Across Every Ocean, I Am Holding On to You (2024)
Program Notes
I. I Swam Through the Warmth of the Water to Meet You, Rain Iridescent Pouring Onto Our Foreheads (0:00-1:30)
II. There Were Moments Where I Felt As If You Held Me with the Hand of God (1:30-4:00)
III. Past the Trees, I Pedaled—Towards the Place Where We Met Again and Again (4:00-8:09)
As the name suggests, Across Every Ocean, I Am Holding On to You animates the process of attempting to maintain human connection with each other across the many ‘oceans’ that may keep us apart: our hearts are oceans, our own traumas are oceans; arguments, miscommunications, upbringings, cultures, physical distance, even the cell phone lies prominently among the oceans that we must traverse in our constant journeys to reach one other. The 3-movement piece takes heavy inspiration from Sweet Trip’s “International” and “To All the Dancers of the World, A Round Form of Fantasy” from their 2003 album Velocity:Design:Comfort. Each movement and its title depict different stages & memories of a friendship divided by oceans, longing for a reunion someday.
The piece features voice-memos and recordings with friends. I wrote this piece as a letter to friend who I felt I have swam through many oceans with together. I have often struggled to express myself in words or writing; one day, I recorded us talking and playing music together, and afterwards, captured this conversation:
“It’s so stupid how music is better way for me to communicate with people than words.”
To which my loving friend replied: “I don’t think it’s stupid—I think it’s lovely.”
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The first movement utilizes various percussion textures like shell trees and cymbal scrapes which are processed live along with an ambient synthesizer patch foreshadowing recurring harmonic progressions, calling to the amniotic feeling of the intro of “International".
The second movement features heavy use of granular synthesis, bird-like violin chirps, an augmented Ableton Live drumkit, and a very simple & austere sawtooth organ synthesizer which holds everything together, at first echoing the sound of a ringing phone. This section builds with feedback samples generated from a self-oscillation Erbe-Verb eurorack reverb module, an OP-1, and more string textures, before transitioning into an organ-like pad underscoring a heartfelt conversation with my friend.
The third and final movement explodes into a rock-inspired high-energy soundscape which heavily showcases the drumset and violin, this time with a shoe-gaze style distortion of a piercing scream. The previously mellow pad textures open up to full blast, with a bass-line and sparkly arpeggios which are both performed live by the keyboard player. The electric mallet player accompanies with a distorted harmony guitar counterpoint. The last section after the breakdown serves as a long vamp during which all members are free to improvise and take solos while the chord progression is repeated.
This piece was commissioned by Pathos Trio and premiered in May of 2024 at Lincoln Center. The provided recording is a DAW-mockup of the piece with the trio’s parts fully produced by myself, with me playing the violin part. An official recording and release of the record with Pathos Trio’s performance of the parts is scheduled for 2025.
Instrumentation
violin, electronics, tape; Scott Li
augmented drum set; Felix Reyes
electronic mallets, shell tree, cymbals; Marcelina Suchoka
synthesizers; Will Healy
Listen from 4:55-6:36 and 1:30-3:00
Free Improvisation in C Major (2024)
Compositional Notes
I began constructing this monodic performance system in January of 2024 in preparation for my first hour-long improvised live-performance set as a solo performer. My vision was to create a fully controllable harmonic soundscape that could become a bed for a melodic voice to occupy while retaining the responsiveness and wholeness of, say, an improvised solo organ piece, but with even more control over textures, musical gestures, and sonic palette.
I ended up with this foot pedal controlled system which allows me to operate series of different instrument tracks: granular synthesizers in Ableton playing back + processing particular samples of my own violin and cello playing; the Make Noise 0-Coast playing the bassline, which is self-oscillating through FM/additive synthesis. Various parameters ranging from volume & sample position to distortion & harmonics levels are distributed across a different fader-based midi controller for easy access while performing. Some pre-programmed harmonic voicings are mapped to each foot pedal, freeing my hands to play melodic instruments while performing harmony changes as I please. As it is, the system is extremely modular and is intended to be tailored per performance—it’s possible to incorporate and live loop samples from a mic captured live, play violin instead of synthesizers, and program even more textural possibilities and even different sets of harmonies to switch between with the pedal controller.
In this particular recording, I begin with the OP-1, then introducing and tweaking the foot pedal system, then going back to OP-1 and finally to the Reface CS, each time marking a large emotional turning point in the music.
With this degree of flexibility in controlling what is normally an elaborate, fixed, through-composed tonal soundscape created in a DAW like Ableton, I hope to achieve an greater expressive freedom that removes the many layers of translation between my heart, sound, and others’ hearts, ultimately with the goal of achieving a kind of “sonic love letter” with the same sonic depth as a piece with a “full” arrangement that I could spend weeks or months composing. In this case, the recipient was a friend watching this performance live over video call on their birthday.
Instrumentation/Equipment
Ableton Live-DSP including:
Granulator V2, Sampler with
MIDI Foot Pedal Controller
Keith McMillen K-Board
Novation LaunchControl XL
Hardware Synths:
Make Noise 0-Coast
Yamaha Reface CS
OP-1 Field
Listen from 2:57-5:35 (volume warning!)
a glow of the heart (2021)
a glow of the heart is an original experimental short film that was shot, edited, and scored by me, with original poetry adapted from a piece of my writing inspired by Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000). The text features excerpts from dialogue in Yi Yi, Arseny Tarkovsky, the wikipedia article about Clive Wearing, Jonas Mekas’ As I Was Moving Ahead, Ocassionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, and dear writer friends Claire Zhang & Tiff Tong.
This film is a love letter concerning memory, loss, grief, and the Ether (from All About Lily Chou Chou). It served me as a conduit for processing acceptance of queer identity, familial/relational strife, with referential Chinese cultural symbolism to melancholic depictions of abstracted fruits such as persimmons and celestial bodies (月亮代表我的心 “The Moon Represents My Heart”).
The provided sample is a live performance version of the piece of only the score, performed on May 16th, 2024. View the original film here. View the full piece of writing here.
On The Eastern Horizon, The Sun Sets (2024)
On the Eastern Horizon, the Sun Sets (2024) is a work-in-progress short film whose original score was commissioned by dear friend & film maker Ling Yu Yan for Warp Duo (my project with Levi Lu). I created this score in collaboration with Levi, who provided production assistance on glitch samples featured in the first excerpt and performed voice & violin improvisations together with me in the third & final act.
Provided is a prototype score used by the choreographer,
Chantel Foo, in the creation of the dance scenes, narrative flow and shot list in collaboration with the director. The score features heavy production, which includes heavily processed & distorted Erhu in the first excerpt alongside small glitch gestures animated by Levi’s flight-stick controller joystick-based electroacoustic processing instrument.
Instrumentation
violin, Erhu, production; Scott Li
voice, electronics, production; Levi Lu
dance & choreography; Chantel Foo
Warp Duo is the collaborative project between sound artists Scott Li and Levi Lu which focuses on electroacoustic improvisation utilizing acoustic instruments such as the voice and violin in combination with live electronic systems, including live processing in Max/MSP, digital feedback, modular synthesis modules, and many other systems. Wails, visceral violin scratching, and broken bow hairs accompany ethereal, reverberant soundscapes and melodies, all guided, above all, by pure feeling.