Performances

• 2023

  Soundbites: Fresh Perspectives

  Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music

• 2023 (Premiere)

  Spectra 2023 Sounding Climate Change

  Universiti Teknologi MARA (Shah Alam)

Shorelines – a very common geographical sight around maritime Southeast Asia. Within the same region, the gong chime culture is omnipresent, with each region bearing their own unique characteristics, such as the gamelan, kulintang, and further out, the piphat. Yet in Singapore, a centrally located island city-state, these gone chimes seem almost alien to us.

In many of these cultures, music is created through a sophisticated system of stratified polyphony, where many related individual lines interact with one another within the musical textures. I used this concept to create a double oxymoron in the title. It presents the illusion that a nearby coastline may be miles away. It also symbolises the exoticism of gamelan in Singapore despite our location.

To this end, I often pondered about Singapore’s relationship with the gong chime culture. I turned to the electronic medium to express the technological advanced and youthful arts landscape. The cultural confluence in the multicultural landscape also presents an opportunity to superimpose different gong chime sets together, and in this piece, using samples from the Javanese, Balinese, and Sundanese gamelan. Who knows what results might come from such an experiment?