DIS FIG

One mouth: a choir, a whisper, a scream, often within the same bar. That is Dis Fig, the project of Felicia Chen, who began in school choirs before New York's DIY noise scene and Berlin's experimental electronic underground got hold of her. Her first solo album PURGE (Purple Tape Pedigree, 2019) was catharsis pointed inward, and collaborations followed: In Blue with The Bug (Hyperdub, 2020) and Orchards of a Futile Heaven with The Body (Thrill Jockey, 2024). Seven years after PURGE comes What To Make Of These Mortal Hands (Thrill Jockey, 2026), ambitious, merciless, and unexpectedly tender, an album about what hands can make and what they can wreck, with a poet as narrator and Lee Buford of The Body and Liam Andrews of BIG|BRAVE among the guests.

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Chen has described the music as a womb-like chamber built from sound, a portal with a guide who takes your hand and leads you in carefully, and the sound design keeps that promise. Sub-bass heavy enough to move furniture shares the space with a voice pushed beyond recognition, and then the floor is taken away and what remains is that voice alone with a distant piano, or stacked harmonies with almost nothing underneath. Strings moan on a slow descent until everything collapses outward. The weight is a way of making room for you, and the quiet passages prove that the extremity is a choice.

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WHAT TO EXPECT

Dis Fig plays A COLOSSAL WEEKEND 2027 with a drummer, which gives the electronics a pulse that can be struck and the voice a partner to answer. A voice that can sink to the edge of hearing and then rise into a shriek now has a rhythm played by hand beneath every swing between softness and violence, and the low end has a drum kit to push against. On a stage the invitation arrives in person, whispered, chanted, or screamed.