Yuan Jung-Ping (袁中平): 南風旅程 (South Wind Journey) (1989)

This post wouldn’t be possible without the good ear/find of Christopher Morris and the special vision of Yuan Jung-Ping. It seems appropriate this spring (if you’re on my latitude of the world) to keep digging through the annals of forgotten Asian culture looking for more signpoints guiding us towards a new, Chinese-influence or Sinosphere world music. Yuan Jung-Ping’s 南風旅程, otherwise known as “South Wind Journey”, is just one more clue showing the markings of ideas gleaned from minimalism, fusion, ambient, and New Age but built from a language far older than all of that.

Now known as a Guqin master, it was way back in the late ‘70s when Yuan Jung-Ping was something else. Back then he turned his back on a musical career as the founder of one of Taiwan’s leading Western-influenced folk groups the trio, Travelers. Born in Taipei in 1950 to a family that escaped Mao’s Land Reform Movement in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, Yuan still felt some of the pull of that other mainland throughout his life.

However, it was the music of the west piping through radio stations that spurred him to take up the steel-string guitar and take his first steps into the music world. In short notice Yuan would helm popular rock and roll groups at school that would propel him to be one of the leading figures in the Taiwanese pop scene. Just after getting an exemption from serving in the Taiwanese army due to amblyopia in his left eye, Yuan completely retired from the music industry and spirited himself off to the United States. He felt he had little to learn in Taiwan and believed he needed to retrain himself musically.

In 1983, Yuan would follow his brother to New York City to study ethnomusicology and fine arts at CUNY-Hunter College. It was in America where he’d hear his brother play guqin music from China for the first time. Enamored by the timeless tone and compositions heard played by that multi-string instrument, Yuan began an erstwhile study of its history. While journeying to Boston, specifically to Harvard’s Yenching Library, he’d discover ancient Chinese books filled with scores made for the guqin. Now, more well-versed in the art of composition, Yuan adapted it’s melodicism to the piano. Even if he couldn’t procure a guqin then, it was that instrument that would be the driving force behind his new compositions and a rekindling of love with the ancient “dynastic” music of China.

It was for a brief moment that Yuan would return back to Taiwan to really throw himself into the study of the guqin, all the while in search of a label that could release the new music he had begun creating in the States. There he found a record label called,  鐘石唱片, other wise known as Prime Records, that wanted to carve out a new territory on the island for those listeners interested in forward-thinking Taiwanese instrumental music (and aptly built out a roster to do so, including one Cong Su). 

Armed with the Roland D-50 “LA” synth pictured on the sleeve, he’d combine real and imagined sound to create an album that spoke to the lineage of environmentally-inspired music he heard in those long-forgotten scores. Electronic instruments gave off the appearance of well-worn antiquity. “Antique” instruments slipstreamed through the future, as if they never went away.

Inspired by long hikes he’d take around Taiwan, Yuan discovered all the global environs and culture asserting itself on the island. Southern breezes gave way to torrential eastern pours. Global, cosmopolitan density giving way to one of the greener, palm-frocked kinds. Tradition could hold on for a while — Yuan had to explore and create new ways to unite the ages.

In 1989, Yuan would release 南風旅程 (South Wind Journey). Within this album others would get to hear songs like “浮雲 (Floating Clouds)” and “湖上的銀河 (Lake Galaxy)” that would take to heart the multi-layered pointillistic movement of traditional “Chinese” music and shift it towards the increasingly minimal area of jazz and ambient tones. Although Yuan would largely arrange and play all this music by himself, he’d convene a small trio of session musicians to beef up the compositions, giving them a looser, more human feel.  

Divining ideas from nature, on songs like “熱帶漩渦 (Tropical Swirl)” and “蜻蜓蝌蚪四重奏 (Dragonfly Tadpole Quartet)” Yuan would use systematic, arrhythmic ideas to convey organic, “natural” movements he’d experience in the real world outside our doorsteps. 南風旅程 tries to strike the balance between organic and inorganic, even going so far to do so with the accessible and difficult.

In Yuang’s world a breezy, South American-influenced guitar instrumental like “南風旅程 (South Wind Journey)” could exist with the meditative asceticism of a track like the closer “三分五十三秒 (Three Minutes and Fifty-Three Seconds)”. This musical wu wei inherits the idea that the most natural movement is the one that speaks to you directly.

For 30-odd long minutes there’s a refreshing dose of complex easygoingness that remains distinctly Yuan’s. Here, this future Tao teacher taught us some of life’s first essential lessons by applying them to his world itself.

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