i work shadowed at a wonderful sound production studio two weeks ago.

new mixtape – my 8th! –  jazz, gems and hidden treasures.

i will soon figure out what to do with this blog. something’s gotta give.

Click here to view the embedded video.

brilliant. i wish i was there.

blues on the ceiling

there was a royal wedding the first time i visited stockholm. i saw kool & the gang play under a burning sunset, ate dinner on a cliff drenched in rain, walked myself into a zombie parade and said goodbye to sweden (what i thought was) for good.

two years later i am living here again, much to my own surprise. the royal couple now have a child. i am a person outside myself – bolder – but the city feels largely unchanged to me, like outgrowing clothes. you never realize it until someone points out the awkwardness of your sleeve length, and then you have to do something about it. get a new shirt, fold the old one up, tuck it underneath your bed perhaps.

who knew?

kyu and i have put together the 34th edition of ten minutes (at last!) – we’ll be saying goodbye to this project with number 35. it has been an unexpectedly fantastic run to say the least, and we plan on collaborating further once ten minutes wraps up. thank you so much for all your feedback and support over the course of our project. it has been such a pleasure to share it with you all.

ps. there seems to be some kind of technical issue with streaming audio in google chrome (at least it’s not working properly for me). sorry if it’s glitchy – use another browser or check back soon – enjoy if it’s working fine!

new mixtape again! it’s one of my personal favourites. check out this article about betty harris - the only artist i’ve featured twice across all my mixtapes so far. she’s dynamite.

i’ve also added a few more photos and pet projects to my main website. planning for a more complete overhaul soon…

judith seng

“Objects covered in wax, freezing usage and time, merging matter and surface.”

i am a huge fan of yosuke yamaguchi and i especially love the calligraphy of「森へ」on this album cover. the strokes remind me of twists and knots in the trees of the forest. maybe i will start writing my last name like that. i seldom write my chinese name, and it’s a shame that i don’t. 2012 shall be the start of this habit.

this year, i also vowed to pursue more ongoing personal projects, so as promised: one is in the works, one is in idea development stage, and one is already out! i’m really excited about this collaboration with brian. it’s something we’ve been doing for a while now – sending music back and forth to each other – but it feels great to present something in a concrete format.

hong kong by ward roberts

What is at issue is how an image of Hong Kong’s architecture and urban space is used to support a narrative that implicity attributes the colony’s success to the smooth combination of British administration and Chinese entrepreneurship. Such a narrative also mobilizes ethnic and psychologistic assumptions that cannot bear scrutiny: the dogma that Hong Kong people are by nature hardworking, that they have a high tolerance for crowded living conditions by genetic design, that they will do anything for money. Peeping out from under this narrative is a master discourse that, seeing only its own mirror reflections, inscribes the primacy of the economic everywhere in the most literal-minded fashion. This is a discourse that elsewhere I have called decadent. This discourse manages to make a complex space disappear into a one-dimensional image, structured on a facile binarism. Such a binarism not only tends to domesticate differences and restabilize change; it also avoids the spatial issues, to give us only a copulation of clichés.

Ackbar Abbas

if you ever get a chance to see this film at the cinema, do. one of the best documentaries this year.