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Drums are Legion, Murders are Spatial and we drink to the Apocalypse

So the world keeps burning and I keep being here, spinning my tales in whatever shape or form the world allows me to. I’ve been obsessing over spatial structures in songs and stories. Some works of mine have been released into the wild.

Upcoming, is a workshop presentation at Ars Electronica. I premiere a short audio theatre piece called “No One Died”. I’ll pop it up at some stage when it’s made its rounds. The premise? Well, there is none, “No One” Died remember…well that’s one point of view, until you move around to find the truth of the tale. This is an audio tale you must move around to find out the truth about. Written with the very curious, inventive and awesome scriptwriter Michelle Mead

Well if you are at Ars Electronica by any chance: my workshop details are here:https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/en/download/

What’s it got to do with the apocalypse drinking song I keep alluding to? Well…the mechanics of this piece drive my lyrical portion.

Earlier part of the year was me obsessing over cats, thunder and gods to create this piece called “When the rain god sings, Storm Lions are born”. It’s a fun one, and I had a ball working with Taikoz and Ryuji Hamada. The piece premiered in NIDA. A glimpse of it here

It was a bit of fun and hair tearing in equal measures as I was obsessed with the idea of having a solo artist “play” an orchestra in real-time. Yes – this means no more counting to any kind of backing track, the rich track is actually triggered live. Luckily Ryuji Hamada and Taikoz are just the sort of awesome musicians and awesome dancers and movement artists to humour all the experiments needed to make it all happen.

More details here:https://www.taikoz.com/productions/when-the-rain-god-sings-storm-lions-are-born-from-lion-dogs

Over and out for now

Yunyu

Of Musicals, Virtual worlds and upcoming site updates and where to connect

Hah. I’ve been obviously bad at site updates and other general updatey things but here we finally are. The pandemic has proven mildly distracting, but I’ll try and do better…on this updatey front.

Updates

100 CAPES 100 stories – 100 speaker Monster project

Let’s begin at the latest.

The year begins with a bit of fun from House that Dan Built. A wonderful female focused arts organization. I’ve been commissioned along with other fantastically talented composers Jessica O’Donoghue and Pru Montin to make an hour long piece made from 100 interviews of 100 women from various walks of life.


There’s an emerging composer call out here if you want to join in the fun of working with us.

https://www.thehousethatdanbuilt.com/100-capes-100-stories

Dolby Researcher and a stint at UTS

This year I start at UTS doing a Masters of Research making a creative project (its songs) with Dolby. More to be revealed. But excitement abounds because I’ve been experimenting in musical virtual worlds. More on that in a bit. I’ve got a site update to do. (see below)

Musical with NIDA

Last year’s highlights were a musical workshop with NIDA where I got to run a fantabulous workshop together with film veteran David Elfick and remarkably accomplished music composer Peter Dascent, directed by the wonderfully talented Elsie Edgerton-Till. This is a musical I had fun co-writing music and story for. JH is a supernatural musical based on South East Asian legends, which begins with a skeptical boy peeing up the wrong tree…and getting teleported as a result.

Yay toilet humour – and don’t piss up the wrong tree. All classic ingredients for a play for children.

It’s looking like we continue the fun later this year. I’m looking forward to the public performance.

Martial Arts Papers

I continue to find Beat Saber (or similar music games) very fascinating and I love martial arts. I’m also obsessed with how well movement games in VR might serve as a movement repository for martial arts moves .

I’ve invited Grandmaster Zhang Chongwei to choreograph an actual fight sequence to one of my compositions. Chongwei is the principal instructor in TK martial arts and has won a ridiculous amount of martial arts championships. We then put music and martial arts together as a Beat Saber playable mod.

This has been written into a paper with Dr Rhett Loban and Rauno Parrila. It’s here https://gamescriticism.org/articles/ong-et-al-5-a

The paper’s the first of many and we will be making the Beat Saber mod available once the moves are fine-tuned and we have done a few more tests. Keep an eye out for test player callouts.

