I think, if I’m going to try to “sell” something to you, I should try to to sell it to myself first. For me, what instantly “gets” me about Chen Ming-chang’s music occurs around two minutes into “淡水騎車 (Riding In Danshui)” off this, his soundtrack to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust In The Wind.
Featuring, a melange of environmental recordings, acoustic guitar, wind instrument, and synth, come together, it’s in this song that I can sense it perfectly embodies the tale told by its film – a visual meditation on our struggle to adapt reality with those bigger dreams that increasingly appear more and more like a mirage. For some, though, memories will come streaming in three minutes after this album begins. It’s a melodic chord sequence that turned a wayward artist into someone at the forefront of a new vanguard of Taiwanese music.
Before Chen Ming-chang heralded the start of a new form of Taiwanese folk music, there was the young kid from Beitou trying to escape the seedier parts of his home, taking in all the folkloric performances held throughout the hot springs capital of Taiwan. His first love of writing wouldn’t be in music but in puppetry, a love he developed while attending Beitou’s puppet theatres.
By the time Chen was old enough to get into high school, a guitar (a gift given to him by his parents) collected dust as he explored other forms of performance. Once he picked up the guitar, Chen began to perform “western” music and with existing folk groups (in spite of his penchant for feeling stage fright). At the moment in time, by his own admission, the music he was making was terrible and rudderless. And now, tied to running his mother’s jewelry store (after the news of his father experiencing a stroke), making any kind of music was far from Chen’s headspace.
It wouldn’t be until he was 28 years old, that at the urging of his mom, Chen would refocus himself on making music. Taking advantage of a gift of a 4-track cassette recorder from his mother, Chen jerry-rigged his bedroom into a soundproof music room where he’d take in students as a guitar teacher and record demos (in his free time).
From his bedroom studio, Chen Ming-chan would fall under the influence of Chen Da, one of the giants of Taiwanese folk music who developed the “new folk sound” with roots in protest music and in rediscovering/adapting age-old folk songs into new vernacular. His demo tapes would be filled with music now dramatically inspired by Chen Da, adopting a similar, raspy voice, using a more tonal sound. However, outside of his home, Chen would relate to a journalist friend of his, his love for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s movies and how he’d love to one day soundtrack one of his movies.
Somehow, a home tape recording of his was given to an acquaintance, and that became the cassette tape given to Hou Hsia-hsien. Basically, with the note: “check out this demo from a young man who wants to record a soundtrack for you.” A pipe dream somehow became true, as Hou realized that Chen would be the perfect musician to soundtrack his final film in his own “coming of age” trilogy. When they met, Chen was full of young hubris, something that would endear him to Hou. Yet, somehow, Chen found himself graduating from a nobody to an important body learning the ropes of how a professional recording studio worked. Now he had to deliver a soundstrack.
Working with songwriter, Christine Hsu (aka Xu Jingchun) on piano and on vocals, they took their ultra modest recording budget and early views of the film, using those threadbare resources to construct a kind of musical dialog between themselves. Using the film’s onscreen characters and their environment as the intermediary, they’d craft a tape featuring a new kind of Taiwanese instrumental music.
During the daytime, Chen would take Christine to go out on bicycle trips, riding from Beitou to the coastline. Once back from the greenery and landscape outside of their studio, they’d return with field recordings and ideas, capturing the like minded, rural to urban Taiwanese world of Dust In The Wind’s protagonists. In the studio, Christine would make Chen focus on capturing the subtlety of the story by honing in on a more concise, direct melodic form of playing. She’d tease tones out of her Yamaha DX7 and Chen would play guitar unlike anything before.
Out of countless hours the duo recorded (and recorded) reams of songs in just three days, and out of all that work, Hou would use only four minutes for the film released in 1986. No matter. Those four minutes of music would become iconic, speaking to countless Taiwanese who found a quiet solace in a shared story (as set in the film).
It wouldn’t be until many years past the film’s release, after Chen’s rise into Taiwanese folk rock history that Sony Taiwan (I believe) would try to capitalize on the popularity of both the singer (who’d go on to do other brilliant soundtrack and solo work) and Hou’s resurgence, with 1993’s The Puppetmaster, that they’d plumb the Chen’s memory trying to discover master tapes to once thought to be lost. Chen, thankfully, dig some digging himself, findem them gathering dust under his balcony’s bird cage. Baked by direct sunlight for nearly half a decade (holding back mold and tape rot), Dust In The Wind the soundtrack was found in Chen’s home in 1993. Now audiences could put Chen’s “character music” in context with his more known “sung” work.
What you’d hear in 1993 would be songs like “戀戀風塵主題 (一）(Theme One – The Little Train On The Pingsi Line)”, hypnotic, melancholic sounds inspired by the percussive resonances of yueqin music. Interstitial music like “風的口哨 (The Whistling Of The Wind)”, and “雲的陰影 (The Shadow Of The Clouds)” showed the influence of ambient music. Others like “信 (The Letter)” and “雨水 (Rainwater)” bring the prosaic quality of new form Taiwanese folk song into territories that are still ever more haunting and ethereal, touched by jazz and other modal music.
You see, I’ve seen bits and pieces of Dust In The Wind. Far from its ideal full-screen theatrical environs, watching it on my comparatively tiny monitor (much like Chen and Xu), I still get that pang of nostalgia (or feel a certain empathy) with the images on the screen, as the music becomes its atmosphere. How so? It’s in this music that, seemingly, finds a way to obscure the lines of what constitutes something being “foreign”. For every memory we can forget in our mind, songs like “那一工，想起了柑仔店 (That Day, Remembering The Shop)”, or “牽你的手 (Holding Your Hand)”, can create new ones, tying us to places whose only distance from ours is purely physical.