i’ve never met lyli jordy in person. i’ve never heard her speak aside from picking up on her ghostly vocals in the productions featured on her soundcloud. we met in the way that seems typical of the music community – over the internet, earlier this summer when my good friend jackie spade pointed me in lyli’s direction, insisting that she has a “voice that needs to be heard.” i tucked into her soundcloud, devouring her every release from dripping, melting dub to complex microhouse or instrumentalized minimal thread through perfect, breathy vocal fragments. and though i’ve never heard it in person, i know for sure that lyli has a voice that, indeed, begs to be heard.
so, who exactly is lyli? “i like to keep descriptions short,” she winked when i asked her the same question. in lieu of a biography on soundcloud, she offers up a quote from paolo casals: “the cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.” it’s a beautiful and telling excerpt – lyli’s music speaks with the same kind of poetry and careful, considered structure. a producer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, lyli’s samples are her own: it’s really her voice enchanting you, her piano riffs telling a story, her cello zigzagging with her organic techno. through live recordings, she transposes all of these fascinations. inspired by nature, the abyss, and the deep sea, her music takes on a subaquatic accent: it’s at once like floating and like sinking.
a recent signee to new local imprint, future montreal, lyli is her own underwater orchestra, as she likes to say. her mix for littlecity brings that to the surface, a combination of pretty melodies and soft beats featuring artists like john roberts, herr koreander, and francis harris.
