It’s easy to feel untethered when you’re listening to Chen Guoping’s (aka John Chen) Songs From Within (心意). Oscillating across various styles — jazz, neoclassical, ambient, traditional, and New Age — the album itself never feels anchored to any specific border. The main protagonist in this collection, John Chen’s fingerpicking, acts like a liaison speaking in various musical languages, trying to find common ground from various disparate points that any can connect from (but few do). The beauty of a gorgeous album like this is that John always finds a way to get his point across, making a statement (even if it’s something uniquely his).
As before, much like Chan Wing Leung and David Mingyue Liang, John Chen’s main influences didn’t grow solely from his homeland in Hong Kong but were informed by his studies abroad. Somewhere it was stated that John came to the U.S. in the 70’s as a foreign exchange student looking to study composition, computer music, and ethnomusicology.
By the time John graduated from the University of Illinois in 1988 he had done enough to earn a doctorate in Music. Throughout John’s time in America, whether performing live or recording with others, he explored the full range of guitar vocabulary out there. From electric to acoustic, from 12-string to 6-string, John made it a point to develop his guitar playing free from any easy designation. All of this, in essence, explains why a decade later in Songs From Within (心意) you can hear myriad traditions and explorations appear under his own banner.
John came to “New Age” music not out of a means to waterdown his ideas for that market but as a means to promote the spiritual side of his life in song. So, as a devoted Buddhist, John jumped at the chance to put to tape songs that had a deeply meditative quality to them. Now older, and serving as the director of Hong Kong Baptist University’s Electronic Music Department, he had, to put it bluntly, less shits to give and did what he wanted to do.
Now a decade later, in 1999, under the KIIGO record label, two year’s worth of record sessions yielded the music you’re hearing today. He wanted to get his recording just right and took his time to do so. Rather than strictly stick to guitar-centric songs, he expanded his own breadth of technique, rolling in electronic accompaniment and modern computer composition software to augment his panoramic idea of his kind of music.
“惬意 Reposedly” is a stunning introduction to that world. Over a flamenco-tinted guitar melody we hear something undoubtedly foreign: a harmonica. That tell-tale sign of American country music ascends to prominence over music that finds an intriguing middle ground that would feel out of place with different tinkerers. Likewise, the distinctly “Chinese” modality that informs the background of “诗意 Autumn Water” inspires an equally imaginative fusion. On it we get to hear more of John’s jaw-dropping guitar melodicism, fluttering notes in ways that go beyond their Spanish lilt, toward ambient/minimal spaces that are more esoteric and tonal, something shared with other tracks like “极意 Five Elements” and “心意 From Within”.
For those that might think it feels off to get such island vibes from someone like John, one must remember Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culture. That duality of finding something distinctly of his root to flow with the roots of other worldly music creates an almost romantic entanglement of compositional thought that allows songs like “心意 From Within” and “禅意 Thoughts of Zen” to have their wonderfully windswept atmosphere.
All songs have a distinct meaning to John on this album. You see it in the track tiles: comfort, destiny, silence, Zen. Rather than rely entirely on his weighty, learned background, he allows space for that improvisatory spirit to appear in songs like “源意 Essence” and let’s his guitar be just one piece of a greater puzzle deciphering his feelings.
It’s of no great consequence that each instrumental was paired with a poem to accompany it in the album liner notes. There’s a wonderful lyrical quality to Songs From Within (心意) that surely can speak to anyone looking for some orthodoxy that is no longer as unorthodox as one thinks. We don’t always want something “poetic” but it’s always illuminating to hear something that just sounds perfectly so.