moved towards herself, molting her gender like an iridescent, venomous snake uncoiling in the tall prairie grass. She threw herself at the mercy of the pit - other people’s elbows at the all ages hardcore show felt close enough to techno.

Bruce Springsteen had his Nebraska, a bare-bones, notably more ominous record - his dark night of the soul with red text on a black background. OHYUNG now has her Iowa, a stripped-down, self-produced, notably more atmospheric record, tinnitus quiet after the rave with red text on a black background. When she removes the scaffolding, when she grinds up the bones of the song, what remains? Ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, late night gloom. With mangled chorales, lo-res rips of devotional music, surreptitious field recordings, and assorted synth pads, the full, brutally inspiring bleakness of January on the plains reveals itself. OHYUNG’s last ambient work - 2022’s imagine naked! - unfolded, expanding the way a poem does. Iowa is more of a document, a VHS home movie dubbed over itself again and again. Is that real snow? Or is the tape eating itself?

Though very beautiful throughout, there’s an illness-of-ease to the music, a fog of threat, numerous points of rupture in otherwise serene tracks, massive subwoofer activations that could be heaven’s kick drum or the slam of an AI-guided bomb. Sampled choirs in rapture, a fine line between terror and reverence. Weaponized Christian ideology demonizes trans folks while ICE rappels into apartment buildings, is this really what they pray for? And under that big, beautiful, driftless sky, who will protect you? Those that hold you dear. There, in that rectilinear state, OHYUNG found community, playing shows and throwing raves. And when the punk kids showed up to dance they moved together. The album’s final track - a heartbreaking living room duet with Iowa City artist toyaway, budgies and TV in the background - aches, swells, and undulates, dedicated to the memory of Chris Wiersema, a beatific figure of huge import in Iowa’s music scene and someone who was kind to our composer while their lives crossed paths. Not a romanticization, not a nostalgia, more like a postcard, a ticket stub. In the vastness of the world, in the longness of the winter, before the impossibly distant disappearing point of that outstretched horizon, there is music on the wind.

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Physical vinyl editions of IOWA are produced by Trans Music Archive. All proceeds from Bandcamp and vinyl sales will be going to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund, which is doing important work distributing funds in a state that has banned gender affirming care for minors, removed transgender civil rights protections, and eliminated gender affirming care for transgender Iowans on Medicaid.

shop.transmusicarchive.org/products/ohyung-iowa


Mastered by Ariel Loh and OHYUNG
Memorial (Track 12) featuring additional synth by toyaway
credits
releases March 6, 2026

music by OHYUNG
additional synth on "memorial" by Toyaway
mastered by Ariel Loh and OHYUNG
album art photo by Constant Laval Williams
design by DAY