Tropical Church

2024

In memory of Ryuichi Sakamoto

All instruments by Olivier Cong
Except:
Shakuhachi by Sunny Yeung (track 6)
Percussion by Karen Yu (track 9)
Double Bass by Nelson Fung (track 13)

Photo by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Designed by Renatus Wu

I was waiting for the bus to arrive at the stop when the rain started pouring. 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 the city. They sounded like a piece of nostalgic happening, infusing sounds that I was most familiar with inside this sacred architecture.

That 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 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.