I’ve been to Hong Kong three times in my life, all of them before the 1997 handover. (Once in the 70s, once in the 80s, and once in the mid 90s.) Were I to return, I don’t think I would recognize the HK of the present. The version that Xi Jinping’s government is putting in place is operationally very different from the society that I experienced. And I’m sorry to say that believing that the One Country Two Systems framework would last very long past ‘97 always struck me as unlikely: China was a world power for millennia save for a blip in history when 19th century colonial Britain and their naval warships used Chinese inventions like gunpowder against the Qing Dynasty in order to maintain a trading relationship where Britain could continue to use opium instead of silver in exchange for Chinese porcelain, silk, and tea. Because Britain itself didn't have enough silver to buy what it wanted, but it did have Indian-sourced opium. So there was never going to be a permanent obeisance for the colonial way of doing things. The future of the island and the Kowloon side is on track to be typified by increasingly tight control and less European-style democracy. Any historian could tell you that. The Hong Kong that I experienced is a thing of the past. 

Nonetheless I chose the title with its reference to Hong Kong as the locus of the Tyme Sefari Field Recordings that constitute the initial material. Postmodernism’s leveraging ‘recognition’ as a mechanism to trigger awareness of metatextuality is not operative here, and arguably the provenance of the materials is irrelevant as there are no audible traces left of the original sounds. The work, then, could simply be ‘untitled’ and regarded as an abstraction rather than an entity with discernible content that an assiduous listener might unpack. There are other levels that resist easy apprehension, in particular a formal scheme that is likely to deny access to the logic of its deployment and raison d’etre, though one of its tactics is that it makes legible the fact that there are patternings present throughout. 

This is the first work in a series wherein each has a duration of 74 minutes, the original 1982 CD standard.

fragrantredharbortorrent (2021)

Jay Alan Yim

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