London based electronic musician Flora Yin-Wong composes elegant and ambient sonic collages by sampling and recording anything that catches her acute attention on her travels, from the mundane to the unlikely. Her collaged compositions weave together and unite the fleeting moments she has captured from all over the world.
On her 2020 album “Holy Palm” for Modern Love, we hear fragments and echoes of street festivals in Buenos Aires, a supermarket in Toyko, a wedding in Hackney. A Greek Orthodox priest recorded on a car radio in Crete, while Buddhist monks chant in Cantonese in Hong Kong’s Po Lin monastery. Yet the miniscule is also ever present: the sound of wind, gravel, insects, crows.
This is music that compares, as Pitchfork have observed, with the 1983 film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. Marker also stitched together a fictional travel journal of moments captured in Japan, Iceland and the African continent. “He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time,” says the narrator. “Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.”
Alongside her music collages, Yin-Wong has also written this extraordinary book, Liturgy. The book is a sensory trip, using words and pictures to explore some of the Buddhist, Cantonese and Taoist ideas, principles and superstitions that inform her artistic method. Yin-Wong explores fiction, ritual, cosmic principles, conspiracies, parallel universes, religion, dreams, fragmented memories and knowledge. Reading this is much like stumbling upon a secret dossier of fantastic ideas and esoteric research – you have to check it out!
Flora Yin-Wong is a London–born, Chinese-Malaysian writer, producer, and DJ who has released material on the labels Modern Love and PAN. Her sonic work uses traditional instruments, software processing, and text-based storytelling, and has been performed at venues including ISSUE Project Room (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Volksbühne Theater (Berlin), and Berghain (Berlin).
120 pages
Paperback
Edition of 2200
2021 by PAN (Berlin) & Primary Information (New York)