Melantun Records Pop-Up

Melantun Records Pop-Up: Electronic Dreams of Tsao Chien

Artist: Ujikaji

Curator: Chee-Wai Yuen (Singapore)

Melantun space designed by Irfan Kasban

Melantun Records was an artwork installed at a vacant unit of a Singapore shopping centre in 2017. Set up to look and feel like a record shop, the artwork allowed the audience to enter a place where the past, present and future of underground music culture in Singapore seemed to converge, through displays of historically seminal albums and gig posters, the organising of in-store gigs to facilitate the direct transmission of a musician’s creative impulse to an audience, and the careful insertion of speculative elements such as the creation of album artwork from imagined futures. As an artwork, Melantun posited the space of the record store as cultural and intellectual economy, facilitating subcultural knowledge production and exchange.

Melantun Records Pop-Up: Electronic Dreams of Tsao Chieh finds the beloved record store reviving the story of forgotten Singaporean polymath, Tsao Chieh (1953–1996). Tsao was an engineer with a distinguished career in the military but who also established himself as a composer, especially of orchestral works. Sent overseas by the military to study engineering in England and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, Tsao took the opportunity to pursue his musical passions, taking extra classes in music (a subject not offered by local universities then). By the time he graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a PhD in electrical engineering, he had somehow also found the time to obtain master degrees in music composition and mathematics.

On his return to Singapore, Tsao began to establish himself as a promising composer, writing such works as the ambitious Singapore, Symphonic Suite for Large Orchestra, a 40-minute work in five movements. The piece was performed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Singapore Arts Festival in 1986, which contributed to his national recognition as Outstanding Young Person of the Year that same year. What is perhaps less known is his pioneering work in computer music in Singapore. His stint at Stanford in the early 1980s had exposed him to the work of the Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. By the early 1990s, he had begun using Kyma and other computer music languages, and composed a handful of computer music pieces during that period before his untimely demise from lung cancer at the age of 42.

“Of all the different artists, it is quite terrible to be a composer, because your dream has to be realised by other people.” – Tsao Chieh

The artwork will present the life and works of Tsao Chieh from the angle of his work as a computer and electronic music pioneer in Singapore. There will be a few components: text displays highlighting aspects of his biography, reproductions of his scores/notes, interviews with family members and colleagues, and mixed-media pieces which remix his works for the present generation.