Matthew Lam - Composer

Duration: 8' 
Premiere:

Oct 24, 2025. EMuSE Concert, Hatch Recital Hall, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY

Performed by Adrian Lau

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Program notes:

This piece is strongly inspired by the tong laus (Chinese style tenement buildings, popular in Hong Kong from the Colonial times to the 1970s) built in the post-WWII era near my apartment in Hong Kong. From a foreigner’s perspective the tong laus with the (now almost extinct) neon lights might seem to resemble a cyberpunk paradise from a futuristic utopia, partly due to influences of movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction and Ghost in the Shell. However, due to poor construction methods, lack of maintenance, and possibly poor construction materials due to scarcity of materials and capital in the post WWII period, some of the tong laus are at the verge of collapsing, and are on critical life support: they are structurally supported by additional steel beams installed in recent years to prevent from collapsing, waiting the day to be torn down and redeveloped. Looking at the facades of the tong laus, you can see slaps of concrete degrading, numerous cracks on the surface, parts of the concrete fallen down, and even the rusted steel beams (which should be covered by concrete) exposing to open air. 

Musically speaking, the music starts by recreating the soundscape of a construction site with drilling sounds imitated by the bassoon reed and real-life construction sounds in the fixed media, with both samples and processed bassoon sounds (with synchronous granular synthesis). However, the building starts to crumble immediately after it is completed, with cracks and fragments of concrete falling onto the ground, which is signified by the multiple delay lines in the live processing part and the convolved sound in the fixed media. In the final section, the building starts rapidly falling apart, resulting in a huge boom at the very end. This is represented by the extensive use of multiphonics and the noisy, high frequency fixed media.