H.UI’s Butterfly Error Is a Tori Amos-Touched Bilingual Lullaby Haunted by Lost Selves –

H.UI constructed one of the most ornate bridges between Eastern and Western culture in her seminal single, Butterfly Error. With the ethereal grace of Tori Amos when keying piano melodies and stretching her harmonies through an expansive octave range, the breakthrough singer-songwriter drifts between dialects in the bilingual lullaby of a ballad, reflecting how what we love can feel like the most fragile phenomenon on earth when the only thing that’s certain is change.

There is a deep sense of morose melancholy lifting through the luminous layers of Butterfly Error, mourning how cards can fall against us based on even the most inconspicuous actions. Inspired by “庄周梦蝶” and the Western idea of the butterfly effect, the single turns uncertainty into introspective self-inflicted torture, inflicted by the questions we ask as we wonder which life we are living and which version of the self has been lost along the way.

As the debut single from sun in my eyes 「光过而不留」, and the first release under H.UI, Lava Hong’s new Los Angeles-based bilingual project, Butterfly Error marks an auspicious chapter for the songwriter, who used her return to voice, piano, language and storytelling as a form of healing in the aftermath of identity loss, grief, dreams, memory and a permanent vocal injury. It carries both fracture and reconstruction through double piano, close harmonies and lyric-led intimacy.

Butterfly Error is now available to stream on all major platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast