Joy! Twists and turns! Grimaces! Hallucinations! otay:onni is back! Chinese artist Lane Shi Otayonni hadn’t really taken the time to disappear (her two albums in collaboration with This Quiet Army were released in 2025, and her last “solo” album dates back to 2024), but still: diving back into her baroque, visceral, poetic, and simply strange universe remains a rare pleasure, if only for its uniqueness. Love is in the shit, she tells us. Not just because we’re creatures filled with hate, but quite literally: we’re also creatures filled with poop, and that’s where otay:onni finds love, redemption, beauty, and hope. Love is in the Shit comes with an alchemical-toned introduction: “This album speaks to what we cannot escape—the noise, the weight, the mess from the world, from others, from our own minds and bodies,” adding that “within the agony, here comes our process to restore, and hold on to something.” Remeber her track W.C. from the 2023 album Dream Hacker: she was already telling us something similar.
After the contemplative textures of Serpents and Shallows and Howl and Tell or the haunting piano of True Faith Ain’t Blind, Love is in the Shit immediately takes on the air of a ramshackle circus act, a theatrical piece that embraces its dissonance to find beauty within it (for example during this interlude on the first track, Have You Ever, during which the artist speaks in Tu Hua, her native dialect, which she usually reserves for private settings). The electronic and the organic blend into a visceral whole that resembles a mutated, cacophonous, industrial form of trip-hop played in a dilapidated circus. Lane Shi explains that for this album, she created and continues to shape a “a sound-distortion device that resembles a pile of turd rising from a lotus. As I twist it, the sound transforms, revealing the essence of the “shit” we receive - and how, through our own perspective, we can change it”: form meets substance!
Right away, you’re convinced: Love is in the Shit is brilliant. It’s brilliant for its ability to turn sound into a steaming, sometimes nauseating yet liberating substance, in which the artist sculpts and shapes her emotions, anxieties, and nightmares. It’s also brilliant for its offbeat, baroque humor, fully aware that its message might seem outrageous ( but let those who don't poop throw the first poop at her). Love From Survivors (we’ve included the music video below) could be Lingua Ignota who didn’t eat enough fiber—a brilliant mirage where constipation and tension evolve into a mystical, surreal ritual within which lies life, elegance, and a hypnotic fragility.
The alchemical process—the transformation of matter into spirit—draws us in. Noise, nuisance, and suffering become elevation. Poop gives life to flowers, but also, in a more figurative sense, the shit of existence infuses art. otay:onni digests a range of influences—from Björk to the The Dresden Dolls, via the furious explosions erupting from Queen Adreena’s guts—to create a beautiful piece of poop that shifts from mischievous nursery rhyme to deep sorrow. The hushed No Talent, the grandiloquent The Place: the songs follow one another, playful, stimulating, and poignant.
As if to preserve its richness, Love is in the Shit is short. Nothing is excessive, nothing is superfluous, nothing is repetitive. Almost an “album within an album,” its closing track, Tears Won’t Tell, lasts nearly as long as the rest of the album combined. This tour de force leaves us with a hypnotic ritual, a trance that blends folk sounds with electronic experiments and, through pain and intestinal turmoil, makes the listener both the shitter and the shat-upon. Love is in the poop, let’s love our poop, it is who we are, it is what we free ourselves from, it is our future, we are all just poop, otay:onni loves us.
