By Jen Ho, Contributer

Maybe I don’t have it in me

To breathe in new air

To write my story

Each voice in me that breaks through

Is drowned out by the doubt I caught from you

Brooklyn-based songwriter Monica Koh, a.k.a AERI, entices you to walk down a lonesome alley with remnants of her past whispering in your ears. A silken curtain awaits for you at the end of the alley, which you gently pull aside and immediately step into the empty dark dimensional space in which she mourns a past love, floating between matter-of-fact recollection and unrestrained lamentation. 

And so begins Koh’s self-titled EP debut “AERI”, a journey of solitary grief, suffocating angst, and self-destructive toxicities from intergenerational trauma, interwoven with external voices that suppress her desires to break free. With each song at a steady pace, Koh undresses the conservative outfit that weighed her down for a lifetime, re-examines her reflection as she drops each layer to the floor, and exposes the beauty that’s been hidden underneath her whole life. She cathartically throws the layers over the cliffs, finally able to embrace the empowered and singular Queer womxn she so deserves to wear on her sleeve. 

Torna’s production work is humble, purposely leaving room for silent spaces to support each track’s introspective intention. He also finds moments to stretch his wings for some bright textures and energetic beats in “Agave” and “Rather Be.”Most notably, the atmosphere that Torna sets in “Horizon,”intertwining layers of dreamy guitar lines and synth together, brilliantly illustrates Koh’s woes of swallowing the sun with each breath. You can taste the sweet passion that’ll nourish your soul, see the peace that’ll rest your weary legs, and smell the urgency that’ll break you out of this compartment built to contain and diminish your core being.

Koh’s prowess as a songwriter is her ability to become the stream of consciousness that tends to run nonlinearly through one’s head while sitting in the subway, biking across the city, or taking the long walk to one’s destination. Real-time moments blur together as one existentially anguishes over the same details a thousand times over on where it all went wrong and where it all went right. 

Koh’s ability to deliver insight with such sincere conviction shines in the EP’s stand-out track Schönsten, a tender ballad that transports you back to a past love that you preserved and infinitely remember at its most beautiful, even if the love wasn’t infinite and meant to be. 

Quivering on each word, Koh draws you closer and closer to the sound of her breaths until the instrumental rush gently carries you back to the same dimensional space as the beginning of this EP journey. However, instead of mourning love in the dark, you’re reminiscing in a magnificent sea of softly dimmed lights that shimmer with each cherished memory. Koh finally found a home within herself, after a lifetime of searching. 

Koh makes her live performance debut as AERI tomorrow, June 7th, at the API womxn-run establishment “Hunky Dory” in Bed-Stuy, where she will be curating “Inner Dialogues”, a night of poetry & music as part of her EP release show at 7:00pm. I am simply stoked to listen to her journey up close, stripped down, and surrounded by fellow artists with ruminative stories of their own.