There are few things we love more than shattering genres, constraints and identities. When we first heard Ai fen, we were instantly drawn to her unique sound and powerful presence. Now the artist is set to self-release her debut album, postforever, a collection of 10 tracks which exists in the electronic and pop realms but takes on a life and sound of its own, something we at The Brvtalist always appreciate.

The new solo venture of Polish/Chinese musician and producer Ewelina Vlcek-Chiu, also known as one half of the witchwave duo ba:zel (with Daniel Vlcek), Ai fen comes out of solitude and deep, terrifying self-reflection. The composition is more experimental than the artist’s first project, particularly regarding the voice which vacillates between extreme poles of expression. The production is entirely done by Ai fen and features heavy use of processed vocal samples, minimal synths and the soprano flute, played with classical melodies or employed to create textures and drones. Ai-fen is the artist's Chinese name, given to her at birth as a counterpart to her first Polish name. In this way Ai fen is a nod towards an Other-ed Self, always present but hidden from view, an exploration of identity as a biracial, multinational woman growing up millennial.

Following the release of her first two singles, the visceral “screamo-pop” track “As I Thought” and the vocal sample heavy, more meditative “This Analog Desire (Makes Me Slow)” Ai fen is self-releasing her debut album postforever. The album was crafted over four years, wherein Ai fen learned to produce and record. postforever is made up of ten tracks flickering across an experimental pop approach featuring screamo, ambient, classical and techno elements. Its title is an anachronistic, nostalgic gesture towards time, an immortal combat between reflections.

Out today, to help mark the release, we were able to ask the artist some questions about her background, the release and more. We are also pleased to present an exclusive full stream of the album. Listen and read more below.

The Brvtalist: Ai fen is a new project. Tell us about your musical background and how you came to begin this endeavor.

Ai fen: I have played flute from the age of ten and later took up piano. I went to a Catholic conservatory until I graduated from high school and then didn’t play any music for over a decade. In 2014 I was at an art event where Daniel (Vlcek) handed me a microphone and told me to sing. I never had before but he liked my voice and we decided to do a project together. That’s how ba:zel, my witch-wave duo (www.bazelmusic.com), was born. That was the first time I composed music at all. About two years into that I started to crave having something over which I would have complete creative control and where I could experiment more, so I started to learn how to produce and that’s how Ai fen came to be.

TB: You mentioned before you call your music "trauma pop". Tell us a little bit more about that term.

Af: I started to refer to my project as “trauma pop” or “screamo pop” to reference the rather unpop elements of a project that, because of its tendency toward melody and more conventional song structure (verses, refrains), was inevitably for some kind of mutation of pop. Working with dramatic vocal fluctuations is a way for me to gesture towards the instabilities in my personality that stem from different types of trauma, whether personal or societal. In Ai fen I challenge myself to be fully raw to unravel what unnerves me. The album starts with "OH" referring to the millennium, the double zeroes that led to the Y2K scare. I was just a kid when it happened and it was exciting, frightening and also mysterious to think that a computer glitch could lead to such devastation, especially since computers didn't feature almost at all in my life at the time. So that New Year's Eve was really something I remember clearly, not long after ICQ, messenger and things like that began to appear and cyber territory became an extension of my teen social life, albeit more cryptically than it is now. The album then moves into fears of having children during the climate change crisis and the imminent, yet vague terror of climate change in general (1nfanticide, This Analog Desire (Makes Me Slow). Other tracks question heteronormative traditional relationships and primal desires (As I Thought, Crimson), tap into childhood trauma localized in particular triggers (All the Things) and explore landscapes of non-belonging and enforced identities (Raw Air, MYŚLIWY, Blood Millenials). The track I_Like_Breathing however is a hopeful mantra, it reminds us to "inhale exhale out, everything else is just a store we tell ourselves." It ends with a flute loop drone, a choral arrangement and explosive screaming to gesture towards our inevitable end in these tangible bodies. But this shouldn't be taken as dark or negative, for me the scream is a liberation, a ripping through into a new self.

TB: You are a Polish/Chinese artist currently living in Prague. Would you say your multicultural heritage informs your art?

Af: Without question! Ai fen is my Chinese middle name. Growing up biracial had an enormous impact on how my sense of identity developed, especially because we moved around so much and due to the fact that being Chinese and being Polish seemed to be mutually exclusive identities that could not be reconciled. As radically different cultures wherein the persons are marked by not only varying rituals and behaviors but also outward appearance I, as both Chinese and Polish, had to constantly defend and explain myself when faced with the very basic question of “Where are you from?” In a way, I often felt that I was in a nowhere land, being neither Chinese nor Polish and certainly not Canadian or American. So I was nothing, but this turned out to be very enriching for me because it created a space in which I could really evaluate all the influences of my background and come out as the sum of it all but also the sum of nothing. This is also similar to the millenial experience where we’ve stood on the transition of analog and digital and come out with a loving nostalgia of the past and a certain uneasiness and distrust to the cyber present while at the same time being addicted to it. This is compounded by the climate change crisis which asks us to unlearn all the myths we were taught about following patterns of work ethic to guarantee a safe future.

TB: postforever is your debut album. Tell us about the concept of the album and your approach to creating it.

Af: I studied critical theory and towards the end all the various “posts” (postmodernism, post avant garde, post internet, etc) started to seem like a joke. One day the phrase “postforever” just popped into my head and I knew that it perfectly encapsulated everything this album is about. What comes after postforever? Nothing and everything, because the concept of eternity itself is both inescapable and imaginary. I've said that postforever is "an immortal combat between reflections", and that's both a funny reference to my childhood via the 1990's video game I used to play with my brother (Mortal Combat) and the phenomenon of seeing eternity when you face off two mirrors. In that phenomenon you need to face your reflections against one another to see into infinity. I find that an apt analogy to the album because what I'm doing in postforever is taking reflections of myself that are excavated emotions from the deepest, darkest corners of my identity. They come from the past, present and future and are all things I've been afraid to say out loud. In encapsulating them into finite compositions I've created a multitude of reflections to be arranged as confrontations of each other. These shards are all interrelated but only in being individualized and clarified can they be put in a face-off to give me a glimpse of the inescapable and imaginary within myself: eternity, a postforever.

TB: Now the album is out, do you have any plans to perform live/tour?

Af: Yes! I am doing a tour with Swedish project Tropical Vampire via Queers to the Front Booking. Selected dates will also include Maja, the founder of QTTF talking about gender identity and toxic masculinity via her experience as a transgender woman. We will start in Sweden and make our way down to Prague via Holland, Denmark, Germany and Poland.

I also just finished a mini tour with 5 dates in Austria, Slovakia, and Czechia with Vienna based project The Boiler. This was following the cassette release party in Prague and an amazing way to jump headfirst into playing the album live and developing it performatively. On this tour I realized how important performing is to me and how I can push boundaries within my own music and myself through live performance.

Thank you to Ai fen for speaking with us. Her debut album, postforever, is out now on limited cassette and digital formats. Pick yours up at: https://aifen.bandcamp.com/album/postforever

-JRS