Lia Ouyang Rusli is a prolific film composer who has scored A24’s Sorry, Baby and Problemista, HBO’s Fantasmas and several other films. She also releases albums as OHYUNG, her ongoing solo experimental project that encompasses pummeling noise, euphoric pop and ambient drones. In March 2026, she released her second ambient album, IOWA, which was inspired by the year she spent here.
“I’ve been in New York for a while,” Rusli said. “And when my partner started going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for two years, I would occasionally visit.” At some point during this period, she played a show that was booked by Chris Wiersema, Iowa City’s premiere programmer of experimental music who died unexpectedly on March 13, 2024.
“I was like, ‘Well, perfect. Let’s line up a date in which I’m visiting, and I’ll do a show,’” she recalled. “He booked the show at Trumpet Blossom, and people were really kind and receptive to my set. Through that experience, I got to see a little bit of the music scene in Iowa City and meet some people. That, in large part, helped me realize that I could spend a significant amount of time here and be a part of its music community.”
The town sort of reminded Rusli of where she grew up — Hershey, Pennsylvania — though she feels like Iowa City has a lot more cultural things going on. She had never really imagined moving to the Midwest, but after living in New York City for a decade, it seemed like a great place to relocate for a year.
“Having FilmScene was really amazing, as someone who works in film, to be able to see art house films and constantly have things to watch,” Rusli said. “And the music scene here was very punk, very DIY and very queer. There was a lot of experimental music too, and a lot of really great artists came through.”
Growing up in Hershey, she was not exposed to much of any left-of-center music. As a teenager, Rusli listened to a lot of Top 40 radio and oldies, and some classical music. A skater kid, she mainly consumed pop-punk bands. Then she got into hip hop and started making beats on her computer in high school.
“I would try to record some rock music, but I was much more drawn to producing rap music,” Rusli said. “My setup hasn’t really evolved that much since then. I’ve always been very computer oriented. Like, up until 2021, when I did my first proper film score for Problemista, I didn’t have anything more than a laptop, really. Part of me always prided myself on having a DIY ethos and not needing a lot to make music.”
Rusli learned how to work with samples by listening to producers such as J. Dilla, RZA and Flying Lotus. She started out learning how to use GarageBand, and then her cousin taught her how to use the loop-based music production software Logic. After that, she spent all her days and nights making and recording electronic music.
“So many years later, I still am really drawn to sampling,” she said, “but I want to work with it in different ways as a film composer and as someone who’s really into experimental music. Like, how do I expand a sample and abstract it?”
Working with vocal samples led Rusli to record IOWA, an ambient album. “You get a lot of happy surprises from sampling choral music, which has such an emotional feeling because of its connection to the human voice,” she said. “But also, when you’re sampling a voice, it has its own micro-chords that shift when pairing it with synthesizers — sort of like crushing them together through compressors. I feel like it brings out some really interesting feelings.”
Rusli originally came to ambient music through revisiting sounds that she had been using in film scoring that never made it into the final cut. Her first ambient album, imagine naked!, was released in 2022, and it took a few more years to collect the sounds that made their way into IOWA.
“I went into it with this idea of being in Iowa and experiencing the political climate of Iowa,” she said. “By using Christian choral music, I was making abstract connections between Christofascist policies by chopping it up and immersing it into these soundscapes, which had a real political undertone to me.”
When Rusli starts an ambient record, she tries to assemble as many small ideas until she can figure out which ideas feel expansive enough to become songs. She steadily kept working on IOWA until it congealed as an album of interconnected compositions and soundscapes. Now that it is out in the world, Rusli has been meditating on how to make it work in live settings.
“I’m trying to figure out how to perform the album in a way that’s enjoyable for myself, because usually, if I’m going to perform, I like to go hard if I’m doing a noise show. It’s hard when I’m making an ambient record, because I don’t really think about how I’m going to perform it.”
IOWA’s final track, “memorial,” is dedicated to the memory of Chris Wiersema. Rusli described him as “a beatific figure of huge import in Iowa’s music scene and someone who was kind to our composer while their lives crossed paths.”
Wiersema brought hundreds of boundary-breaking artists to town in his myriad roles as a house show promoter, booker for local rock clubs, Mission Creek Festival programming director and founder of Feed Me Weird Things, his own deep listening series. Three weeks after his death, the Englert Theatre hosted a memorial that was attended by hundreds of people.
“Chris’s memorial made such a huge impression on me,” she said. “I could count the number of times he and I hung out on my hand. Maybe no more than five times, because I was only there for six, seven months before he passed away. But he was one of the main reasons that brought me to Iowa City. I could have seen us doing a lot of things together in the future.”
“He was just such a community-forward guy who really wanted to make a home for all the freaks and celebrate that,” Rusli added. “So, going to the memorial and seeing all these people who had been touched by things that he did in his life — and being on social media and seeing some of my favorite artists who had at some point come through Iowa City commenting — I was like, ‘Wow, his legacy is everywhere.’”
That is how Rusli’s lived experience of attending Wiersema’s memorial transmuted into “memorial,” IOWA’s closer. “I didn’t know him incredibly well in the end, but seeing how beautiful his memorial was showed me a roadmap of how to live my life, which is why I’ll always be very appreciative of the way that Chris lived his life.”
For Rusli, that roadmap includes musical output that some may say is worlds apart from the ambient stylings on IOWA. “In the future, I really want to make a pop record, like a really crazy pop record, but that is going to take a while.”
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This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2026 issue.
