Transcendent Phoenix, the debut album from Lucina Yue, is one of compelling beauty, in music and in sound.
Yue plays the konghou, an ancient Chinese instrument that resembles the harp. (She is also proficient on the guzheng.) As she noted to me, “Transcendent Phoenix explores the sound and expressive possibilities of the konghou, in a dialog with Western instruments and contemporary composition…with a strong emphasis on high-quality recording and audiophile sound.” (The album was released in 2025, but I found out about it recently.)
I’ll get ahead of myself and say the musicianship is masterful and the sound is magnificent.
Lucina Yue was born in Xinjiang, China, and now resides in New York City. Among her numerous achievements, she’s the first Chinese konghou player to appear at Madison Square Garden (in 2018), and has won many awards for her performance and compositional talents. Transcendent Phoenix is a musical suite of eight pieces, encompassing themes of transformation and rebirth through metaphors of fire, ice, earth, and nature, as expressed through musical elements. These pieces, which blend aspects of traditional and contemporary Chinese and Western tonalities while sounding entirely of their own, were composed by Dongqing Fang, Tian Tian, and Sam Wu.
Lucina Yue is accompanied by a superb group of musicians on cellos, percussion, harps, double bass, and piano in various configurations. She has four solo pieces for konghou, “Flute and Drum at Sunset (Flowery Moonlit River in Spring,)” “Blue Light Opens Dream’s Shadow,” “The End of Snow is Nirvana,” and the album’s stately closing piece, “Earth.”
Lucina Yue. Courtesy of the artist.
Transcendent Phoenix was recorded in Water Music Recording Studio, The Bunker Studio Samurai Hotel Recording Studio and Engine Room Audio by recording engineer Shao-Ting Sun with Hsin-Hwa Tai and Ernesto Valenzuela assisting. It was mastered by Alan Silverman and Sharon Hurvitz. According to Yue, a number of vintage microphones were used in a “proprietary secret microphone array developed within the tradition of Carnegie Hall recording director Leszek Wojcik.”
I listened to the UHQCD, vinyl, and via streaming. (The UHQCD, for Ultimate High-Quality CD, uses a special polymer claimed to enable a more accurate pit shape, and, like the Anne Bisson Guilty Pleasures album reviewed in Issue 229, the superlative sound quality seems to bear that out.)
Before hearing the album, I knew nothing of the konghou. Ms. Yue educated me: the konghou superficially looks like a Western harp, but has a double row of strings. Each pair of strings is connected by a balanced lever to a centrally-positioned resonant box. The strings’ vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to the body of the konghou, and out through its sound holes. Because each pair of strings is connected by a balanced lever, plucking one string changes the effective string length of its counterpart. As the lever returns to equilibrium, both strings return to their original tension and pitch. As they do so, the pitch subtly fluctuates. (Please refer to the addendum at the end of this review for more detail.)
The instrument has a richer, deeper tone and texture than other plucked instruments. Yue is able to get a konghou string to sustain a great deal, and, combined with the superb miking of the instrument, Transcendent Phoenix offers an incredible immersive soundspace where notes are plucked, bloom, and decay with a gorgeous resonance. The konghou has a natural-sounding tonality, as do the other instruments.
The bowing of the cellos sounds sumptuous against the plucked nature of the konghou, as heard in the album’s first two pieces, “Ice and Fire: A Dance of Ice,” and “Ice and Fire: A Dance of Fire.” The piano on the dreamlike, contemplative “Blue Light Opens Dream’s Shadow” has palpable body and weight (as does the low-pitched drum). The percussion can be quick with incisive “snap,” or startlingly loud, as on “Yartsa Gunbu: Winter Worm,” a demonstration-quality track. Here, Yue plays the konghou with a plectrum (pick) rather than with her fingers, creating a unique sound that contrasts interestingly with the harp. The recording quality is so good that you can distinctly hear the variation in every single string pluck. Incredible.
The recording is very dynamic. The quiet parts are exquisite – you can “see” deeply into the sound. The loud parts are powerful, and the percussion can go really deep. At times, the music just swells and breathes. Sometimes, notes just float in space. It’s amazing how a great musician can play just one note – Miles, Beck, Garcia – and it’s so pure and perfect that the note is a world in itself.
Ultimately, the beauty of the music and sound of Transcendent Phoenix, and the sublime artistry of Lucina Yue and her musicians is simply captivating, the kind of music that goes beyond thinking or analysis or trying to describe it adequately. When music is on this level, it’s difficult to put into words. Well, I’ll try: spellbinding.
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Engineer Shao-ting Sun gave me information about the recording of Transcendent Phoenix. It was recorded using PCM at a 96 kHz/24-bit depth through a vintage Neve 8088 console. The main microphone array employed the Strauss Packet configuration, which electrically combines an omni and cardioid mic in phase to create a “wide cardioid” pickup pattern. The omnis were Microtech Gefell M296s, with Neumann KM140 cardioids. Neumann U67 and vintage KM84 mics were used for close micing.
