Summer – Reflect and Forward

This is the first blog post of this academic year, my final year here on Sound Arts. Here we are, arriving at the last stops of my degree. This post will document my summer and ideas I have for how will I develop and learn in this important year.

This summer has been long. It felt long. I decisively made myself focusing on me and nothing else. Didn’t do anything work related, not really seeing friends. Just most of the time alone, on my own, contemplating. I went through a horrible breakup and I was devastated, massive doubts on myself. And I decided I need to be alone and go cold turkey on anything that consumes my time: social media, films and TV, and sudoku. I started writing daily journals to document these complicated feelings that I have. Massive, bulky, heavy feelings that I didn’t know how to untangle or explain. I stopped after a month because it starts to go nowhere (I will elaborate another time), but that was really helpful for a while to comb out these knots.

Soon came September, and I jumped back in right away. I couldn’t be more done with where I was mentally. I have spent time on it, and I am ready to do things again. Not in a way that I abandoned the summer, but in a “I can live with it” way. I am excited about school, excited to get it over with. I am excited to go out and perform again and work on amazing projects. I started rehearsing a piece for the artist Bianca Scout, which we performed on the 2nd of October in South Bank Centre. I started working in Resonance Extra. More projects are in contemplation and more performances are coming.

For this Portfolio unit in particular, I have lots of ideas that I want to develop and expand. these includes: a pop album, another opera, a performance, a radio show, and many many more. I started to think where I wanna be when I graduate in a year’s time, and I think this is the year where I focus on getting my work done as a singer-songwriter regardless of forms and genres. And for the first one to come along. I think I am going to develop another opera, which would be considered also as a radio show. I have started working in the radio station as mentioned, and I am currently trying to see if I can get a two week residency there to work on this project. The idea is that I will develop and record this piece called “Swan Song” there in the studio, and do several broadcast in return.

The piece is about a MI5 agent swan that belongs to the late Queen in 1986, when she came to Hong Kong on a tour along the Queen. Unfortunately the Queen died during the tour, which created a sticky situation for the spy swan, where the swan would meet a local moth who turns out to be a communist. The story is ultimately about a domesticated swan trying to find her own identity after the Queen’s death, in correlation to me as a colonised person trying to find my voice in a post-colonialism world.

This project will include my exploration with Cantonese, as well as an experiment into creating new Hong Kong folk music that belongs to the people but not as a musical style. Also given the context of a radio show, how do I imagine radio as a medium, and how do I tell a story over it. The project will hopefully ended up being an album and released sometime next year, after the residency taken place, when I can further develop, edit, and produce it.