‘Holy Palm’ is the debut album by Flora Yin-Wong, an artist, writer, DJ and journalist, summoning the ghosts of her life in a masterful meditation on metaphysics, superstition and memory. It’s part collage, part audio diary, part reflection; a sort of private ritual purification. Following her mesmerising turn on PAN’s ‘Mono No Aware’ comp and a string of acclaimed, wildly varying productions and mixes in recent years, ‘Holy Palm’ appears like a woven tapestry of interconnecting recollections, rendered with and around an extensive repository of field recordings made over the past 6 years.

Deploying production strategies ranging from Max processing to sharp/stitched collage work, Flora filters and tiles aural snapshots of far-flung places - from an abandoned Arctic settlement in Svalbard, to an accidental recording of a monk chanting prayers on a radio in rural Chania, Crete, and drug-fuelled Tokyo club scenes - into an uncanny investigation of how ritual punctuates and gives meaning to life.

With an abundance of references, each piece toys with the imagination’s sense of place; memory is permeable, plasmic and recalled here through abstract, textured sound design. The 10 original compositions flicker to hallucinatory effect, brooding with a dark soul as traces of gamelan intersect ghost radio signals from the Arctic and a windswept Dungeness; real, unreal, surreal.

The final pair of extended ‘Loci’ parts present the source material at its rawest and most suggestive, with fleeting grime & jungle car stereo blasts seeping into Indonesian street scenes, insects in rice paddy fields, the Chicago subway, thunderstorms, yangqin recordings; gongs, Mariah Carey, a Greek wedding in Thessaloniki, crickets at night, running water, fire safety training, a street festival in Buenos Aires, bubbles, whale calls on a boat in Tromso, wind chimes on a mountain on Teshima Island - snagged in imperceptible transitions that mirror delirious, unfathomable impermanance.

In effect ‘Holy Palm’ perceptively outlines the uncanny magick in the rift between the real world and faith- based beliefs, hyperstizing a personalised, syncretic book of sonic spells.