Ghosts of Shanghai in Electric Bloom: Adai Song’s Sonic Journey

There is something almost alchemical about “The Bloom Project,” the new album by Adai Song (also known as her electronic moniker ADÀI), a Beijing–NYC musician who chooses to treat tradition not as relic, but as living flesh.

The record presents itself as a feminist reawakening of shidaiqu, that smoky 1920s Shanghai fusion of jazz lounges, cigarette smoke, sequined qipao silhouettes, and hushed midnight gossip. But Song does not merely resurrect the era; she folds it into the present, welding it with EDM’s pulse, pan-Asian sonic textures, and the celestial aura of her voice. It is less revival than reincarnation.

The opening track, ‘A Lost Singer,’ feels like a ceremonial unveiling. Song steps forward with a confidence that is not loud, but luminous. The violin, her lifelong companion, enters like a thread of memory, something ancestral, familiar, almost mythic. The beat pulses warmly, rounded at the edges, vaporous and soft-focused, making language irrelevant. Her voice is star-chime and incense smoke, the echo of a geisha-story whispered through a paper door at dusk. There is power in this softness, a deliberate claiming of space not through volume, but through presence.

‘Night Shanghai’ shifts the frame. The piece carries a narrative lightness, a nostalgic sway, yet beneath the surface is a subtle melancholy, like watching old city lights reflected in rainwater. The dance is playful, childlike even, but shadowed.

By the time we reach ‘Make Way’ and ‘I, I Want,’ Song begins to bend genre more aggressively. 80s synth-pop shimmer slides against rap cadences delivered with a clarity that could slice glass. The music here becomes cinematic, neon, dense urban architecture, strangers brushing shoulders in a city that never asks your name.

‘Carmen 2025’ is where East meets West not as contrast, but as collision; opera ghost-echoes, modern club heat, a sensorial delirium. ‘Wuxi Tune’ is perhaps the album’s emotional apex: jazz-laced, tender, glimmering like a memory you forgot you lived. When the drum’n’bass textures break in, the dream snaps, but gracefully, like waking to daylight through sheer curtains.

The closing tracks, ‘Wild Thorny Molihua’ and ‘River Run,’ are sensual, languid, fragrant. They bloom slowly, like perfume warmed on skin. They leave you not with answers, but with atmosphere, lush, erotic in the way longing itself is erotic.

“The Bloom Project” is not simply an album; it is a cultural séance, a reclamation, a remembering. Adai Song sings not just for the past or the present, but for the continuum between them. And she makes it feel alive.