Moniker e:ch is the alter ego of Macau’s Eric Chan, frontman for respected local band Forget the G. This past winter, revisiting an old passion for the noise genre, he conducted his maiden voyage into the world of experimental music in a fit of creative fervour and inspired improvisation. The result is ‘The State of ___’, an album of rich soundscapes, dynamic nuance and shocking power that was released digitally last month.
“I got into noise and experimental music at the age of 13, with Einstürzende Neubauten,” Eric Chan tells CLOSER in an interview at the Live Music Association (LMA). His interests then turned to the Japanese scene, with artists like Merzbow and Keiji Haino making lasting impressions on the Macau teenager.
“I had developed a good picture of what noise music was about by the time I was 16 or 17,” he explains, “and, as sometimes happens, I just took a break from listening to it for the next 12 or 13 years.”
Then, last December, the end of the world came and went. However uneventful, it stood out as a turning point for Chan.
“I thought, it’s over, I’ll do something new, I’ll make an album, and I got this idea to connect with noise again in a solo project.” The full-length LP, ‘The State of ___’, was written and recorded at LMA in the space of just two days, each song captured in a live take, performed on solo guitar through various effects and three amps. “My set up was rather similar to the one I use with my band, Forget the G, but patched and tuned differently for a more experimental sound, all analogue, just pedals, no software,” Chan reveals. “Perhaps it’s the influence of Keiji Haino, but I like the idea of a person playing – through a guitar, through the effects – direct to the audience.”
Chan performed the songs on a modern, Travis Bean-style, all-aluminium guitar, as well as a baritone guitar.
“That was a big departure from what I’m used to with the band,” he confesses, citing the power and depth of these instruments. He collected ideas from experimenting with his own equipment and pedals, but also from environmental noises, even power tools, assessing their value in terms of abstract sound, rather than conventional music, at times using objects such as a shiny, new one-pataca coin or a hex key on the guitar strings to unlock a new palette of colours.
The songs on the recording were composed to the extent of having a predetermined underlying drone, harmonic vocabulary and effects set-up, but apart from that they are improvisations.
“As a solo performer I’m free from the constraints of an ensemble, from participation in the musical communication and interplay with other band members,” Chan says. “I’m able to fully realise spontaneous ideas, without limitations, and respond immediately to the sound of my own guitar and the effects. I recorded the album sitting right in front of some very powerful amps, and the visceral feeling of the resonance, vibrating through me and in the room while I played, helped me sculpt the soundscapes and the textures.”
The trigger for this on-the-fly approach to recording came from the recent positive experience Chan and his bandmates had making the last Forget the G album. The entire record was composed from scratch and recorded live, all within a single ten-hour session open to the public at the Tap Seac Glass House.
“It was very improvisatory and relied heavily on capturing the essence of the moment,” Chan recalls, “and I was left with a great desire to revisit that experience in a solo project.”
The tracks on the record are each named with a pair of Chinese characters and, when read from first to last, starting with the title, form a poetic sentence evoking an unborn child in the womb. Musically, they present a vast dynamic range, from moments of lyricism and bright harmonic textures to ominous drones and arresting blasts of intensity, always with the pervasive warmth of a guitar-based, analogue sound universe.
“Even when I’m playing noise, I like to insert truly melodic moments that grab the listener’s attention,” Chan explains, “from which I can create huge contrasts with a leap to powerful, overwhelming noise-scapes.”
For a genre like noise, with a typically small, niche audience, artists in any region naturally form a close-knit and supportive community. Eric Chan, as e:ch, performed this year in Hong Kong at a new venue called CIA (Culture Industries Association, www.ciahk.org), run by pioneering HK noise musician Xper.Xr., and in Macau with renowned Tokyo-based Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski.
His album will be distributed in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the UK, Japan and the US by the Hong Kong experimental label Re-Records, run by another fellow noise artist, Sin:Ned (Dennis Wong Chung-fai [translator note: 黃仲輝]), organiser of Hong Kong’s ‘Noise to Signal’ concert series.
Chan also recently travelled to Taiwan, where there is a quite robust experimental music scene, and was invited to speak about the noise genre and its proponents in the two SARs. Though Hong Kong is surely the centre of local activity, Chan wonders if his album may serve as a rallying cry for noise fans on this side of the delta and stimulate more happenings here, as well as generate awareness inside and outside the region about Macau’s non-mainstream art: “I hope the album will draw attention to Macau, in a new context.”
e:ch
