The Breakdown
Hot town, summer in the city“, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s immortal sixties pop hit may not be a song that will immediately ping into mind when listening to ‘Tropical Church’, the new album by musician, sound artist and composer Olivier Cong. Yet Cong’s graphic soundtrack for his own city, Hong Kong, puts the listener as closely in touch with the complex vitality of that particular metropolis as John Sebastian’s gritty snapshot of a heat-waved New York. Released via the Room40 imprint Someone Good, ‘Tropical Church’ reveals a tapestry of exquisite ambient music for a living city, carefully woven strands of experience and memory, personal to Cong although extending beyond the autobiographical. You can sense the place when listening but the images transfer themselves to wherever and whenever you wish.
Clearly Cong’s significant musical collaborations for film, dance, theatre and immersive art projects in Hong Kong have helped him make music with such a wide emotional impact. He also cites Ryuichi Sakamoto as a key influence on ‘Tropical Church’ which filters through in the album’s measured minimalism, restrained melodic electronica and seamless blending of acoustic instruments. solace draws gracefully on all these elements, its tiny-bird synth tune flitting carefully over an opening chord sequence before a drum pulse brings a sense of inevitably rising urban clamour. A similar delicate synth progression maps out the sombre, tuneful They don’t sleep on the beach anymore. Ripples of harmony, rustles of found sound, it’s a track which highlights Cong’s eloquent sonic voice. There’s something fulfilling and warm, even Cortini-esque about these slowly evolving electronic movements.
Elsewhere the moments are more widescreen, representations of a cityscape where you can be lonely but never alone. The Godspeed-esque post rock rumble of when the labour is for love builds on drone metal dynamics, setting electric guitar tingles within some gothic sub-bass heft and looming dramatically. A saint about to fall is equally theatrical, a loop of retro prog organ setting off on a fractured skank before switching between quirky Tangerine Dream/Davachi abstractions. Cong’s debut album from 2020 ‘A Ghost & His Paintings’, released through his own Raven & The Sea label, showed invention in its merger of chamber folk, post rock and ambient forms but nothing as individual as the reflections that we have here.
Olivier Cong speaks of being led to “explore the ambience that makes up my daily life” before embarking on this project and in drilling deeper into the sounds washing around him, on the streets, in his home, his frequent places, he’s been inspired to compose music that is consistently engaging. Even the more resolutely experimental pieces have you rewinding to discover more. Take the field recording collage of dok, written with fellow Hong Konk based sound artist Karen Yu, where the lapping water, percussive waves and rushing traffic uncannily merge in texture and tempo. Or the more brooding Solid sun which allows scarifying rolls of electronic detritus to get pricked with chinks and chimes of eastern percussion.
The utilisation of such traditional, acoustic instrumentation seems key to the full statement that Cong sets out to express on ‘Tropical Church’. In this impressionistic response to his city he injects a sense of history through using such resonant sound fusions. The stately strums of the guzheng waft in alongside bass drum and shakers on the tense subterranean moon dance while burning aches with the yearning fluted croon of the shakuhatchi as the rain patters outside. It’s a spell binding highlight on a consistently stunning record.
These electro-acoustic underpinnings also reveal another intriguing dimension of ‘Tropical Church’. With his father born in Mauritius, Cong has Francophone roots which gently mingle throughout the album. In interviews he’s acknowledged an admiration for the French avant gard composer Yann Tiersen and you can hear echoes of this seminal musician’s boundless eclecticism in Cong’s general approach. More specifically on 闔家平安 , bluesy acoustic licks and pensive accordion busk while the traffic passes by, just like a clip from an imaginary Tiersen soundtrack.
The album’s powerful opening spoken word piece I am afraid of also features sombre accordion/harmonica phrases as the recorded thoughts of random pedestrians around their deepest fears provide the song’s poetic back bone. How about “I’m afraid of not knowing the truth behind other’s words and people’s actions” or “I’m afraid of leaving the world alone “ for gold-dust lyrics. Who needs AI just ask the people!
A second sonic poem prayer of mine provides stark haunting closure to the album’s narrative. Written with Nelson Fung and movingly narrated over a cello’s slow groan, the spoken story recalls the album’s creative spark. Sheltering from a monsoon storm in an aging Honk Kong chapel, Cong was struck how the scene encapsulated the spirit of his cityscape, its past and present, its chaos and beauty, its vulnerability and viciousness. From this experience the exceptional ‘Tropical Church’ has developed into the visceral, contemporary work we have now. So yes an album born from chance but shaped by Olivier Cong’s exceptional artistry.
Get your copy of ‘Tropical Church‘ by Olivier Cong from your local record store or direct from Room40 HERE
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