Music for «After the Deluge»

Introductory remarks (2025)

The four fixed-media pieces that constitute Music for «After the Deluge» (2017-18) represent my first foray into composing as part of an interdisciplinary collaborative team of artists, as well as composing for a site-specific installation. Set in the imposing locale of the Tai Hang Tung Stormwater Storage Tank, few will fail to detect the immanently reverberant acoustical properties of the extensive underground space, punctuated by rows of heavy columns, its spatial dimensions often obscured by the many dark corners that seem to expand infinitely.

Kingsley Ng’s After the Deluge articulates the complex relationship between water and generations of Sham Shui Po inhabitants, whose livelihood prior to the construction of the Storage Tank is often disrupted whenever summer rainstorm besieges the city. As sewage services progressively improved over the years, the importance of the Tank also proportionately diminished, its interiors, now eerily vacant, no longer flooded with bodies of water, but, in its permanent silence, echoes the memories of a Hong Kong that is slowly receding out of sight.

The music that accompanies this site-specific installation must inevitably become entangled with notions of memory, history, and time. Reworked portions of my earlier electronic works — Selon «L'Interprétation des rêves» (2013), Étude en mélancolie (2015), midnight | sun (2017) and Hereafter will be your unbecoming (2017) — are interweaved into the newly created sonic soundscapes, in effect engendering a palimpsestial nexus of musical worlds that intersect with one another, dissolving the singularity underpinning their individuality as ‘works,’ revealing a certain (im)material fluidity that, beneath the veneer of stylistic divergence, binds them together as refractive parts of a larger opaque whole.