Swiftly Rising

06-07-24

Our sixth show in our 20th Year Anniversary Series offered a unique experience. “Swiftly Rising” was an intimate showcase highlighting the creativity of some of Hong Kong’s current songwriters. The showcase featured performances of English-language songs in a personal atmosphere, allowing audiences to connect closely with the songwriters and their craft. Thanks to Terrible Baby, Eaton HK for hosting. Big shout to Zaide who stepped in to work the sound. Thanks to Aaron Michelson for the photos and Cyril a for the reviews. Big thanks to Raven, our wonderful door person and Christy, our busy intern.
我哋20週年系列嘅第六場演出為各位帶嚟咗一個獨特嘅體驗。「Swiftly Rising」係一個緊密嘅音樂展示會,突顯咗香港現時創作歌手嘅創意。呢個展示會主要集中於英文歌嘅演出,營造咗一個親切嘅氛圍,比觀眾可以同創作歌手同佢哋嘅作品有更緊密嘅連繫。多謝Terrible Baby, Eaton HK嘅場地支持。更加要大大聲多謝Zaide幫手處理音響,Aaron Michelson拍攝嘅相片同Cyril撰寫嘅評論。仲有我哋好好嘅守門人Raven同忙碌嘅實習生Christy,真係多謝晒你哋!
❤️ Chris B xx


VAUN

1. Coming Home
2. Only Tears
3. One Last Night
4. And I Know I Wanna
5. Lost Paradise

The first performer of the night was Vaun, the lead singer of Magic Mountain Bells. I reviewed the band two and a half months ago (before Vaun lost his voice and only regained it recently) and had no idea until I walked in with two cocktails spilling and heard his distinctively clear voice. While Magic Mountain Bells has been around for no more than about a year, Vaun has been writing for over 20 years. And his experience shows – when discussing his compositions, he’s technical and structured, laying out the purpose of each musical section and layer.

But his trained up experience hasn’t stopped him from embracing new technology.

“If you need advice,” he said as I tried very hard not to spill alcoholic pink foam over the floor. “Use AI”.

“It’s a tool”, he continued. “You as the composer can choose and change it to how its supposed to sound”

In fact, he even admitted to one of Magic Mountain Bells’ first songs being written by AI – something that I didn’t realise at all when reviewing them previously.

His first song was ‘Coming Home’, a Magic Mountain Bells song that reflects how every member of the band is an immigrant but now all see Hong Kong as their home.
Without the band to back him up, Vaun’s persona was entirely different. In contrast to the manly, rehearsed front-man persona at The Fringe in April, this Vaun was intimate and friendly, admitting to mistakes and to his lack of guitar skills (you’re fine don’t worry).

Nonetheless, even when performing solo, the sections for each song were clear and distinct from the lyrical strummed verses to the driving bass riffs. He explained to the audience how when writing any song for the band, certain sections are written to be heavier, with the whole band joining in so that the audience can also join in, while others are meant to be more performative. “We are always thinking about audience interaction”.

When asked about his writing process, especially for the band, Vaun said that writing is a collaborative process. “A lot of songs are written and produced together”, he said. “The song just now was written when a friend was just jamming; we built on top of each other – I built on top with my vocals, the bassist wrote the bridge”. That clearly explained why the bridge was so bass heavy and driving – teamwork, it seems, does in fact make the dream work.

Another song “One Last Night” was also a song from Magic Mountain Bells. The song is about addiction and he last performed it on 4/20. Make of that what you will. Here Vaun explored his use of AI a bit more “Some of the melody was written by AI”, he explained “It took about 20 different takes for the AI to give us something we finally found good”. What was surprising, not just to me but to the whole audience, was that you really couldn’t tell it was written by an AI – that’s because he, and the band, workshopped that ideas from AI into the song holistically changing parts of it, adding layers, adding lines and overall turning it from a generated idea into something real. “You have to be really good at prompting”, he explained further”. Lesson: don’t just expect the computer to do everything for you.

A particular treat for the more educational than usual evening was Only Tears, a rock ballad that he premiered that night that is still in its workshopping stage. “It’s likely to change a lot before being played by the band”, he said. The song was a little bit folk, reminiscent of Glen Hansard’s lyrical folk rock ballads but with simpler lyrics and riffs, as expected from Vaun and Magic Mountain Bell’s easily accessible style.

