43:00, five tracks, digital stream, Ting Shuo Hear Say, October 27, 2024
Departures / Arrivals 《出境 / 入境》 is an album-length sound art memoir that traverses where diasporic memory is held. I revisit sites significant to my biography, such as the apartment building that I grew up in, walks I took with my family, school I attended, etc to activate a memory recall in response to the spatiality and acoustic qualities of the built environment.
I use my memory as a score and my body, voice, and the built environment as instruments, to perform and unravel layers and clusters of memories. This iterative practice allows me to stitch together semi-narrative fragments of what I remember and ascertain what I could not possibly remember.
This memoir work contains five tracks. Each is an experiment with sound and language that probes and materializes memory with soundscape and unscripted bilingual dialogs. Each composition presents a diasporic architecture, where a particular time/space is stretched and compressed at once.
This sound art memoir project addresses dischronotopicality (after Esther Peeren), a diasporic subjectivity that experiences a collapse between time and space, a jumbled sense of time/space as it compresses and expands at once. With an insistence on marking the body in time/space, this project also calls into question the assumed absence of the recordist’s body in field recording practices.
A meditation on memory surrounding a specific place and relationship, it’s an invitation to listen in and between the cracks of sound, language, and memory.
The album was released as a part of Ting Shuo’s Post Pandemic Acts: Therapeutic Auditory Tell Tales audio series and on Bandcamp on October 28, 2024.
The album is also featured as a part of the HOMING exhibition, curated by Arjuna Neuman for Archive of Belonging. This exhibition includes a radio broadcast that took place on November 11, 2024 via Refuge Worldwide and on Radio Alhara in Bethlehem, Palestine on December 21, 2024.
This project is commissioned by 聽說 Ting Shuo Hear Say with funding support from National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taiwan. Special thanks to the Berlin-based Archive of Belonging.
Listen + read (English)
Listen + read (Chinese)
Bandcamp
Press images
Composition, performance, recording, and mixing by Umi Hsu
Featuring voices of Umi Hsu, Kevin Hsu, Hong Yuan Hsu, Shiu Ying Hsu, Tong Mu Hsu, Li Yan, and Sonia Hsu (in order of appearance)
Voice acting by Esme Brown and Leina Hsu
Mastering by Nigel Brown
Music (Track 5) by Bitter Party
Photographer: Sonia Hsu (track 1, 4), Jacob Alden Sargent (track 5)
Special thanks to Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Nigel Brown, Jonathan Zorn, Erik DeLuca, Adriene Lilly, Steven Kemper, Aurie Hsu, Ash Nichols, Liza Yeager, Eva Tsai, Wu Chia-Jui, Zheng Yin-Ling, Kenneth Yates, Denny Greene, Ashle Fauvre, Lindawei, Nathan Lam Vuong, and Grace Umali for their creative and production support.
Gratitude to my family for their steadfast support.
Much love and gratitude to Jacob Alden Sargent for being a sound soul mate.