Take a moment for the arresting stillness of “all dolls go to heaven.” IOWA, the full-length opus by film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli (“OHYUNG”), hits you deep in the gut. The first 2026 release by must-follow label Trans Music Archive is both an essential meditation and a call to arms.
I adore ambient and experimental music, and yet it’s hard not to get caught as an echo of releases that came before. IOWA is transcendent, steeped in Rusli’s experience in film composition and her deep imagination. It should arrive with all the urgency of the civil defense sirens going off before a storm. (Yes, I also grew up in the Midwest, or at least midwest-adjacent south of Louisville. You can almost smell the ozone in these tracks, the sickly greenish-purple sky of an oncoming severe storm.)
Photo by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli; via artist’s site
If these first two tracks don’t convince you to buy this album — and the fact that the vinyl edition benefits the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund at the moment they need it most urgently — I’ve got nothing.
It’s beautiful, and yet all this makes me want to weep and scream at the same time. And the video is perfect:
The release processes Christian choral music through tube amps and cassettes, degrading and perhaps lamenting the twisting of that faith into anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-immigrant violence. That’s relatable, too: I can tell you the lonely sublime sound old gospel records make as the monophonic AM signal breaks apart like crashing surf, as you dip between weak local signals on the highway. Or the horror as the local megachurch spewed toxic regressive ideology to an entitled audience.
But I can’t really top the evocative, biting text that comes with the album, so I’ll add it here in full (at bottom).
In addition to Bandcamp, you can head to TMA’s site directly:
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.
I wrote about the Trans Music Archive project when it launched last year:
And you can check out both Lia’s film compositions and her OHYUNG project on her site:
She’s been prolific already as OHYUNG and as a film composer (under her full name), so that includes this fantastic music video. (It’s almost alarming how little attention this now nets even with critical acclaim.)
The film scores are organized by type — melodic, beats, experimental — each worth a deep listen.