9 East and Southeast Asian Digital Artists Discovering Inspiration in Speculative Fiction

By

Collin Smith

·
September 10, 2020

Digital music has traditionally had an uneasy relationship with narrative. Whereas rock was elbowing its approach into the class of “critical music” with the idea album, home and techno most well-liked to emphasise the kinesthetic utility of organized sound. Early producers typically prevented the album format totally, focusing as a substitute on 12’’ singles that might be simply slotted into DJ units, prioritizing emotional resonance over cerebral stimulation.

One notable exception, nonetheless, is digital music’s affiliation with speculative fiction, the system of literary genres that think about alternate futures and realities. From the mystic Alvin Toffler-inspired futurism of techno progenitor Cybotron to the cli-fi storyline that underpins Grimes’ most up-to-date album, there’s a wealthy custom of computer-made music meditating on the expertise that made it. Contemplating that digital music virtually by definition sounds futuristic, it’s maybe unsurprising that its creators are so typically excited about what that future will appear to be.

This custom is being made richer by the latest explosion of digital music created by East and Southeast Asian artists. Ahead-thinking labels like CHINABOT and Do Hits have established good rosters of producers both dwelling in or hailing from Asia, all of whom are placing their very own stamp on the style’s decades-long dialogue with speculative fiction. In distinction to their extra Eurocentric friends, these artists typically incorporate parts of Asian folklore and spirituality into their work, that are as prone to function guzheng or suona samples as they’re drum machines and synthesizers.

“I feel a number of musicians from East Asia are attempting to look ahead by wanting again,” says producer W.Y. Huang. “Retrieving one thing misplaced, stolen, forgotten, uncared for—cultural, philosophical, religious concepts—after which creating artwork not from the standpoint of nostalgia for the previous, however to think about prospects of the longer term.” On this approach, the work of those artists remembers Afrofuturism and different aesthetic actions that conceptualize potential futures from a non-Western cultural perspective.

Like Asia itself, the artists engaged on this work characterize a various vary of views and approaches. Whereas some use idea and narrative to craft finely-tuned social criticisms, others are motivated by a spirit of self-exploration. Others are impressed by goals, whereas nonetheless others search for an idea retroactively, as a approach so as to add dimensionality to a completed mission.

“It’s a must to put some which means into [your music], though you already know that the music is the which means,” says Howie Lee, co-founder of Do Hits and a veteran member of Asia’s digital vanguard. Ultimately, the unifying precept on this up to date wave of Asian artists is their want to make music that—to cite Aesop Rock barely out of context—“makes us smile if it sounds dope.”

Which isn’t to say that idea doesn’t matter. “Narrative in music is actually attention-grabbing and pushes the listener to look a bit additional,” says producer and CHINABOT founder, Saphy Vong, over e-mail. His remark will get to the guts of why speculative fiction’s affect on digital music has remained steadfast since its inception. There’s a pure fascination with tales that promise to inform us what the longer term will appear to be, and so long as that future is unsure, folks will all the time be motivated to look and see what they may discover.

If that’s your recreation, then whether or not you’re searching for utopian guarantees or dystopian conspiracies—or perhaps just a few nice new music—these 9 artists have you ever lined.

W.Y. Huang

The Singapore-born, Brooklyn-based producer W.Y. Huang has been engaged in a past-meets-future mission for a while, together with by means of his previous releases as Yllis on the Do Hits label. On his newest EP, Crossing The Nice Water利涉大川, Huang sheds his alias and adopts a brand new narrative method impressed by a traditional Taoist textual content, the I Ching, in addition to that textual content’s connection to binary code. The album is centered round a Taoist magic practitioner dwelling in a pc simulation and follows that character’s development to religious enlightenment.

“I attempted to attract parallels between Taoist magickal expertise and that of laptop expertise by means of the world-building inside the album,” says Huang. This world-building is accentuated by Huang’s lush manufacturing and a backing orchestra of Southeast Asian samples and subject recordings. Nevertheless, the star instrument is Huang’s delicately Autotuned vocals, which tremble and warp like a picture on the rippled floor of a reflecting pool. The impact offers Huang’s lyrics a gripping emotionality that vivifies his story’s protagonist, and that ought to discover prepared reception with followers of James Blake or Bon Iver.

Meuko! Meuko!

“A number of tales needed to come collectively earlier than I might create an entire construction and idea,” says Taiwanese artist Pon in regards to the 鬼岛 Ghost Island EP she launched as Meuko! Meuko! One in all these tales is the “Dreamscape” included within the liner notes to her EP’s Bandcamp web page, which got here to Pon after recording the one “Ghost Island” and have become the work’s main conceptual basis. This narrative snippet’s surreal backdrop of city imagery and spiritual symbolism are manifested sonically on the album’s assortment of claustrophobic soundscapes, during which ritual chanting and ceremonial horns battle for house amongst a dense patchwork of commercial noise and footwork-inspired sub-bass.

Lafidki

The longer term isn’t all flying automobiles and gleaming metropoles. On Derichan, Saphy Vong appears to be like on the darker facet of growth underneath his inventive moniker Lafidki, shining a lens on the Cambodian homeland that his household left as political refugees throughout the Khmer Rouge regime. “Cambodia can’t cease constructing nonsense costly buildings only for the wealthy,” says Vong. “Folks [are] nonetheless [living] in slums, however on the identical time everyone makes use of a smartphone. Wi-fi is all over the place, however you’ll be able to’t drink the faucet water.”

