Crush EP

Born and raised in Fukuoka Prefecture, schooled in California, USA (her mom’s homeland), now based in Amsterdam, Golin is Lin Suemitsu, a Japanese-American producer and singer, as well as dancer and choreographer. The latter two disciplines seem to inform the first two, as she delivers her distorted and idiosyncratic version of the exquisitely frivolous modern pop of her father’s country of origin. Familiar structures fall away, or even apart, as she applies a contemporary dancer’s sense of sensuality, intuition, and unpredictability to these slippery, mercurial confections. Her vocals are of particular interest… singing in both English and Japanese, she feeds her voice through Auto-Tune to emulate the uncanny artificiality of the Vocaloid app, the essential ingredient of the amateur hobby pop churned out by legions of young male urban hermits in Japan. Between these factors and a visual presence informed by anime – the warped, almost post-human physicality of it, not the silly cosplay – Golin’s ersatz J-pop is celebratory and subversive at the same time.