New Game in Progress

Have picked up programming so while making a Game with the wonderful manga artist Queenie Chan. We think it’s nostalgic horror based in my hometown of Singapore. Here’s a peek at the site of creation.


Site updates

The site’s held very tenuously by duct tape and desperate monkeys and in dire need of updates. So those of you contacting with broken links… it’s going to be fixed, just going to take a bit because I am still working on being legion

Contact

Should be a post by itself but I’m going to try and keep it short here. Socials are a bit of a drain. At some point, I think they just steal time away from music and other creative fun so I’ve obviously kept it minimal.

Also, the internet’s a little angry these days. So I’m holed up making a bunch of things instead, without entering the internet’s angry little pub and joining the shoutey activities.

I’ll probably start up discord…since it’s temporarily less evil than the metas and glazebooks and maybe…just maybe keep twitter, but I’m unsure. I know contact’s been a little less since I’ve moved a little away from just singer-songwriter stuff, but I’d love to keep in contact. And yes, the music and songs are still coming in one way, form or another. And thank you, those who drop a message to say hi. It makes my day šŸ˜€

So keep an eye out. and I’ll see u hopefully be on the other side of a site update at this rate…

Dragons, Sabres , Radio…all in the apocalypse

In a year that seems to be played on some kind of weird beast mode…what with the fires, pandemics and riots. Here’s some catch up news from the studio dungeon.

Here be dragons

Worked with the lovely folks at Insert Dragon here on this cute retro 90s game. Avail as an early access game.

Pirates of the Silk Road non-vr preview

Last yearļ¼Œ I decided to mix my love of wushu (Chinese martial arts) with my new found love of beat saber and made this fun little mod called “Pirates of the Silk Road” — For those not familiar with this game, it is basically dance dance revolution with sabres played in Virtual reality worlds.

And of course, if you have access to VR then the mod link is here . FREE

And if you don’t, here’s a vicarious play through with no need for VR access.

Radioplay on 4zzz ozone

Red from Twisted Tales …the girl who remembers she’s wolf has been added to 4zzz’s Ozone. Bonza!

https://www.4zzzfm.org.au/program/ozone/2020-06-01

A kid’s musical

Been working as composer/co-writer with Palm Beach pictures on a musical for children. Started as a composer, then a cultural consultant for all things fairytales and then got invited to co-write because I had too much to say. Maybe good things do come to those who cannot keep their mouths shut šŸ™‚

Fingers crossed, the next time I mention this, it will be out in the wild

Some thoughts…

I’ve been busy, as you can probably tell, but I’ve been mulling over what to do next for my personal projects. What stories do we tell in a world that is used to short and loud twitter/facebook posts, knee-jerk shares and music streaming rates that can best be filed under “dystopian comedy”. Not the best environment to create but I’ll try my very best.

Am trying some media experiments with my motley bunch of creators, putting the music in all sorts of media spaces. Keep an eye out for this space.

Battle of the beats: Martial arts arrives on Beat Saber dance platform

The Fight is the Dance

Sometime last year, an amazing VR production team, Mod very kindly opened up their studios and introduced me to a Willy Wonka world of mixed reality, VR and all the stuffs of pure imagination. Among all these goodies is a hit VR game called Beat Saber. A game with light-sabers, where players hit shiny blocks to time – like Dance Dance Revolution, but SHINIER. I decided a mod had to happen, so I can fight through music – Pirates of the Silk Road is the result.

Pirates of the Silk Road

The making of Pirates of the Silk Road

Playing Beat Saber, the martial artist fangirl in me was in love. I didn’t want to dance (which is what the game seems to be designed to do) , I wanted to see about fighting, or ok…fight dancing.

So, cue creation, I invited some kick arse musiciansā€¦Michael Sheridan (guitars) and Kirke Godfrey (additional drums + mix), and we made a track that allowed for dance and martial arts all at once.

