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It is midsummer, the Perseid meteor shower spits its last trail of shooting stars from the center of the constellation Perseus, and from the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, within that same constellation, NASA publishes the first sonification of the sound waves emitted by a black hole through social networks for the whole world to hear.

Meanwhile, the telescope turns to Earth like a microscope and focuses on artist Yu Lin, playing her cello in the center of Cortana, in the gallery of our store at Palma among a constellation of garments, charging them with her sonic energy. Here he talks to us about music, space, nature and his project Resonant Islands.

Yu Lin means "Jade Forest" in Chinese and certainly has precious roots that stretch halfway around the globe. "My grandmother's family came from southern China, but she grew up in Vietnam. My mother is half Colombian and half Vietnamese, and grew up in Algeria and France. My father is Swiss and lived most of his life in Italy. I'm on tour looking for my next base. I was in Lisbon for seven years. I feel at home in Colombia, in Vietnam, in a specific place in Switzerland and in Italy. This year I discovered Mallorca for the first time and immediately identified with the mystical nature of the island. I can't wait to go back and explore its caves".

From this rich cultural heritage, he began to weave sounds to make music from an early age using both composition and improvisation.
"My love for cello started when I was four years old. Its enveloping sound attracted me so much that I insisted to start practicing until my parents let me start at five years old. I compose when I hear music coming in my mind and I note it down. Since I was a teenager improvising solos of manouche gypsy jazz on cello, I explored all kinds of possibilities with the instruments and still get surprised by how much is there. In many concerts I had no idea what would happen, it was pure improvisation with other musicians. Because of the deep listening of each other and the connection between us, the public thought we prepared and rehearsed long before getting on stage. I love to collaborate with artists in all genres, and create soundtracks or compose together.
Listening allows you to rest from the chatty voices in your head and to open up to different perspectives. It broadens your horizons and enriches you with stories, with life. Silence is an experience that attracts me since childhood. My ears are very sensitive so I moved to Lisbon when it was still a silent city, then moved to the forest when the city got busier. I need a lot of silence to be able to work in peace, that’s why I work best at night"

But as the Chandra X-ray telescope has revealed, silence is even difficult to find in space, previously believed to be a vacuum, but in actual fact full of tenuous gases and plasma released by stars that drifts between the galaxies in clusters, known as the intracluster medium. This can transport soundwaves and with them heat and energy. When Yu Lin transports soundwaves from her cello, she too becomes an intergalactic medium:
"Everything I express myself with comes from the same need to bring the invisible to the visible, to be a channel and transmit what I receive to humanity. Music can give you instant relief, can help you go through the hardest times. It was used as medicine since humans exist. I believe that today we’d benefit from remembering the ancestral way of experiencing music: singing and dancing together is a cathartic practice that can heal and give you a sense of connection to yourself and everything on earth. We can literally tune into the earth’s frequency (432hz) and that has physical health benefits."

For example: “The sound of the rain, makes me feel at peace and I can feel how happy nature is when it comes. I’ve played in a marble cave, in forests, and in water cisterns. The most outstanding venue I played at was inside of a 200 years old tree. It’s wood created an immense resonance. I am actually planning a tour where I’ll only play in natural caves and resonating spaces. Islas Resonantes needs a very “wet” acoustic so it brings me to unusual venues. Theatres are great to focus the attention solely on the performer, but they give you distance with the public. I prefer a setting were we are on the same level, where everyone is part of the experience.  Islas Resonantes means we all are resonating islands, in the sense that we’re not isolated in our individuality: every emotion, thought happening inside of us has an impact to the environment and people around us. It’s a call to pay attention to this constant resonance that connects us all through an ocean of frequencies.  
The point of Resonant Islands is that we are not isolated in our individuality: every emotion, every thought that happens within us has an impact on the environment and the people around us. It is an invitation to pay attention to this constant resonance that connects us all through an ocean of frequencies".
The frequencies emitted by the supermassive black hole would be imperceptible to the human ear, since they contain the lowest note in the Universe ever detected: a B-flat, something more than 57 octaves below middle C; at that pitch, its frequency is 10 million years. The lowest note detectable by humans has a frequency of one twentieth of a second. Dimensions that we can only understand thanks to music.

