Screenshot from YouTube
One might be hard-pressed to find an album more personally developed than Wulijimuren’s Sun of UTC+8. Each guitar-centric composition tells a different life story based on the Mongolian immigrant’s own experiences both in his home country and the United States following his move to New York in the mid-2000s. His newest music video, for the song ‘Vast Sky’, sees him paying tribute to the lakes of his homeland.
In particular, Wulijimuren tells us, “There used to be many beautiful lakes in my hometown, but now they are all dried up. Although as we choose to ignore their loss as if they never existed, the birds that have migrated there for countless generations, still return to their primordial birthplace only to be gunned down by poachers as they circle in search of the water that was.”
If you like what you hear, you can pay an ear to more of Wulijimuren’s work via CDBaby or Spotify.