I teamed up with Chongwei Zhang (Zhang Shifu) from TK Martial Arts, who is a serious multi-championship winning martial artist/ stuntperson/actor/ fight choreographer. He generously provided advice and choreography ideas to this fight-dance genre we seemed to have created. Then of course, I had to program a whole lot of boxes in Beat Saber world to somewhat capture all that bad-assery.


Zhang Shifu on sabers.



Do not let my calm exterior fool you, I’m MOSTLY doing my best NOT to let the saber kill me.

This is the result of all that collaborating, where the composing process is all about programming fight moves in game world, writing the piece, re-testing a move and moving beats to suitā€¦composing has never been this physical and this stupidly fun.

Links


Buy Pirates of the Silk Road HERE




Download/Play Beatsaber mod HERE:

https://beatsaver.com/browse/detail/14219-15361

Special thanks (again) to


Mod for loaning space and doing up this fantastic mixed reality shoot (Michela, Mish, Illia, Maize you folks are way awesome!). This all started because Michela threw me down a mod challenge, so it’s really her fault. šŸ™‚

Macquarie University (Rhett Loban) for loaning time, space, people and equipment so we could test and test again. Rhett is a PhD candidate who has done some amazing VR work on the Torres Strait Island VR experienceļ¼Œwhich has won him The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander STEM Professional Career Achievement Award

Beautiful art of Pirates of the Silk Road by Queenie Chan who is a super talented manga artist. Check out her stories!

My music and martial arts collaborators Michael Sheridan, Kirke Godfrey and TK Martial Arts – Zhang Chongwei

Most of all, thank you to the testers who test played the mod.

Here’s to friends, testers and shiny sabers!

Twisted Tales – Little Matchgirl

 

Ok as promised. The 2nd single this dec before we all head off to xmas lands.

This be little matchgirl. She hails from the world of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl.

The story and the twist is self explanatory, our little match girl isn’t selling matches this time but dreams.

 

The single lives hereĀ 

Twisted Tales – iAlice Canon a Cecila!

SoĀ oops. I didn’t exactly make 2 singles in the last mth. so here’s one of 2 this mth . The next comes in a seperate post.

Say hi to Alice in Wonderland in iAlice Canon a Cecila!

I naturally asked what happens when a mirror goes into a mirror into a mirror. Because this is what Alice is no? This dream thing. I thought it might be nice if the music was palindromic overall. Ā Which is to say the musical notes invert/ retrograde themselves along some very poorly established lyrical foldlines. so look out for words like “mirror” “copy” for some musical retrogrades, and “invert”, “topple” for the whole theme played upside down.

Because…why not?

img_1671

What do the lyrics mean? I have nothing for u. Because the lyrics come from me taking a walk through my comic book collections. Here’s a little less than a peek.

untitled

The single lives hereĀ 

Twisted Tales – Cinderella — dance of the undead belles

Howā€™s everyone? Soā€¦2 releases this month. Becauseā€¦captain obvious would note that I have missed an october release. My most sincere and heartfelt apologies. Time has gotten away from me like a slippery eel on hyperdrive.

Itā€™s been a bit busy 3 shorts this month amongst 2 other great things I canā€™t yet announce. This is me forward to some films finishing their festival tours so I can show them to you. šŸ™‚

Itā€™s interesting with Twisted Tales, when I made it, I had wished for it to be like a kind of Dorian Gray thing. That the ugly things in my tales would stayā€¦only in stories, in musical portraits, but as the last few years would suggest, perhaps the ugliness is leaking out of the portrait. Those were the times of comparative innocence. So,ā€¦if I broke the world and we have somehow ended on the evil timeline. I apologise and maintain the very weak defence that correlation is not causation.

I offer my 1 cent on the current chaos here.

Ā TWISTED TALES. CINDERELLA!

This month’s first release is Cinderella. Based on the concept of dancing plague of 1518 where people supposedly poisoned into a fervour by mushrooms, danced to their death.

via GIPHY

 

It also loosely borrows from Jack the Ripperā€¦and as the title suggests, Cinderella.

