Emerge is a concept album inspired by “I From The Centres”, a woodcut by Jon Renzella. The woodcut represents the idea that we are the sum of our influences.
I wanted to create a series of digitally produced, improvisational tracks that captured the idea behind Jon’s artwork. The artwork portrays an entanglement of various imagery. For this album, I wanted to create a sense of instrumental and melodic entanglement.
The music for this album was directly inspired by carving sounds in a video of Jon making the woodcut. All the music were recorded via MIDI and produced to simulate acoustic instruments. I recorded the first instrument of each track, while improvising to Jon’s carving sounds. The second and third instruments were recorded in dialogue with the first.
The album titled Seven Melodies features 7 melodies inspired by nature, color and emotions. These original piano compositions form part of a conceptual audio-visual performance inspired by the natural beauty of Taiwan. Each piano piece is composed in a different key signature, with each key signature representing a specific colour. The natural elements represented throughout the music each represents a specific emotional state.
Every melody is a point of convergence where a specific key signature, colour, natural element, and emotion connect and merge. Based on the mysterious and binary beauty of nature, these piano compositions explore the two-fold nature of being human.
