Hot Salvation

“Growing up has always been a solitary journey, marked by forward-looking anticipation, anxiety, unripe potential, aspirations, and closures.”

London-based Chinese composer and multi-instrumentalist Li Yilei makes a triumphant return to Métron Records with "NONAGE," their second full-length release following 2021’s "OF." Delving into an introspective exploration of childhood, this new creation weaves together samples from vintage Chinese TV shows, mechanical children's toys, and an array of acoustic and electronic instruments—some crafted by Li themselves.

The Chinese title for "NONAGE" is "垂髫," translating to "childhood" or "dishevelled hair," capturing the carefree phase of life when children let both their literal and figurative hair down. For Li, nonage is a realm revisited to understand fear and fearlessness, love and despair, grief and glee, curiosity and mistakes.

“I remember pressing piano keys like touching flowers, reading scores like looking at paintings, writing like how I would talk to myself, greeting death like how I would greet life.”

Originally conceived as an archiving project, the record retraces and reimagines fragments of Li’s childhood memories through scent, location, and color, breathing life into the lingering emotions that endure into adulthood.

Compositions are constructed around a diverse array of unconventional sources: damaged instruments like a toy piano, a hand-cranked music box, bird whistles, a broken accordion, and anything else Li could find that evoked nascent recollections. Scattered throughout are samples from Li’s childhood piano jams, moments of contemplative transmigration where past incarnations of self and memory converge with the present.