Tim Shiel & Mindy Meng Wang’s New EP Happens To Be Some Of the Best Australian Electronic Music Released This Year
Mindy Meng Wang is an unlikely member of Australia's contemporary music scene – the key word being contemporary. Since her arrival in Australia in 2014, the Chinese musician has played with Regurgitator on a Velvet Underground covers tour, regularly collaborated with Melbourne electronic musician Sui Zhen and recorded with Total Control's Mikey Young. Importantly, Wang has done all of this not as a guitar player or singer, but as a master of the ancient Chinese string instrument, the guzheng.
The two-metre long instrument, which came to prominence in the second century BCE, has a sonorous, major tone; it is hugely expressive and difficult to master. To the untrained ear, it might sound like a richer version of a sitar.
Wang released her debut album An Improvisation Through Time and Space last year, an experimental effort recorded wholly on the guzheng. But this year, she has arrived as an indie force to be reckoned with on her latest collaboration with electronic producer and triple j/Double J radio host Tim Shiel, the EP Nervous Energy 一 触即发. It also happens to be some of the best Australian electronic music of 2021.
The release is only 15 minutes long, but the fusion of Shiel's sounds and Wang's playing is so distinct that it manages to create a bona fide sonic world of its own within that time. The closest, recent musical relative I can think of is Four Tet's "Two Thousand And Seventeen", which samples sitar from a devotional Hindu hymn. That song isolates and loops a single line into ringing, hypnotic heaven – an act of curated listening, manifest in song. But Shiel and Wang are collaborators and contemporaries in conversation on Nervous Energy 一 触即发 – instead of Weng's guzheng feeling like a sample ripped over the top of pre-made beats, it is the other end of a möbius strip that she and Shiel occupy.
Wang and Shiel's interaction of the (truly) ancient and the new in musical terms dovetails with encroaching urbanisation of ancient spaces. There are moments of harmony, though it remains a struggle punctuated by moments of extreme friction. Wang's playing, when left unadulterated, is light, organic and floaty; Shiel's production pushes back against it with weighty, and erratic synthetic beats.
Wang describes the interaction of the two's music in similarly evocative terms: "Tim's music made my blood surge immediately, and I couldn't help holding my breath; my muscles tightened, like a wild leopard about to jump out from the dark, or balancing on a string up high in the sky. I used the guzheng to create a meditation of tranquility in the chaos, to try calm my emotions and fast heartbeat. The gentle melody brings rational control and pulls everything back to a perfect balance."
Shiel's percussion carries the spirit of '90s IDM, quoting the frenetic jungle of Squarepusher or the soft, motorik drums of trip-hop. He acts as chameleonic beatmaker, forming around Wang's playing. Highlight "Sleeping Tiger On The Bund 蓄势待发" sees the guzheng's ringing strings increase in speed, before shattering into fragments; Shiel chops wordless singing into reversed guzheng and a club beat.
On "Body of Water (What Is Love) 一线之间", the pair choose to juxtapose – rather than blend – their backgrounds. Shiel trades A and B sections with Wang, with the producer offering saw-lead over a drill 'n' bass beat and Boards of Canada-style vocal samples (a voice that manages to say "what is love" without sounding like a question); Wang replies with a simple boom clap beat, and a traditional melody line that slowly buckles under the strain of aggressively vibrato playing.
Though Nervous Energy 一 触即发 might be stylistically experimental, it is also intent on remaining eminently listenable. "Hidden Qi 隐.气" and "My Love Is Not What It Was 嗔念" both begin as drones – the kind that could spurl out ambiently for an hour – but burst into a shimmering melody. They tell imagistic, sonic stories in a condensed three-four minute form – making them entirely radio-ready.
In the IDM sphere, Australia suffers from its size. Though there are independent labels, including Shiel's own excellent Spirit Level, they lack the history and cult following of those in the UK like Warp, Ninja Tune or the US' Brainfeeder. Nervous Energy 一 触即发 deserves to be in the same conversation right at home.
Tim Shiel and Mindy Meng Wang's debut EP Nervous Energy 一 触即发 is out now via Music In Exile.
Written by Josh Martin, a Melbourne-based freelance music and media writer with words in MTV Australia, NME, Junkee, Crikey, etc. Follow him on Twitter @joshuamartjourn.
