Olivier Cong — Tropical Church
Hong Kong experimental musician Olivier Cong has a number of recordings dating back to 2018. His website refers to this new release on Room040 as his 'second album', entitled Tropical Church. It is a rather ambitious sprawling experience, with thirteen different tracks, mostly two to five minutes in length, that each explores wildly different instrumentations and composition styles.
This recording has an immediate vulnerability and emotionality due to the monologues by various people describing what they are afraid of, woven throughout the first piece, "I am afraid of". "...of still holding on when it is time to let go", "...of leaving this world alone". These phrases stick in my mind, powerfully setting the tone for the whole album.
The backdrop is made up of resonant tones, or rather fleeting glimpses of tones. It seems there is no underlying drone or chord, rather so many hints. Coming into the darkly cinematic 2nd piece, "Solace", a piano draws the structure into something more grounded. The voices are silent now, sparing us the magnitude of their worries, and yet the music is somehow more desolate. This is undoubtedly a deeply melancholic, at times outright despondent piece of work, but as such seems to examine the core of human sadness and dissatisfaction.
Cong tells his story through lush, resonant timbres which are something between electronic and instrumental, with all the expressiveness of human performance, but otherworldly, processed harmonic content. I find myself debating whether the sound I'm hearing is some kind of guitar, a piano, purely synthetic, or something else.
In the more avant-garde "Moon Dance", a sprawling variety of sounds and movements are intercut in cleverly timed gestural intervals, with thunderous kettle drums, flickers of oddly processed strings, and arcs of sparking feedback punctuating the backdrop, culminating in a crack of actual thunder later in the track. Bells and distant choirs can be heard. The production is truly a masterwork of editing, perfectly making space for such widely contrasted sounds to take the foreground in turn.
"Burning" is a soliloquy for shakuhachi, with a backdrop of rain. The following "Solitude Study" is one of the most poignant on the album, with a kind of gothic choir sound combined with licks of slide guitar (a quite unusual context for a slide!). Completing the 1-2 of sorrowful reflection, we get "When the Labor Is For Love", a lilting piece primarily for guitar.
Tracks like "Dok" and "Solid Sun" come from a more emotionally neutral, detached place, creating a stoic, meditative space where the tiniest pin-drop is heard, built around field recordings, clever stereo effects, and the kind of eerie dreamlike resonances we heard towards the beginning of the album.
Tropical Church skillfully and poetically combines cinematic gothic ambience (like one might hear on a label like Cyclic Law) with freeform composition and musique concrete styles. It can be a painful heartache of a listen but hits every beat with grace. Cong's thoughts and memories overflow into every moment of this recording, which covers so many experiences, places and states of mind. Seemingly able to take any instrument or sound source and translate it into an emotional work, his style is limitless. To find out more