Travelling with the Fishermen's Song

The Fishermen's Song of the Eastern Sea is an Orchestral Piece, a piece which I performed with the Orchestra of my high school many years ago. We still perform together years after our graduations. With the pandemic and the crackdown on dissidents in my hometown, many of us, including myself, left the city. Performing together again in the future would be fairly difficult. During my stay in Germany, I traveled to various places with my ambisonics recorder. Apart from doing field recordings, I performed the tune of the intro of the Fishermen’s Song in acoustically special spaces of the areas I visited, for instance in outdoor theatres, bunkers, and where I am currently at, i.e. Ústi nad Labem.

This is a live performance manipulating these recordings. The same piece is performed in different spaces, bearing the acoustic properties of these spaces. Through the media of immersive sound, the piece attempts to mediate this connection through organizing and structuring the recordings, as well as sonically manipulating them, these spaces are contrasted against each other through the same factor, the performed tune itself. The reminiscence of the life I used to live is brought into the present, a connection to my hometown, in the form of the tune: the shared memory with my friends I used to perform with, while adrift in foreign lands. The transformation of the tune in the performance represent the wishes that one day we would reunite and perform together once again.

Special Thanks to: Gary Kwan Chun Hin, for recording the tune in the hall of my high school.

Due to a series of unfortunate events, the recording of the performance is lost.