as a composer

Body History: III

Sigma Contemporary Dance

Composed as part of Sigma’s residency at National Gallery Singapore. I messed around with Juno arpeggiation sequences built from Javanese scales, and sound-designing industrial textures using exponential rhythms to reflect a state of flux between self-identity and collective structure.

In Parallel

Sigma Contemporary Dance

Composed as part of Sigma’s residency at National Gallery Singapore, this work was performed in an art gallery in response to the Living Pictures: South-East Asia Photography exhibition. With themes around incomplete realities of documenting war, I explored writing in parallel keys/modes, differing genres and select pentatonic scalar choices (upon study of traditional SEA music) to reflect states of duality and eras of industrialisation.

Sunny

A Film by Regina Toon

A film produced for Viddsee, I worked on the audio aspects of this from sound-design, audio post-production to composition. I had fun using plugins from a Singaporean company IXSound, in particular their Zhongruan and Pipa samples to create the opening theme.

Eudaimonia

Sigma Contemporary Dance

I explored writing music from various angles for this one, from a jig-like harmonic standpoint to using audio dialogue from rehearsals to craft a soundscape. I also employed a more singer-songwriter approach for the ending track.

Civil Twilight

Sigma Contemporary Dance

A dance production that was thematically intense. As I explored writing grander themes, kind of went ham on the usage of devices from string arrangements, felt pianos, key changes, traditional and non-traditional percussion, fuzz guitar and bass, vocals…

AUS-SG Micro Residency

Lewis Major, Christina Chan

This was a really interesting project with choreography based on Christina wearing a suit that would reflect her movements in real-time virtually, with the goal of technologically bridging distance as part of rehearsal possibilities. The score starts off with drones built from mangled MRT field recordings and morphs into a section that in retrospect, was me reminiscing on how it felt like to play Suikoden II on PlayStation.

Hypnagogia

Sigma Contemporary Dance

This production was done during COVID lockdown and filmed using a 360 camera. I felt like it would be fun to explore binaural composition for this one and learnt a lot about composing binaural music using Waves B360 and NX technology, though the recordings here are in its original stereophonic state. Moments of oscillation and instrumental guitar lead into folk-stylings written in Malay for the ending.

Moving Online

Moving Online

A four part series, this dance video project was filmed in different spaces. I explored the idea of bringing the sounds of spaces into spaces, employing field recordings as part of a composed score that included other harmonic and rhythmic elements.

Stolen Dance

Translucent Bodies

A cross-disciplinary short film, I worked on the audio aspects of this from sound-design, audio post-production to composition. This was at the beginning of the lockdown and I had been going around Singapore recording various things like the sound of traffic, train and bus noises, birds, traffic lights etc. The score is a mix of drawing upon those things as source material, and morphs into a musical motif written in Malay.

Dock 65

Sigma Contemporary Dance

This was my first ever dance production, and it was performed live outdoors at the Esplanade Bridge. I had an amazing time finding my footing as a composer and experimenting with all sorts of things that had been swimming in my head up to this point – from manipulating field recordings to creating synth-laden rave tracks.