Yijia’s Fusion of Folk Memory and Future Beats Resonates in 'Yi The Sun'

Yijia’s “Yi The Sun” is a rare meeting point between ancestral memory and forward-facing production. The Chinese-born, London-based artist fuses elements of the Yi ethnic minority’s traditional music with ambient-psychedelic trance, creating a sound that feels at once ancient and hypermodern.

The journey to this track began years earlier. After rising to fame as a teenage pop star in China, Yijia found herself unmoored from her cultural roots. That disconnect sparked a deep dive into traditional folk music, from Mongolian throat singing to her own family’s lullabies, not as a museum piece, but as a living, evolving form.

Her inspiration for “Yi The Sun” came via a friend’s rare field recording of Yi music. The haunting resonance of the voices stayed with her, and a DNA test later revealed she was more than a quarter Yi herself. What began as curiosity became a deeply personal act of identity reclamation.

Lyrically, the track imagines a return to Earth after generations away, its refrain, "Hey, hello, is anyone home? I’ve been gone for too long”, bridging cosmic dislocation with ancestral longing. Beneath it all, a steady, modern pulse anchors the song in the present, ensuring it never drifts into pure nostalgia.

“Yi The Sun” revives the past, refracting heritage through the lens of contemporary sound design. The result is a piece of music that’s both intimate and expansive, rooted and restless.

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