BolisPupul didn’t plan to construct his debut solo album, Letter To Yu, around a letter to his late mother. The thought still hadn’t crossed his mind 10 years later, when he first visited her native Hong Kong, but the wheels were set in motion on that trip. “I had the reflex to grab my phone and write down what I wanted to say to her,” he remembers. “I needed that closeness, the feeling of proximity with my mom.” Pupul makes an irreverently framed but carefully curated strain of dance music that contains in its DNA the early experiments of Kraftwerk, the new beat grooves of his native Belgium, the techno and house of the ‘80s American midwest, and the latter genre’s French variants in the ‘90s and ‘00s. “Letter To Yu” is a grand, slow march, but the album is an upbeat affair overall, pulling on the same uplifting electronic threads Pupul has used in the past. The experimental dance artist discusses transmuting grief and cosmic coincidence into joyful dance music on his upcoming albu...