With Old Tales Retold, the creative partnership between Yan Jun and Taku Unami achieves an exercise in the language of liminality - a sustained hesitation before the arrival or disappearance of meaning. Recorded inside the cavernous calm of Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum in late August 2025, the album is as concerned with collective memory as it is with collective forgetting. Instead of reconstructing some pristine fable, the duo dwells in the paradox: the telling is always incomplete, always more an invocation than an inventory. Rapid shifts in dynamics - moments of concentrated quiet colliding with spectral surges - leave the listener not seeking resolution but finding poise amid ambiguity.

What distinguishes this collaboration is its willingness to abandon expectations: ruptures and pauses refuse narrative momentum, while textures gather in unpredictable forms across each disc. The gestures are minimalist yet never orthodox, with environmental and acoustic sounds gently undermining the threshold between the musical and the real. You sense the presence of the museum, the weight of its air, as if the building itself was a third performer, breathing alongside the artists. Echo and residue shape the contours, inviting the audience to reflect on what has been retold - and what is always forgotten in the retelling.

There is nothing didactic here; no didactic “lesson” is proposed, and no ritual is strictly observed. Rather, each interlude and transition persistently courts instability - memory is not fixity but flux, dissolving and shifting from every angle. In this context, improvisation is not only spontaneous but a means of questioning the integrity of performance itself. The beauty is contingent, arising from the tension between precision and improvisational askew. The album’s narrative framework, if it can be called that, leans into dispersal and recombination, highlighting the space between source and echo. Rather than declaring itself with authority, Old Tales Retold invites listeners to wander the ambiguous terrain between myth and abstraction, discovering that everything retold is always, irremediably, still in flux. This is an album to sit with, to notice the subtle erosions and refractions that populate its world. The release refuses nostalgia, sidestepping simple evocation for a deeper, more enigmatic engagement with transmission and reception. In its spareness and its submerged intensity, Old Tales Retold forsakes the familiar comforts of folklore, insisting instead on the restless allure of gesture, resonant space, and untethered listening.