Vong employs Cambodian folklore to discover these techno-capitalist disparities, equivalent to on observe “Poan Pasda,” which references the parable of the “banana tree ghost” that may invade houses if its namesake tree is shut sufficient to their home windows. Vong’s retelling imagines a world during which the ghost has been displaced by deforestation, draping scintillating synth riffs over ominously gradual cymbal-like crashes to create an environment that’s concurrently summary and evocative. “I’ve by no means discovered the way to play music formally, so I must think about one thing,” Vong explains. “From all of the ghost tales I heard from my dad and mom, I attempted to visualise them.”

Alex Wang

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Heavy steel wasn’t born in China, however the style has such a faithful following there that one might argue it’s up for adoption. Alex Wang channels his personal steel fandom into the darkish, combative atmosphere of 0%, which additionally takes cues from online game soundtracks and the dystopian writings of Aldous Huxley. The ensuing album is post-apocalyptic in each aesthetic and idea, however Wang emphasizes that the previous preceded the latter. “The idea behind 0% is extra a device to assist folks perceive it,” he says. “The sound of the album got here first.” That sound comes out clearly on songs like “Snow Falls within the Desert,” the place pugilistic percussion trades blows underneath the unnervingly distorted wails of fellow Chinese language songstress YEHAIYAHAN.

Jaeho Hwang

Jaeho Hwang’s first EP on CHINABOT, Non​-​self 비자아 , was born out of an id disaster characterised by disillusionment together with his main profession as a visible artist. Discovering music manufacturing helped reorient him, notably the normal music of his native Korea. Non​-​self 비자아 deconstructs these classic sounds and merges them with the darker membership rhythms Hwang would hear round his adopted metropolis of London, a synthesis that displays his personal multicultural background. “Once I play with very previous Korean sounds, and I’m making one thing extra up to date, experimental digital sounds, I really feel like, ‘Oh! that is likely to be me. That in all probability presents myself.’”

The EP itself appears to current a various set of identities, shifting from the clarion immediacy of should-be membership banger “Transience” to the extra textured ambient of closing observe “Trying Again.” Hwang truly used lack of consistency as a conceptual lodestar, taking inspiration from the Buddhist concept of anatta, which stipulates that each one identities are in a relentless state of flux. “So there’s no purpose to have an id disaster,” he quips.

Howie Lee

“I used to be simply wanting randomly, after which I noticed ‘tiandi buren‘ and thought, ‘That is it’,” says Howie Lee in regards to the naming course of for his newest album. The title references a Taoist idea asserting that nature is ambivalent to the destiny of humanity, however the randomness with which Lee selected it’s presumably extra illustrative of the album’s tenet. The songs on the album draw from the mid-set improvisation that Lee frequently works into his DJing, in addition to a latest fascination with jazz and stay instrumentation. In consequence, change is principally the one fixed on 天地不仁 Tiān Dì Bù Rén, inviting listeners to a fluid world the place Manchurian palatial dance throwdowns will abruptly pause to include the surprising introduction of a Spanish guitar. “Numerous random issues in all probability look unhealthy at first,” Lee expounds. “Typically you get [into a] automobile crash, however , it might be factor. I feel that’s what 天地不仁 Tiān Dì Bù Rén is speaking about.”

Duck Battle Goose

This Shanghai band first gained regional renown with an eclectic model of electro-infused math rock earlier than embracing old skool home on their sophomore album CLVB ZVKVNKT 未来俱乐部 (the English identify is unimaginable to recollect—simpler to make use of its Chinese language title, which interprets on to “Future Membership”). Two of its members, Han Han and 33, have gone on to make a few of China’s most forward-thinking dance music as Gooooose and 33EMYBW respectively, whereas sometimes reuniting to create disarmingly nice piano-driven electronica.

CLVB ZVKVNKT 未来俱乐部 ostensibly follows a cyborg protagonist’s quest to discover a legendary membership the place people/machines/aliens can all occasion collectively in peace. In an interview with the Chinese language music web site Woozy, Han Han explains that Duck Battle Goose truly adjusted the album’s BPM development to suit this narrative arc, transferring from the modish up-tempo breakbeats of album opener “五差别 detached” to the languid haze of the hero’s ultimate resting place on “幸运星 fortunate star.” There’s an entire lot between these two factors although, from Derrick Might-style piano vamps to Manu Dibango interpolations to (apparently) synthetic nano-tech zombies.

Yen Tech

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Nick Newlin is a rapper, however his debut album as Yen Tech doesn’t all the time sound like a rap album. The Korean-American MC/producer typically appears extra like he’s preventing together with his beats than rapping over them. It’s a becoming aesthetic for an album loaded with references to spaceships, drones, and a normal sense of dystopian paranoia that performs effectively with Newlin’s maximalist entice manufacturing. The tense vitality on Mobis is so penetrating that when Newlin’s voice lastly breaks by means of the maelstrom to sing-screech the question “How can we survive?,” you’ll be able to virtually really feel the missile lock snapping into place behind you.

Soulspeak

After all, it’s potential—although laborious to think about in our present context—that the longer term may simply be a number of enjoyable. This may appear to be the opinion of Jeff Kai-Luen Liang, aka Soulspeak, the Beijing-via-L.A. producer who teamed up with Australian trumpeter TTechmak for the collaborative album Love In The Land Of Robots. In Soulspeak and TTechmak’s world, there’s no strife between man and machine, simply eight tracks of pure ear sweet. The 2 artists’ inventive synergy is unimaginable to overlook on tracks like “Not Right here,” the place TTechmak’s ethereal trumpet melodies glide mellifluously atop Soulspeak’s crisp juke beats.