Although Vaun is currently still mostly known as the frontman of Magic Mountain Bells, tonight showed how he is perfectly capable of standing alone. In fact, I personally like him more as a solo performer. Without the responsibility of leadership and driving massive crowds, his performance was less perfect but also less corporate. Even though there were a few slips here and there, the intimacy more than made up for it. Then again, a good musician is capable of performing in many different ways with many different people and if anything, this performance has shown that Vaun is not just experienced, but knowledgeable, friendly and versatile and definitely someone to look out for wherever he goes.

Or maybe he’s a heavily prompted AI generated android, who knows.
– Cyril Ma


KEISHA BUCKLAND

1. Dreams
2. Crush
3. Hindsight
4. Standard Girlfriend
5. Locomotive
6. Fighting the ocean
7. Ammonite

The second performer was 17 year old Keisha Buckland who at the time of performance was just opening up her IB results.

“They were not what I was expecting …. Which means I’ll just have to work harder on music”.

Naturally she didn’t reveal her score to her adoring fans, but few can deny that she already works very hard on her music. Her songs, lyrically and musically complex past her age, are emblematic of a new style of alternative indie-pop that’s really only been around since 2020. Influenced heavily by country, pop with lashings of musical theatre and poetic self-expression, the style that Keisha performs with is a clear representation of the music and media her generation consumed.

Taylor Swift, naturally, was listed as an influence, as was Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter; I also personally feel some Mitski and Rebecca Sugar vibes which would make sense with the influence of Adventure Time and Steven Universe on Gen Z and older Gen A culture. The high amount of Musical Theatre influence, in the lyrical and musical structure and performance style surprised me until I remembered that many now-famous singer-songwriters like Olivia Rodrigo actually came from Musical Theatre backgrounds. Not to mention that musical movies have been coming back into vogue, and some shows like Dear Evan Hansen, Heathers, Hamilton and Mean Girls are household names with younger generations.

I don’t even think there’s a name for it yet (Quirk Pop, I’ve written down in capital letters, inspired by the self-description of every Gen Z person as ‘quirky’ but I’m open to suggestions).

Why all this speculative preamble though? Because I think Keisha has something really going for her but it’s important to figure out what exactly that is and where she can go from there. Her style of music is established yes, to an extent, but not as much as classic rock which Vaun, for instance, writes in. Her themes are pretty standard for songwriters of her age, her opening songs Dreams, Crush and Hindsight need no further explanation, yet the lyrics – humorous, slightly self-deprecating combined with a generally upbeat cottage-core atmosphere, performed with an emotional theatrical half-singing, half-recitational style separates Keisha from mainstream performers. And despite her grades perhaps not being as good as she expected, she’s clearly passionate about the subjects she cares about – English Literature she mentioned several times, even with one song Locomotive being based on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. She even has a song called Ammonite which apparently is a type of fossil – she told us that anyway, I had to google it.

Her lines don’t always match with the music, and the music doesn’t always match the lines – they interact in interesting ways; sometimes the lyrics go over the musical phrase, sometimes the music decides to jump up and down. How, for instance, do you fit the lines from Dreams “I just wanna be pretty and smart and mentally stable / Show people my art and under the table my hands sit in my lap instead of picking at my nails” into a normal song form? The lines barely have the same number of syllables! Sometimes, the music is there to create a more interesting atmosphere for the story, Ammonite for instance feels like a waltz or a lullabye in the ocean, which fits with the flowing emotional break-up narrative of the song.

Ultimately everything feels like a chaotic train of thought coming straight out of the performer’s mind which is exactly what the intention is. She admits this, naturally, saying that when writing and performing “It is inevitable for some of yourself to bleed into it”.

Keisha’s music can’t yet be described as incredibly mature. A lot of her lyrics and music still feels a bit overly free, her themes a little expected. But that’s ok – her songs are about growing up, not about being grown. Everyone ultimately matures and alongside personal maturity, so does their craft. Keisha’s hit the ground running despite her insecurities and with this much talent, there’s nowhere to go but up.
– Cyril Ma


RYAN CHEUNG

The Risk of Driving
Stockton
Vancouver
Either Way
Settle Down
Thin Ice

Doctor by day, musician by night, final performer Ryan Cheung showed up with a brand of rock and blues that is medicine for the kindred. In both composition and performance style, Inspired heavily by John Mayer (he himself mentioned Mayer several times), alongside D’Angelo, Eloise and Erica Badu, Ryan’s music is a little more on the 80s and 90s classic rock and RnB side. His lyrics are personal, his music mature, if a little on the expected side.

