Something Keeps Transforming
a conversation with Pak Yan Lau
Pak Yan Lau. Photo by Laurent Orseau.
Pak Yan Lau, born in Belgium, with roots from Hong Kong and now based in Brussels is a sound artist, improviser, musician and composer. Over the years, Pak Yan has developed an expanded universe of sounds, using acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic approaches, and including anything from prepared pianos, toy pianos and synths, to electronics and a range of sound objects. Following Pak Yan’s solo performance at Sonosphere in WORM (Rotterdam), we invited her for a conversation on discovering new sounds, preparing new instruments, and bringing your music from your studio to the stage. The interview features the recording of Pak Yan’s live performance at Worm on March 22, 2022.
When we reached out to you, you told us about an underwater installation you're working on.
Yes, the AMOK festival in Brugge has asked me to create a new piece for an art deco, still functioning swimming pool. I decided to do something under water. People go for a swim and they suddenly hear my music. It will be there for five days, and on the closing day, I will give a concert above the water surface. People will have to put their heads half in and half out of the water to hear both parts, making their own mix with the above and below music.
Under water, sound travels four and a half times faster and is omnidirectional. You have the feeling that the sound comes from your body, as you don’t hear with your ears but with your bones. You can break the sound waves if you move. And there’s a different frequency spectrum: you can’t hear clearly lower than 150 herz (at least with the kind of underwater speakers I will use), but you do hear up to 20,000 herz, which is much higher than through air. Next week I will test my first recordings in the pool, and figure out which sounds work well. Then I will start to build my composition.
Could you take us through your universe of sounds?
The elements vary. I'm currently working on this piece for the pool, but I've also been asked to work on an installation involving glass ‘tears’ as acoustic chambers. The sounds I recorded for this will be completely transformed inside these chambers. I learned that everything in the watery, glassy universe is high pitched. Bass sounds don’t work inside the ‘tear’ chamber. My first instrument is the piano, a big resonating box capable of making beautiful overtones. For 15 years, I have been experimenting witham searching within the prepared piano, where I put tape, wooden sticks or nylon strings into the instrument. My universe of sounds mostly involve, in some way or the other, overtones and harmonics. That is why I also often use toy pianos and gong rods, instruments which produce weird overtones because they are out of tune and difficult to control. These sounds captivate me.
The toy piano seems to occur often in your recent work.
Last year I released my ensemble piece Bakunawa, which features four toy pianos. I also bring a toy piano when I play solo, because they are small and easy to carry, and they sound crazy. As a piano player, I was often confronted with the fact that not every venue has a piano. So bringing toy pianos also speaks to the Chinese practical side of me. Recently, I started using the ceramic wokalimba which has its own unique and sparkling sound. My boyfriend, who is also a musician, made a kalimba from a wok soldering metal spines inside it (he calls it wokalimba), and I decided to make a ceramic version. I can show you, I have one here. They are super fragile, so you have to be careful carrying them around. I always try to see what I can add to the sound world that I already have. I like it when I hear something I don't recognize, but that intrigues me.
Wokalimba by Pak Yan Lau
You mentioned that nobody expects extensive musical works on toy pianos. On the other hand, John Cage and other composers have made seminal works using the instrument. Do you feel the weight of that legacy, or not at all.
I mean that nobody expects symphonies out of a toy piano, and therefore, expectations in general are a bit less demanding. I don't really feel a weight, because I use the toy piano in a different, much more sound oriented way. Some contemporary music pieces can be very academic and classically written. I have heard pieces for three or four toy pianos that are pretty complicated and precisely timed. But that’s not really my thing. My starting point is always sound, and from there rhythmic, melodic and harmonic elements follow. I have a friend in Poland who has collected all the toy pianos in the world. One of his projects with his group Małe Instrumenty (who also plays unusual and self made instruments) was playing Chopin waltzes on toy pianos. I take a different approach.
When you talk about how you explore and experiment with sound, and with matter and materials like water and glass and ceramic, it’s as if you’re becoming a sound alchemist. Which part of the whole musical process do you enjoy most?
There are different moments in the process when I hear that things are coming together. It can be discovering a sound that I’m very happy with, or a moment when I perform live. When you perform alone, you could say you improvise, but there has been so much research and preparation that it is also composed in a way. I do have a structure when to produce which sounds, and when I want them to meld together. I enjoy that part too. Maybe the purely technical part, like figuring out how to record something really well, I don’t really like that, but others do, so I invite them to work with me.
In this issue of //\ hoekhuis, we’re interested in how ‘the balcony’ both performs as a private and public space. When we saw you performing on stage, it felt as if we were entering your private studio, where you were experimenting and listening and responding to what happened. How do you experience performing for an audience?
Every time is different. I remember the performance in Worm well, because I was very calm, and I really took my time. That’s not always the case, I tend to rush and sometimes I play too much. At Worm, I entered a flow and everything was at the pace that it needed. Leaving things resonating. Playing for an audience is not the same as playing in your studio, where you know you can make mistakes. You can drop something, and make unintended noises. When performing live however, a mistake immediately becomes musical material. You have to work with it and you give it a twist, transform it.
Do you ever think about scores, or graphic notation?
Yes, for my latest record Bakunawa I made scores. Instruments like gong rods are difficult to notate, so the scores are made out of cards with little coloured stickers with instructions. For instance to hit the instrument, or to start a loop. I am thinking a lot about how to notate and communicate sounds. Composer Éliane Radigue for instance only works one to one with musicians. Even though her music is very much composed, there's never a score. She really takes her time, to make a solo piece for one musician easily takes a year. I also like this very different approach.
It's more like an oral tradition.
Yes, and it becomes very personal. But then how do you transpose a piece to another musician? It's interesting, because with an oral tradition, it’s a living thing and something will always change. It keeps transforming.
Pak Yan Lau’s toy piano with scores for Bakunawa, photo by Laurent Orseau.