"Both art and music transcend time and space. With music it’s way easier to play with dimensions, since every time you play you take the listeners on a journey and it gives everyone the sensorial space to travel very far in time and space. The vibrations of colours and their combinations can also give that experience, in a silent way. I spend most of my time reducing, simplifying the information and simmering it down to the juice of it. I want to give you space to have your own experience, I just give a minimal sensorial hint. When I play, I let myself travel with the music - sometimes I go very far and come back when the live is about to end. It’s a sort of therapy for me, and hopefully for the audience too."

Each project has its own life, and tells me what it needs. Vipassana meditation and Qi Gong are practices that help me process all my experiences and digest them into art.

I cannot control my creative process; it is very spontaneous. Traveling, reading and listening to interviews opens my perception, since then it inspires me to look beyond. It's very easy to sparkle my curiosity, and when I see/hear something really intriguing I go down the rabbit hole and research everything about it. That's how I end up in remote parts of the planet.

Being a woman is something I've had to study to understand, because frankly no one tells you what incredible power there is in simply embodying a womb. It is the source of all my inspiration, as it is a direct connection to all the "dark matter" out there that sustains manifested reality. Today it is still difficult to exist as a woman, even in privileged countries and even though we are the majority of the global population. I have a performance and sculpture project about what a woman is and the sacred emptiness she carries within.

For me beauty has no gender. The feminine and the masculine are within each of us, and it's quite some work to bring them into harmony. Making space, holding space in the presence of the other is beauty".

Composer: Yu Lin Humm
Creative Director and sound: Christopher Manhey
Camera and light: Sandijs Ruluks
Interview by Victoria Macarte

It is midsummer, the Perseid meteor shower spits its last trail of shooting stars from the center of the constellation Perseus, and from the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, within that same constellation, NASA publishes the first sonification of the sound waves emitted by a black hole through social networks for the whole world to hear.

Meanwhile, the telescope turns to Earth like a microscope and focuses on artist Yu Lin, playing her cello in the center of Cortana, in the gallery of our store at Palma among a constellation of garments, charging them with her sonic energy. Here he talks to us about music, space, nature and his project Resonant Islands.

Yu Lin means "Jade Forest" in Chinese and certainly has precious roots that stretch halfway around the globe. "My grandmother's family came from southern China, but she grew up in Vietnam. My mother is half Colombian and half Vietnamese, and grew up in Algeria and France. My father is Swiss and lived most of his life in Italy. I'm on tour looking for my next base. I was in Lisbon for seven years. I feel at home in Colombia, in Vietnam, in a specific place in Switzerland and in Italy. This year I discovered Mallorca for the first time and immediately identified with the mystical nature of the island. I can't wait to go back and explore its caves".

From this rich cultural heritage, he began to weave sounds to make music from an early age using both composition and improvisation.
"My love for cello started when I was four years old. Its enveloping sound attracted me so much that I insisted to start practicing until my parents let me start at five years old. I compose when I hear music coming in my mind and I note it down. Since I was a teenager improvising solos of manouche gypsy jazz on cello, I explored all kinds of possibilities with the instruments and still get surprised by how much is there. In many concerts I had no idea what would happen, it was pure improvisation with other musicians. Because of the deep listening of each other and the connection between us, the public thought we prepared and rehearsed long before getting on stage. I love to collaborate with artists in all genres, and create soundtracks or compose together.
Listening allows you to rest from the chatty voices in your head and to open up to different perspectives. It broadens your horizons and enriches you with stories, with life. Silence is an experience that attracts me since childhood. My ears are very sensitive so I moved to Lisbon when it was still a silent city, then moved to the forest when the city got busier. I need a lot of silence to be able to work in peace, that’s why I work best at night"