Sun noted, “Since the konghou was a very new instrument to me, I actually put [up] a lot more mics than I was supposed to [use]. For room mics, I put up four options; close room (DPA 4006), mid room (Schoeps MK2H), far room (Neumann KM130 “tall” room (Schoeps MK21). I picked and mixed different configurations of the mics during the sessions, and applied very minimal reverb effects through the tall and far room mics. The big tracking room with wooden construction became relatively important to this type of recording. We tried really hard to carefully to make the sound right, the most ideal way to play and capture the konghou in a big studio.”
He continued, “Konghou is a double string-layered instrument, making it quite challenging to record. A main microphone array is a must, because if you’re standing or sitting right in front of the instrument, you will hear natural stereophonic effects. However, the sustain is super long – if we didn't stop or mute it, it [would] ring more than 15 seconds or even much longer for lower notes. So the decision-making of the placement of the instrument itself as well the miking position was very, very important and it took us a long time to [balance] the resonance between the room and the instrument’s sound hole, and the harmonics and the tonal expression that needed to be captured and created sonically to make it sound good.”
Because the album was recorded in different studios, Sun had to re-balance the sound each time, though he used the same microphones and signal chain as much as possible.
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Addendum: Transcendent Phoenix in Detail
For those who want take a deeper dive into the album, the following was provided to me in an e-mail from Lucina Yue.
The recording of this album features precise spatial imaging, especially in the solo tracks. Listeners are encouraged to pay attention to the exact location from which each note appears to be played. For example, low frequencies often appear in the lower right of the listening field, while high frequencies are frequently perceived in the upper left, as if listening directly in front of the performer. At times, even within the same register, the left and right hands alternate rapidly, creating dynamic spatial movement. This not only offers a highly engaging listening experience but also serves as a test of system setup and imaging accuracy.
The eight tracks on this album each possess distinct stylistic characteristics, employing different performance techniques on the konghou to produce a wide range of tonal colors.
From an acoustical perspective, the konghou is fundamentally different from the harp; it is closer to a zither, yet even this zither-like structure differs from the guzheng, another traditional Chinese instrument, in its sound production mechanism.
Because each pair of strings is linked by a balanced lever, plucking one string causes a corresponding change in the effective string length of its counterpart. As the lever returns to equilibrium, both sides restore their original tension, string length, and pitch. During this process, the pitch on both sides undergoes subtle fluctuations, resembling the traditional Chinese ornamentation technique known as “yin” (a very subtle vibrato-like oscillation).
The konghou also allows for a minor-second glissando. Harmonic-based vibrato effects are also possible. However, once the string is heavily vibrated, the pitch tends to become unstable. From both the physical design and the aesthetic character of the instrument, extensive vibrato is not ideal; therefore, Lucina Yue’s konghou performance generally avoids frequent use of vibrato.
In the performance approach of Lucina Yue, combined with the recording technique realized by Shao-Ting Sun, the sustain of a single konghou string can extend up to 13 seconds. As a result, no artificial reverberation is required. The natural overlap of sustained tones during performance creates a rich, organic reverberant field. Particularly within the context of the Chinese pentatonic modal system, this resonance produces a distinctive sense of solemnity characteristic of traditional Chinese musical aesthetics.
When played with the fingers, the konghou and the harp differ significantly in string material, string tension, and playing technique. Even when performing the same piece, applying harp technique to the konghou can cause displacement of the sound-guiding bridge. When the finger leaves the string, the bridge may be bounced back against the resonating body by the string, producing an impact noise that results in a flatter tone with unwanted artifacts. The relatively lower string tension makes performance feel like running on sand – speed becomes harder to increase, and tone production and dynamic control are more difficult to manage. Playing the konghou requires a kind of refined, controlled touch, similar to flicking a coin across the surface of water.
The konghou can also be played with plectrums. Different plectrum thicknesses produce different tonal colors. In this album, three different plectrum thicknesses are used, as well as natural fingernail technique. The double-row string structure allows harmonics to appear in paired form, a technique that is entirely impossible on the harp. Precisely because of this double-row design, arpeggios on the konghou also differ fundamentally from harp arpeggios.
The presence of the sound-guiding bridge also introduces a layer of subtle mechanical noise beneath the tone – an acoustic effect that cannot be achieved on the harp.
We recorded the piece “Yarza Gunbu: Winter Worm”” to highlight these differences. In this work, four concert harps, one konghou, two percussionists, and one double bass are placed together, creating a clear sonic comparison between harp and konghou timbres. In particular, the first movement, “Winter Worm,” makes extensive use of plectrum technique on the konghou, making its timbre easily distinguishable from the harp. In the second movement, “Yarza Gunbu: Summer Grass,” the konghou shifts toward extensive finger technique, resulting in a transformed sonic character and a different musical trajectory. In the climactic improvisational section, bridge-borne noise is deliberately introduced to enhance the atmospheric intensity.
Courtesy of the artist.
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