Carolyn Fok was in Los Angeles, cleaning out her late father’s house, when she discovered the statue of a woman, reclining in a seductive pose amidst the odds and ends stored in a dark room. She shined a flashlight through nearby glass and snapped a photo for what would become the cover of Calamity of Beauty, her latest album as Cyrnai. 

Fok, who is also a visual artist and writer, refers to these kind of moments as “found experience.” As a child,  she found a drum machine that her father made and began playing around with it. “He didn’t give it to me, I just found it and I found a lot of things,” Fok says on a recent video call. “He would leave secondhand instruments in the living room and I started putting things together as a teen, so finding this statue was like, oh, did he want me to find this too?”