Label: Room40

香港出身の音楽家であり過去に2枚のLPアルバムを出版している孤高の人物Olivier CongがRoom40に登場。自身の経験をそのまま音像へと変換した作品で、雨宿りの為に駆け込んだ礼拝堂内部で聴いたサウンドをインスピレーションに制作。雨が教会の屋根を激しく打ちつける、外ではクラクションを鳴らしながら車が通り過ぎる、それらの音が香港の高層ビル街に響き渡るといった一連の情景を、ピアノ、エレクトロニクス、尺八、古筝、スポークンワードにて表現。故郷へのパーソナルな感情が白昼夢的な音風景として表れています。美しいエンボス加工スリーブ、インサート付き。





Matte laminate, full colour sleeve with embossing and insert card.

A note from Olivier

I was waiting for the bus to arrive at the stop when the rain started pouring. I quickly escaped into a chapel nearby, and that’s where the idea of this album came to be. Inside the chapel, I was reminded of the scent of Mauritius, where my father was from, and the pillars of dampen woods mixed with the ritualistic frankincense.

The rain continued to hit violently on the metallic church roof as the road outside grew overwhelmed with angry drivers, honking their way through, their frustrations echoing through streets of skyscrapers in Hong Kong. They sounded like a piece of nostalgic happening, infusing sounds that I was most familiar with in this sacred architecture.

This was when I decided to compose a series of work, featuring eclectic sounds of my city. Also inspired by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, whom I revere, his exercise of restraint and Eastern philosophy led me to explore the ambience that made up my daily life, experimenting and reconstructing them with familiar instrumentations.

In “Tropical Church", you will experience music composed of piano, ambient electronics, shakuhachi, Chinese yuan, guzheng and spoken words, which I think represent my feelings for home — Hong Kong. And to me, home is an old church that harbours a myriad of unspoken emotions, flowing from the West to East. Complex history hidden within the dampen pillars, the sounds of the city and the footsteps of the everyday people that liven up the streets.

Most notably in the first track, “I am afraid of”, voice recordings of anonymous strangers were collected describing their deepest fears. I’m most touched by the answers as they’ve shown me the same fears of death, love and being alone we all share.