Dis Fig: seven years on, hands that build and break

What To Make Of These Mortal Hands is a loud record about other people. Felicia Chen, who records as Dis Fig, spends eleven tracks looking outward at what hands do to each other, with sub-bass heavy enough to shift the furniture and a voice shredded past recognition. The distortion is how she gets close.

Her 2019 debut PURGE was catharsis pointed inward: Chen's own damage, worked out at volume. In the years since she became better known for standing next to other people than for standing alone. In Blue, with The Bug, and Orchards of a Futile Heaven, with The Body, both put her voice inside somebody else's frame. What To Make Of These Mortal Hands is her second solo album, and the first time in seven years the whole frame is hers to fill.

The record is out 23 October on Thrill Jockey, sixty-three minutes across eleven tracks, and it runs as a sequence of scenes more than a set of songs. Seth Manchester mixed it and Heba Kadry mastered it. Lee Buford of The Body plays drums and Liam Andrews of BIG|BRAVE plays bass on 'The Snake You Built'; LUηG trades screams with Chen on 'The Stone Awakens'; the poet The Wind Between opens 'The Account' and keeps returning, closer to a narrator than a guest. Chen described the aim as a womb-like chamber built out of sound, a portal with a guide who takes your hand and brings you in carefully.

The chamber is real, and it is heavy. Distortion carries most of the arrangements, and the mix keeps the low end clear underneath it, so the bass moves like weather and the shrieks stay inside the frame instead of escaping it. What changes across the sixty-three minutes is how much air sits around Chen. For long stretches there is almost none. Then 'Ginko's Way' arrives and the distortion drops away completely: choral, close, layered harmonies with almost nothing underneath them, a room with no furniture in it. 'Mystic One' goes further, one voice and a piano set at a distance, and it is the record's quietest proof that the loud parts are choices.

'Psaltery' takes its name from the old stringed instrument, which tells you the record's images are older than its distortion. 'Vorago' is the best of the heavy ones: strings moan on a slow descent for the whole track and then everything collapses outward, the album's structural trick done once, properly, at full length. 'The Snake You Built' is the peak, Buford's drums and Andrews's bass giving Chen something solid to push against, and she uses all of it.

'The Stone Awakens' is the other one. Chen and LUηG trade screams back and forth until the two voices stop being separable. 'A Hundred Hands' arrives late and restates the terms: hands as the thing that makes and the thing that destroys, the same pair of facts. And 'Komorebi For Ele' closes it, named for the Japanese word for sunlight through leaves and dedicated to somebody, landing finally on what hands make rather than what they break.

This is for people who play The Body and The Bug at home, who want their extremes with a reason attached and can hold a record that is punishing and careful at once. It will lose anyone who needs a hook inside ninety seconds. The hooks exist, but they come back two days later in the shape of a low end you cannot place.

'Arrival' is the problem. The opener does architectural work, laying ground for everything after, and it does not stand as a piece; the record's first minutes are a corridor rather than a door. The run of distortion-based tracks before the two quiet ones asks for patience, and sixty-three minutes is a long stay in one weather system. The heaviness is deliberate, and sometimes it is just heavy.

The care is audible in the mix and in the guest list, and Chen finally made one entirely on her own terms after seven years of lending herself out. It gets a 4.

The tracklist

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