Nestled in a bed of mourning, in homesickness for that space between the first youthful lick of freedom and the whiplash that comes when you’re left completely on your own, comes time machine, the latest EP from Hong Kong-based musician cehryl. Breathy vocals glide over subtle, dreamlike instrumentals, seamlessly immersing you into a past to which you’re more tethered than you thought. Her enchanting EP translates to a moving photo album of her early college years, each track a high-saturation vignette blurred at the edges with the melancholy of loss.
Clocking in at just 21 minutes, the concise EP covers much of its ground through cehryl’s ability to build worlds out of small, intimate experiences. Her lyricism goes hand in hand with the integrity behind production, intention permeating each second of time machine. From the somber opening track “philadelphia,” which recalls lost friendship, to “callus,” where energetic, bouncy plucks parallel the visceral bite of “thorns and scissors and clippers,” each sonic element carries as much weight as her words. By the time you reach the EP’s closer “outside the party, inside the dream” where cehryl wishes for “sugar and honey and trust,” a waltz-like structure lulls you into a wistful rest.
Cehryl is no stranger to transience, having spent time in the UK, Los Angeles, and Boston, where she attended Berklee College of Music. After COVID-19 put tours with Jeremy Zucker and Cavetown on indefinite hold (“I do have goals to play shows again,” she discloses when asked, “still in the middle of planning and gauging the situation!”) returning to her native Hong Kong took some adjustment. She recalls being “very pessimistic and bummed about it” in the beginning. With gratitude for those who surround her, from friends and fans to her management team and label, she’s “adapted to a very different lifestyle,” which includes juggling a day job and creative pursuits while “getting my feet in the tight-knit music community.”
Though her life is markedly different now, accessing seemingly ephemeral memories of her long-ago Berklee days comes second nature to cehryl, who calls herself “sentimental and nostalgic to a fault.”
“I have no problem recentering myself to channel older feelings,” she continues. “If anything, I have a lot of problems staying present and not reminiscing.”
These emotions drive her art in all its forms. She dabbles in drawing, describing herself as “not very good” (though her Instagram highlights will tell you otherwise), edits videos on occasion, and practices photography. “I think all of these outputs come from the same place even though my drawings can feel very different to my photography, which can feel different to my music,” she says. “Through them, I’m able to explore things I am technically incapable of saying in the other mediums.”
Aptly citing Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai as an influence on her videos, she puts songs together like patchwork. It’s her innate creative eye, an intrinsic precision that allows cehryl to immortalize moments in song through the eyes of a visual artist and director: expressive and earnest; reflective, yet raw enough to remain in the moment as though no time has passed at all.
“I find that routines can deaden the magic of making anything from scratch,” she says of her songwriting process. “Sometimes it starts with a phrase of words, sometimes it starts with a melody, sometimes it’s less ‘inspired’ and it just starts with experimenting with a chord sequence. I honestly don’t really evaluate or analyze my own lyrics after I write them. My editing process is just singing through the song and changing words to make the emotion or imagery stronger, but it all feels very ‘zoomed in’ like a small-scale, nit-picky kind of editing and not a pre-planned, big picture, conceptual rubric. More economically put, my process feels very subconscious.”
It’s a stream of consciousness style kept fresh by her commitment to concrete details that keep these songs so present in their stories. “laundry” is a standout for its effortless and poignant poeticism. She invites you to find childlike wonder in yearning for the mundane, singing of a moment “three piles down in our laundry.” cehryl notes that detail is not only “writing 101,” but “memory 101.”
“Without detail, we would not have our own stories,” she explains. “A lot of my writing comes from an autobiographical intent, so each song is like a memoir.”
And that’s the beauty of cehryl’s simplicity. time machine is a collection of songs so honest, they radiate warmth and adoration in spite of sadness, or even within it. When cehryl conjures vivid stories of people who’ve come and gone, though laced with longing, they offer hope, comfort in the belief that maybe you’ve made a mark on someone else’s life as profound as the ones made on yours.
