Silvia Pietrosanti, PENTATONE’S Label Director shares her thoughts on Yang Bao’s MADLANDS:
“MADLANDS is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. It feels less like an album and more like a place you enter quietly and simply be. From the first notes, I sensed something rare and tender: a space suspended between memory and the future.
Yang Bao’s music breathes. The piano is intimate, while the strings and analog synthesizers feel sometimes protective, sometimes unsettling. I first played it as background, and before I knew it, I had stopped everything else and was fully listening, feeling the music with my whole body. There is a tension between warmth and cold, hope alongside anxiety, and somehow, I found comfort in it.
Bao’s work reimagines identity and belonging in a world where human, machine, and nature coexist in a delicate symbiosis. Yet it does even more: the music doesn’t argue about artificial intelligence or ecological collapse, it just feels them. Moments stretch and suspend, as if time itself is holding its breath. Bao pairs this sonic vision with his own striking artwork, reflecting the duality of the visible and the invisible: a perfect mirror for the music’s fragile, immersive beauty.
MADLANDS is out now digitally and physically on CD.