But as the Chandra X-ray telescope has revealed, silence is even difficult to find in space, previously believed to be a vacuum, but in actual fact full of tenuous gases and plasma released by stars that drifts between the galaxies in clusters, known as the intracluster medium. This can transport soundwaves and with them heat and energy. When Yu Lin transports soundwaves from her cello, she too becomes an intergalactic medium:
"Everything I express myself with comes from the same need to bring the invisible to the visible, to be a channel and transmit what I receive to humanity. Music can give you instant relief, can help you go through the hardest times. It was used as medicine since humans exist. I believe that today we’d benefit from remembering the ancestral way of experiencing music: singing and dancing together is a cathartic practice that can heal and give you a sense of connection to yourself and everything on earth. We can literally tune into the earth’s frequency (432hz) and that has physical health benefits."

For example: “The sound of the rain, makes me feel at peace and I can feel how happy nature is when it comes. I’ve played in a marble cave, in forests, and in water cisterns. The most outstanding venue I played at was inside of a 200 years old tree. It’s wood created an immense resonance. I am actually planning a tour where I’ll only play in natural caves and resonating spaces. Islas Resonantes needs a very “wet” acoustic so it brings me to unusual venues. Theatres are great to focus the attention solely on the performer, but they give you distance with the public. I prefer a setting were we are on the same level, where everyone is part of the experience.  Islas Resonantes means we all are resonating islands, in the sense that we’re not isolated in our individuality: every emotion, thought happening inside of us has an impact to the environment and people around us. It’s a call to pay attention to this constant resonance that connects us all through an ocean of frequencies.  
The point of Resonant Islands is that we are not isolated in our individuality: every emotion, every thought that happens within us has an impact on the environment and the people around us. It is an invitation to pay attention to this constant resonance that connects us all through an ocean of frequencies".
The frequencies emitted by the supermassive black hole would be imperceptible to the human ear, since they contain the lowest note in the Universe ever detected: a B-flat, something more than 57 octaves below middle C; at that pitch, its frequency is 10 million years. The lowest note detectable by humans has a frequency of one twentieth of a second. Dimensions that we can only understand thanks to music.

"Both art and music transcend time and space. With music it’s way easier to play with dimensions, since every time you play you take the listeners on a journey and it gives everyone the sensorial space to travel very far in time and space. The vibrations of colours and their combinations can also give that experience, in a silent way. I spend most of my time reducing, simplifying the information and simmering it down to the juice of it. I want to give you space to have your own experience, I just give a minimal sensorial hint. When I play, I let myself travel with the music - sometimes I go very far and come back when the live is about to end. It’s a sort of therapy for me, and hopefully for the audience too."

Each project has its own life, and tells me what it needs. Vipassana meditation and Qi Gong are practices that help me process all my experiences and digest them into art.

I cannot control my creative process; it is very spontaneous. Traveling, reading and listening to interviews opens my perception, since then it inspires me to look beyond. It's very easy to sparkle my curiosity, and when I see/hear something really intriguing I go down the rabbit hole and research everything about it. That's how I end up in remote parts of the planet.

Being a woman is something I've had to study to understand, because frankly no one tells you what incredible power there is in simply embodying a womb. It is the source of all my inspiration, as it is a direct connection to all the "dark matter" out there that sustains manifested reality. Today it is still difficult to exist as a woman, even in privileged countries and even though we are the majority of the global population. I have a performance and sculpture project about what a woman is and the sacred emptiness she carries within.

For me beauty has no gender. The feminine and the masculine are within each of us, and it's quite some work to bring them into harmony. Making space, holding space in the presence of the other is beauty".

Composer: Yu Lin Humm
Creative Director and sound: Christopher Manhey
Camera and light: Sandijs Ruluks
Interview by Victoria Macarte