The first few songs The Risk of Driving, Stockton and Vancouver were dominated by backing tracks that overpowered most of the performance. My notes on the spot were not very flattering. Driven by both confusion and a slight personal vendetta (which I will get to later), I wrote – “Why is he the only one who gets to bring a full band to an acoustic show?” and “this is not a f***ing karaoke bar”. However, in every song there was something that pierced through the wall of needlessly glossy synthesizers. While his lyrics and themes were largely expected (love ballads, breakup ballads and the like), his guitar solos were smooth and ethereal. As his performance continued on, the quips about f***king karaoke turned into “great solo – why doesn’t he just f***ing play?” Case in point – Stockton, told from the perspective of someone outside the titular bar on Wyndham Street, lyrically felt like a song you’d listen to when feeling like you want to text your ex but when the solo came, felt like you were crying over your ex’s lost love.

A piece of advice he gave for budding songwriters is to think about whether something benefits the song, as opposed to benefits you as a performer wanting to show off – a cardinal sin for many young performers ardent for desperate glory. His first half committed this sin but the latter half of his set, largely acoustic, was far more pure and powerful, letting his personality, stories and music take the stage. Settle Down for instance was told from the perspective of his ex-girlfriend who had asked him to, as the title implies, settle down instead of trying to ‘make it’ in music when he already has a full time medical job. Despite a few cliches, the audience were as teary eyed as he was by the end of the song. His final song Thin Ice was for me the most touching. Written about falling in love with someone emotionally unavailable, the tempo and textures were complex, moving from fast to slow, from thin to thick, reflecting the tumultuous chaos of the lyrics. His guitar tone was like an icy glacier rising up, filling the room with a soft white, blue glow, mesmerising but cold yet beautiful. The atmosphere became suddenly more intimate, quiet and meditative.

Fun fact – the name of the song was inspired by how he was always told by his high school teachers that he was on “thin ice”. Which is where the personal vendetta comes in – turns out Ryan is not just an alum of my high school, but my house captain. And suddenly a lot of his backstory made sense.

Despite Ryan being the least musically advanced of the three performers, he is perhaps, for the average Hong Konger the greatest inspiration. In a city where one is pushed to do a ‘proper job’, have a ‘safe career’ and then build a family and settle down, doing anything creative seems not just like a pipe dream but sometimes something morally ‘wrong’. His heartfelt stories have told us exactly that. Yet, he plays, continues to play, and inspires others to play.

“It’s pure gratitude for me to be here”, he said. As a doctor in intensive care, Ryan has seen more suffering than many will in their lifetimes. He doesn’t say ditch your career to follow an ‘unrealistic’ dream, something he is very aware of noting that “statistically speaking, not many people ‘make it’”. But in true house captain end-of-year-assembly fashion, he continues with a question “so I had to ask myself – what’s my definition of ‘making it’?”. Good question – I hadn’t thought about that. “I just do a little every day to make myself happy”, he mused.

His music is not yet perfect. It needs more clarity and his control of tech and production needs work, especially if he’s going to do more solo shows where he needs to control his own sound mixing. But that’s no reason to stop moving.
There is more to life than suits, stocks and stethoscopes. The benefits of music and art is not simply to make money, or maybe in some cases not to earn at all, but to experience something different and deeper.

And so to end the night off, there is now a photo on someone’s phone of the house captain, the house music captain (who came to see the show not expecting either myself nor Ryan to be there) and the guy who was told he could be neither by the teachers. But the theme of the night is growth, development and change; none of us are the same as we were then and perhaps the thing that draws us all together, including Vaun, Keisha and everyone else at Terrible Baby, is the love for music and learning to use it to express something important and personal for the world to see and hear.
– Cyril Ma


Photos by Aaron Michelson.​
由Aaron Michelson攝影​​。
Poster by​ Christy Yuen
​海報由​​​ Christy Yuen ​。

Be Sociable, Share!