Sounds of Taiwan (Interview)

Today we’re listening to Sounds of Taiwan, a compilation by various artists. In 2021, Taiwanese multi-hyphenate Lim Giong shared field recordings from across his home country with DJ and producer Angie QQ. The pair invited various musicians to compose with the recordings, resulting in the seven collaborative tracks that make up Sounds of Taiwan. The vinyl edition is now back in stock at In Sheep’s Clothing. A conversation with various artists who contributed to the record follows the streaming links. Angie selected as a pairing Lim Giong’s 2024 record, The Realm of Otherness, a mostly ambient record made with analog and digital synths.

Sounds of Taiwan - Various Artists (39m, background vocals in field recordings)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

The Realm of Otherness - Lim Giong (76m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

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What’s your earliest memory of music?

Jieh: My parents had a nylon string acoustic guitar that they’d play in the middle of our little apartment, singing songs to me and my brother.

EP (No Translation): The house I grew up in had an upright Yamaha piano that I spent a lot of time with in my youth. From practicing for my piano lessons at six years old to making my own compositions as a teenager.

Minyen: Probably my mom used to sing to me when I was a baby, songs that she improvised about worms, the bus, and other cute things. And 歌仔戲, the Taiwanese opera, you can hear it near temples or traditional markets and TV of course.

Angie: It was Chinese New Year, and my parents had a CD of festive music playing. I got so excited by the music that I started running around the house, grabbing toys from my room and piling them in the middle of the living room. A strange little dance ritual.

Tell us about how your personal history with Taiwan shaped your musical output.

John Tsung: I grew up in an isolated part of Yang Ming Shan, 陽明山, in the mountains outside Taipei, with my extended family (grandparents, cousins) in a house surrounded by chickens and dogs and other animals. We didn’t have many friends who could come visit because it was pretty far from Taipei. So our home was my magic fort. We would go to the woods behind our house to collect leaves and mush them with rocks, and my grandparents always had 京劇 in our house on TV and we’d all be shucking peas in the kitchen, and at night, the adults would stay up chatting and I’d sneak downstairs to listen to them. All of that sound is imprinted in me, in a kind of dream-like way, and influenced the way I use foundsounds, not just as vibey texture, but as instruments and signifiers and transitions.

Jieh: Music is a way of recontextualizing the sights, smells, sounds, and textures that we absorb. So in that way, these traces exist in my music.

EP (No Translation): I was born and raised in the U.S., but my mother is from Taiwan and I spent a lot of childhood summers in Taipei with family. When I’d come back to the U.S., it always felt so disorienting – I’d instantly miss the things that surrounded me there, especially the orchestra of sounds that filled the space and made my American suburbia feel so boring in comparison. The feeling of longing for Taiwan has stayed with me wherever I’ve lived. In my music, I use a lot of recordings from Taiwan as a way to be closer, sometimes with recordings of other places as well. If I can’t be there in person, I try to create a space where I can be there while still recognizing wherever I am or have been, like being in two or more places at once.

Minyen: I was born in 1981, by the time the city kids were all exposed heavily to Japanese games, manga, and anime. The music behind them was so rich. Also I was very into TW pop music and they are quite influenced by Japan! Of course they are influenced by western culture too. Then I fell deeply into jazz when I was 16 during high school. It was the most unpopular genre in the school music library, and I wanted to be cool and different from others… So that’s how the story began.

Angie: Through Lim Giong’s music I was inspired to move to Taiwan in 2018. I lived there for a year. It was a short but deeply felt period of time. While in Taiwan I collected records, worked with Lim Giong, and really got a sense of the music scene and history. That short period of time continues to inspire my work and desire to bridge Taiwan’s music with the rest of the world.

We often feature artists who blend music with field recordings. Jieh wrote previously that this form of sound captures “how we flow, how we vibrate in relation to our surroundings.” Why does this combination appeal to you?

Jieh: Field recordings provide a sense of place and space. It captures a moment in time that can never be exactly reproduced. There are too many variables at play, so each field recording is serendipitous. The interactions, the vibrations will never be the same again.

EP (No Translation): The act of field recording itself is like qualitative research - it can require you to be present and highly observant of a soundscape. Playing back the recordings is like traveling and going back in time. I love the organic textures of life. Using them in my music is a way for me to reflect on how both a soundscape felt in that moment and how it feels in the moment of listening back, creating new contexts for a moment in time to re-exist and re-contextualize.

Minyen: I will define music as ”sounds in a certain time fragment,” so to combine that with a field recording, it’s just like back to the root: where it happens when the sounds turn into music.

Tell us about the instruments/gear you used to create your track.

John Tsung: My friend Ray, who is currently David Byrne’s MD on tour, and I are in a band called GATSA or 曱甴. In Cantonese, it means cockroach, and we are a band of Asian immigrant musicians working in our mother tongues. We use a lot of Chinese instruments, including guzheng and guqin, which are all woven into the piece, albeit in very granularized way (a fancy word for very cut-up.) Ray and I, being immigrants, are also really into American country music, and he taught himself pedal steel, so that is also woven in, as a kind of dialogue with the country we are from and the country we now live in.

Jieh: Fender Telecaster, Oberheim OBXa. Reverbs, choruses, delays.

EP (No Translation): For my track, I used an Elektron Digitone for synth sounds, Chase Bliss Mood for processing/fx, and a very small Eurorack setup focused on sampling.

Minyen: First I play the soprano sax with the material, and then I play the e. piano under the sax track, and in the end I added some foley sound – to make it sound more like someone is really sitting there and playing.

What artists/albums influenced your musical style the most?

Jieh: I’ve absorbed so much from all directions, but a few that are definitely pillars would be Mobb Deep (The Infamous), Dwele (Subject), Ryuichi Sakamoto (1996), Goldie (Timeless).

EP (No Translation): Susumu Yokota, Tujiko Noriko, Boards of Canada.

Minyen: If I have to name one, probably John Coltrane, but all the people I’ve worked with and the music I heard all count – the sound that surrounds me shapes my own sound and the ideas I go along with.

Are there future volumes of Sounds of Taiwan on the way?

Angie: There is definitely a desire to expand the series. A Sounds of Taiwan: Birds. Sounds of Taiwan: Temples, etc. The possibilities are endless. Stay tuned!

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

Jieh: There are far more unsung artists than there are ones who are recognized by the establishment. Marion Brown is one for sure – avant garde, truly inimitable.

EP (No Translation): My friends in Taiwan! Nick Tsai (amazing electronic artist and modular wizard) and Sundialll (Taiwanese x Indonesian vocal/noise/electronic)

Minyen: Hard to answer – who is the right guy to give a rating to artwork? There’s so much work I haven’t heard or seen, so I’m don’t much care about the ratings as long as it’s interesting to me. It can be anyone I’m going to hear or see tomorrow.

What are you working on next?

Jieh: New Holodec album called tru folk, out on vinyl and digital April 17, 2026.

EP (No Translation): I’m working on a new album featuring guqin and many of my own field recordings from recent visits to Taiwan. Many of the tracks are being composed by sampling my own guqin playing, cutting up and altering the sound of the guqin, while still maintaining its essence. Also working on an album of past live performances with my creative partner, Marc Merza.

Minyen: A jazz version of Winterreise in Taiwanese by F.Schubert. It’s going to be 2LP and will be released in January 2026. And lots of live gigs including my winter Japan tour in December (11 gigs in 10 days!).

Angie: The next Sounds of Taiwan!