Yijia is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose work builds bridges between time, culture, memory, experience and consciousness. Early on in her career, she established herself as a rising voice in contemporary folk. More recently her performances her performances at the Royal Albert Hall and Southbank Centre, alongside talks at TED and TEDx have confirmed Yijia as an essential presence in the cross-culture music scene. With her new album TU, this artist returns to the folk traditions that once felt distant, transforming them into a living dialogue with global sounds and modern production. The record threads together Yi, Mongolian and Tuvan influences with electronic textures, ancestral lullabies and poetry-inspired ballads. At once reverent and innovative, this record is both a vessel of memory and a reimagining of endangered traditions. For On The Record, we spoke with Yijia about heritage, echoes through time and how ancient voices continue to breathe within today’s soundscape.
Welcome to Unrecorded! For those who aren’t already familiar with Yijia can you introduce yourself?
I’m a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist working with traditional music to build a bridge between past and present, East and West. My debut album 17 (Sony Music China) won the CMA Chinese Music Awards, and I first stepped into the public eye as a Semi-Finalist on Sing My Song. Since then, I’ve performed at spaces like the Royal Albert Hall and Southbank Centre, and shared my ideas on music’s ability to transcend time, memory, and consciousness on both TED and TEDx stages. At the heart of it, my work is about keeping ancient voices alive and letting them speak in today’s soundscape.
You’ve just released your album, TU, so when did you first envision this album and what guided its shape?
TU began as a seed during my studies in London and Oxford, when I was questioning where I belonged musically and personally. I found myself drawn back to folk traditions I once felt distant from, and they began to guide me home. The album grew into a vessel of memory and imagination — a way to reimagine endangered traditions while opening them to contemporary influences. It was shaped as much by longing as by curiosity.
How do you approach balancing its ancient resonance with contemporary production and global influences?
I don’t see it as balancing opposites, but more as weaving threads across time. Traditional melodies and instruments hold an ancient resonance, while electronic textures and global collaborations are part of my lived present. When these voices sit together, they create dialogue rather than opposition. My role is to listen deeply, to honour both, and to let them flow naturally into one body of work.
‘Yi The Sun’ is such a striking fusion of trance and Yi folk music, so what was it like to discover your Yi heritage after being drawn to that field recording?
It was almost like déjà vu. I first encountered a field recording of Yi folk music without knowing of my ancestral connection, and it resonated with me so strongly! As if the sound had been waiting for me. Discovering my Yi heritage later felt like confirmation that music carries memory deeper than bloodlines — it connects us to ancestors we’ve never met, and places we’ve never been, yet somehow recognise.
What imagery or emotions were you drawing from while writing ‘Willow Flowers’?
‘Willow Flowers’ is based on Su Shi’s poem about impermanence and parting. For me, it evokes the feeling of petals falling in slow motion – delicate but heavy with unspoken sorrow. I was reflecting on the fleetingness of relationships and the beauty in their passing. It’s about learning to hold grief and grace together, like blossoms that wither even as they leave behind their fragrance.
For ‘Sunrise on the Horizon’, how did you approach reinterpreting such a well-loved Mongolian folk song while keeping its spirit intact?
With reverence and humility. I have a lot of love and respect for the culture of traditional Mongolian overtone singing. My interpretation isn’t about changing the song, but about opening another lens and letting it live through my own voice, while keeping its spirit whole and intact.
How do you see the connection between Tuvan folk traditions in ‘Konguroi’ and the other cultural threads running through TU?
Konguroi belongs to a nomadic sound-world that echoes across borders – in throat singing, in open melodies that stretch like horizons. I see it as part of a wider tapestry where Tuvan, Mongolian, and East Asian traditions intertwine, reminding us that cultures are not isolated but fluid, moving like rivers across landscapes. In TU, these threads meet and converse, carrying the memory of journeys and migrations.
How do you balance nostalgia with innovation with songs like ‘Red Mountain Flowers’ which carries national and cultural weight?
Songs like ‘Red Mountain Flowers’ carry the weight of collective memory. It’s a song my grandmother used to sing to me as a child, and our entire family will sing this together on road trips in the car, as we love singing in our family. In my grandma’s final days, she wouldn’t remember anything, and we couldn’t communicate through words. But whenever I sing this song to her, she remembers the song and sings along with me. For me, this song carries a lot of personal, intimate emotion, and I like the lyrics that translate to ‘no matter how dark the night is, morning will always come. No matter how cold winter is, spring will always arrive. I see it as a song that can hopefully resonate with a lot of people across different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. So my aim isn’t to preserve them as museum pieces, but to let them breathe in today’s world. Nostalgia gives me reverence, but innovation gives them life again. By reinterpreting them with honesty, I hope to show they are not just history — they are still alive, still capable of moving us now.
‘Lullaby’ is one of the album’s most intimate moments, tied to your great-grandmother and grandmother. What was it like recording something so personal?
It was deeply emotional. This lullaby was passed down through four generations of women in my family, and singing it in the studio felt like carrying their voices with me. When I sing it, I still feel a deep connection to the memories of my grandmother singing it to me as a child, and I can still feel deeply connected with her despite her passing away. presence. For me this song wasn’t just a recording but a way of preserving their love, of weaving my family’s memory into something that could outlive us.
What’s next on the horizon for Yijia?
I want to keep expanding the journey of TU, from my recent TED talk to starting to write my next album which moves on from the ‘past’ to the ‘present’. I want to continue working with marginalised and endangered music traditions that deserve to be heard and also fully explore my creativity as a multi-cultural and genre-agnostic artist and not put myself in a box. Keep an eye out for my upcoming musical journey!
You can also listen to ‘Yi The Sun’ in our Electro Feels and Folk This Way playlists.
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