In this little tale, I wondered what it actually meant to have Cinderella leave by midnight. Actually, who ever said that Cinderella was one. Why not many? Ā Is Midnight a person? What if midnight was a rogue plastic surgeon that somehow kept a whole lot of damsels and pretty men dancing and whenever one of them looked tired or aged, he would snatch them from the dance floor, slice and dice their tired faces to perfection and place them right back? a fresh faced beauty?

Itā€™s a gory little tale, but in our worlds a little obsessed by celebrities and perfect looks, are we not locked into our own creepy little manic dance?

 

Till the 2nd release this month

Love

Yunyu

A fairytale for our times

In the light of recent interestingness in the world and (I donā€™t just mean the US) perhaps a tale from the indian subcontinents for perspectives, because stories are all I can offer. Stories that are beyond the mainstream Western narrative is what I happen to like specialising in.

Here’s my 1 cent.

5 blind men and an elephant

5 blind ā€œwiseā€ men were presented with an elephant by a king who asked them to describe to him what the elephant looked like

. One felt the body, and declaredā€¦
ā€œThe elephant is a wallā€
One felt the tail ā€¦
ā€œThe elephant is a ropeā€
One felt the ears
ā€œThe elephant is a fanā€
One felt the trunk
ā€œElephant is a snakeā€
One felt the legs
ā€œElephant is a pillarā€

Of course, because they could not understand why the other held such different views, the wise men came to blows because they were really passionate about being able to tell the king their version of truths. This is a pity because all it needed was ONE curious one to keep following along the elephant to get the whole pictureā€¦.which is to say, everyone was partially correct and wholly wrong.

The king was very glad to tell them that AFTER the WWF style bar brawl when everyone got hurt. The kingā€¦i must sayā€¦is an asshat shit stirrer who makes fun of blind people.

Stories of dualities (red vs blue, good vs bad, left vs rightĀ )dominate the mainstream, but real life is much more colourful than that.We live in a sometimes, frustrating ocean of greys. And all tales, including Twisted Tales, come through subjective lenses of how one views the world. Because by a strict definition of the truthā€¦everyone oversimplifies. Everyone lies because words from singular pop corn articles consumed in minutes and shared at a mouse click are blunt beasts that cannot tell a whole story. So you can only keep reading

In a world where it has become urgent that the other sees our point because, climate change, impending sense of world war 3, general doom, injustice, inequality etc etc, perhaps the only way we can get through is to see where they are coming from in the first place. Go to their side of the elephant. We might learn something…or not. But we don’t know till we do don’t we? We could be right in the end, but we should know why we think are right instead of arguing with slogans.

So if you are left, go to right leaning forums. Vice versa. If you are rich, listen to poor people stories and all that in between.

By all means donā€™t do this at all and go through the echo chambers of social media, where your friends will likely agree with you..and then whip yourselves into righteous fury that helps no-one . But if you seek to communicate and find answers in these distressing times then step into supposed alternate realities, follow the breadcrumbs.

Some storiesĀ will be squirm worthy. Some hard to take,but eventually most will offer understanding in those frustrating shades of ambiguity and greysā€¦if that is what you seek.

Then know who funds the stories.ā€¦Check the mediaā€™s stories, who funds them, what’s driving their industry. If they are found to be lying,Ā donā€™t be too hard on the journalists.

When was the last time you paid for a newspaperā€¦ and if notā€¦who funds them? Who pays the journalists? Can the journalists be relied on to tell the truths or are their paychecks dependant on whose side they are on?Or how many clicks they generate with outlandish click-bait titles?

What do you do if everyone is telling half truths? Keep reading. Sometimes certain things converge. Think of it like cross examining suspects in a crime scene..

Then…when you get a moment, thankĀ the storytellers that keep tales alive, in the face of such trying climate for the arts and storytellers. Then,once againā€¦
Read from more than one source, read analysis from beyond the main narrative (I mean beyond the western mediaā€¦but keep reading that too). Test each one, read again. Understand history, your own and others, understand peopleā€¦form an opinion. Question that opinion. Rinse. Repeat. Go beyond your social circles. Keep trying to understand.

