Yuen Chee Wai / Lasse Marhaug In Praise Of Shadows

Yuen Chee Wai is a musician, artist, designer and curator based in Singapore. Often inspired by ideas drawn from philosophical and literary texts, and perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, Yuen’s stylistic oeuvre in improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility and indeterminacy. In 2008, he teamed with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (South Korea), and Yan Jun (China) to form FEN (Far East Network), a music quartet that continues to work with multifaceted networks and collaborations between musicians and artists across Asian countries. He is also a member of the avant-rock band The Observatory, with whom he plays guitar, synth and electronics.

Lasse Marhaug has since the early 1990s been one of the most active artists in the Norwegian noise/experimental music scene. As a performer and composer he has contributed to well over 300 CD, vinyl and cassette releases over the years, as well as extensive touring and performing live on all continents of the world. In addition to his solo work, Marhaug has collaborated with many artists in the fields of noise, experimental, improv, jazz, rock and metal, as well as working with music and sound for theatre, dance, installations, cinema and video.

In 2006, the two spent a full night recording together at the now defunct FluxUs record store in Singapore. The material for the sessions were partially mixed, but remained unfinished. Ten years later, in 2016, the two met again to record in Marhaug’s Oslo studio. The previous recording wasn’t thought of during the new session, but in the course of the mixing it was discovered that the two recordings fit together like a glove. The long-form droney 2006 sessions, recorded late at night in the humid heat of Singapore, complimented the more angular electronic 2016 recording, which was captured in daytime during the brutally cold January winter of Norway. The opposing qualities of the sessions complemented each other, and now the result is available as “In Praise of Shadows”. Sometimes it takes ten years to make an album.