released October 30, 2020

The compilation album Distant Dialogues is a result of the most recent manifestation of the British Council’s Musicians in Residence programme. Since 2011, the British Council has sent many UK musicians to conduct residencies in cities all over China. In 2020 however, due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, these real world encounters have given way to a virtual residency program taking place entirely online. Moreover what was once a one-sided programme of UK artists visiting China has become a two-way exchange, with the participation of six artists from the UK and China. Each artist used material gathered from the social media networks of the other nation as the inspiration for a musical work.

That the entire project has taken place over the internet has given the works a certain sci-fi flavour. Three Chinese artists, Shii, GOOOOOSE and gogoj, sought creative inspiration from the kaleidoscope of UK culture for their respective projects Seeing Flowers, The Meaning of Dance, and What it is for gazing?. And three UK artists, Hector Plimmer, Kayla Painter and Wonky Logic, gathered materials from across the many-sided Chinese landscape for their projects Sonic Travels, Inner World, and Joy/Elation. Over the course of a month our inboxes and social media platforms were inundated with submissions: a poem, a wildflower, a birdsong at dawn, a dancing keyboard melody... after traversing thousands of miles, thoughts and feelings from all over China and the UK landed on the desks of the artists. Out of these the artists made careful selections, further refining their musical themes, and finally recorded and shared their impressions and imaginations of each other’s countries.

For this project Han Han, who goes by the alias GOOOOOSE, wanted to explore the nature of dancing - what kinds of sound make British people feel like moving their bodies? It may not only be the sound of dance music, but also the kinds of rhythmic sounds we encounter in our day-to-day lives, for example birdsong, waves lapping against the shore, trees swaying in the wind, the neighbour drilling into the wall, a random melody that happens upon the mind... The resulting piece Fluxions is imbued with a pop texture, to put it briefly it’s pleasing to the ear. In addition, Han Han produced a video work by collaging and deforming images and videos using homebrew programming techniques.

With Glaciers and Dust, Kayla Painter seeks to reframe vulnerability in a positive light. She received a range of submissions comprising poems, photographs, drawings, sketches and audio. She asked people of different ages and with varying accents in the UK to read the poems out and record themselves, in this way building a connection from the Chinese audience straight to the British audience. She selected honest and mysterious moments from each of the poems and worked them into the track - some as short excerpts, others percussive interjections, while still others are low in the mix used as ambience. In response to the visual materials, she experimented with representing them with sounds according to the feelings they evoked in her. For example, a drawing with long straight lines and beautiful curves was represented by a certain synth she used which plays drawn out notes.

Dwayne Kilvington aka Wonky Logic seeks after joy, and that is what music is for him: a kind of celebration. His work Elation samples various sound materials organised around the theme of joy. Glockenspiel and bamboo flute are used for the main musical motifs – the piece as a whole an imaginarium of musical encounters assembled from the recordings Chinese people submitted for the project. Joy is louder than fear and joy is healthier for people than fear is. Now is a particularly important time to talk about and feel joy, as the whole globe is overtaken by fear.

Shii, who has a passion for flowers, wanted to know about the flowers that British city dwellers encounter in their daily lives. She received numerous photos, videos and writings about flowers: flowers on the cusp of blooming and flowers withering at the end of their lives; flowers indoors and flowers outdoors. Transposing her impressions of the flowers that she saw into melodies and rhythms on the synthesizer, and editing words and phrases from the text submissions into the lyrics, she composed the song Seeing Flowers. The images of flowers that she received will be used in the video clip for the song.

Sheng Jie aka gogoj solicited video material concerning the concept of the gaze. She recorded moments from her daily life, some made at home, others at the park: a lone middle-aged man practising the saxophone, an insatiable school of fish in the pond, and a few fish enthusiasts tossing food into the pond... an endless cycle of interaction. She then sampled these recordings, assigning different timbres to the different moods of the videos. Finally through a process of collage she created What it is for gazing?. Distance separates information from its original meaning, distance also makes the true situation of the gaze seem less important.

Hector Plimmer’s piece Sonic Travels covers miles of territory, from Beijing to Lhasa, from Kunming to Shanghai. He received a selection of field recordings from all over China, some of which were used directly in the music as samples, while others were used more for contextual inspiration – a musical round trip. Hector’s first impression from the submissions was the dramatic contrast between the calm, natural spaces and the bustling city spaces; this contrast is a prominent theme in the piece.

2020’s Musicians in Residence programme is jointly presented by the British Council, XINTIANDI and Shanghai World Music Festival in collaboration with Beijing-based indie label Merrie Records and London based radio station Worldwide FM.