Our world is colourful, my conclusion is that dualities and absolutes are for the lazyĀ or machines running on simple boolean codeĀ .

Then know that there are those who would thrive on your hate, because hate prevents us from seeing the whole elephant. .

Listen. Understand. Because in these times of confusion, stories are all we have. Differing stories will at first confuse us, it could cause anger. Itā€™s okā€¦if you keep testing the logic of every tale and every opinion we read,somewhere along the way. Some things will converge and a whole picture (clearness may vary) will emerge.

You are going to see the whole elephant or at least a silhouette. For some of us, we will see the sick shit stirring powers that started it all in the first place and dropkick them instead. Ā There are those who profit from hate, know how, know why.

 

Rightā€¦folks. Thatā€™s all I got. Now go be curious, awesome people who see WHOLE elephants in rooms. That’s my 1 cents worth, because most of you who made it this far into the article probably already do…see them elephants in varying wholes. šŸ™‚

 

edit: Fixed Typo. Turns out my elephant had many ears and no trunk. Sign of our mutating times. Thanks Karl Goodloe šŸ™‚

 

Of cult leaders that return again and again

Has it been a month already? Here’s the next. I present Pied Piper.

Pied Piper has a long history. It started from this little comic I made a real long time ago on a whim. (This probably jumpstarted Twisted Tales.) This tells the tale of Pied Piper who wasn’t paid and keeps returning as a cult leader to “take the children away”

You can check it out here

I was always interested in what made cults since I knew someone who joined one. Until that happened, I had always erroneously assumed that joining a cult was something the very silly did, but I realise desperation and hopelessness are the harbingers of cult joining.

The lost, the socially displaced – these are usually the prime demographics of cult followers.

So it was hard to write this in a way that simply showed a scene from a cult, mainly Jonestown, but as far as possible, produce no indication of any judgement of people who join cults, because I simply believe them to be victims of circumstances. I wish things were better for them and that they had found better answers to their predicament.

Check out the tune here!

ps: apologies for the lack of postings. I’m still battling film deadlines. I should swim out of this sometime nov/dec. Shall promise to get better organised šŸ˜›

All very good fun though

 

Love

Yunyu

Twisted Tales – Goldilocks – The curious makings of a Serial Dater

It has been quite the 2 months. Such is the unpredictable life of film composing. One minute you are sitting in your studio doodling personal projects and watching life go by — albeit worrying if you should follow up on film projects, the next your phone rings and it’s projects upon projects with the same deadline.The forlorn look given to a quiet phone is now a forlorn look given to a phone that does not stop ringing. (Please keep ringing…I’m only fake complaining)

It’s no miracle or accident. It’s a collection of films I’ve said yes to in the last couple of months. Then producers disappear for a bit to make the miracle of films happen. Then they come back very unpredictably and all at once. Which is so very great and also very terrifying. But me no complain. Excited to show them films around soon but films have a habit of having to stay hidden for a year or so while they make festival rounds.

I have a few other projects up me belt that I hope to be able to breathe word about soon.

Meanwhile my error 404’s songs continue here

TWISTED TALES NEW SINGLE – GOLDILOCKS

But the releases of Twisted Tales must and SHALL prevail and I present GOLDILOCKS. The girl (or is it the boy) who finds his or her lover too big, too small, too hard, too soft.

I’ve had fun making this. I sampled bed springs in the opening of the track and overlaid this with some very tortured erhu playing. You could call it Chinese orchestral rock since there’s a fair bit of electronic erhu (Chinese violin), guzheng (Chinese Zither). I think it’s some kind of Chinese meets Viking metal Bohemian Rhapsody Frankenstein thing of a song. Why? Because because I can.

Enjoy, tell your friends. I promise to be back with more when I get my head around film schedules.

GET YOUR COPY HERE — >

Love

Your Royal Madness
Yunyu

 

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