FEYXUAN is the recording project of Xuan Nguyen, a disabled fey orchestral music composer, writer-poet, and illustrator-designer. Next Month, FEYXUAN will release a new EP, Weak & Divine, on Grimalkin Records.
The record is a companion piece to The Fairies Sing Each to Each, a libretto Nguyen is publishing with Flower Press. Described as “an ambitious hybrid of opera, poetry, and prose,” the story follows a character named Amadeus Vu, a traumatized individual, as they construct their own myth via a tangled narrative of gender, monstrosity and the divine. Expect an examination of neurodivergence, chronic illness, queerness and life as an Asian American through a wildly speculative lens.
Weak & Divine explores trauma in all of its complexity, looking to madness and mythology to fill gaps in the story left by the simplified conventional view of the world. “Traumatized people are either seen as helpless innocents or conniving villains,” FEYXUAN describes:
Either you have no agency, or you do the wrong things with your agency. Either way, the narrative is taken from you. Amadeus Vu is a traumatized individual who is the creator of her own myth, seizing her origin story from her abuser, and also seizing it from all that would seek to view her through a reductive lens of absolute, binary morality.
In anticipation of the record, FEYXUAN is today releasing the lead single, ‘Lord of the Butterflies,’ a strange and surreal three minutes that could form the soundtrack to a long-lost darkly psychological and philosophical JRPG. In keeping with the ambitious storytelling of the libretto, the track is challenging and ambiguous, the dream-like repetition and droning keys lending a skewed sense of the sublime. It is a song of juxtapositions, religious imagery sitting next to the profane, the cold inhumanity of the digital next to the powerful superhumanity of the divine.
who are you? who are you?
“I am a man who will become God”
