The Analog Girl Finds Her Dream Project: A Musical Soundtrack For The ALICE “Smart Office” Complex
When singer/songwriter Mei Wong was given the opportunity to create soundtrack music for a cutting-edge building complex and creative space in her homeland Singapore, she didn’t hesitate. “I feel inspired by spaces, so this indeed was a meeting of interests for me,” she says. “The shape, angles, styling, and purpose of a space can spark ideas for a song.”
Wong, who has released four albums of delightful minimalist electronic pop as The Analog Girl, says a love for architecture is in her veins. “My dad wanted to be an architect growing up,” she says. “I also grew up drawing mock floor plans of apartments for fun. To this date, I love watching videos on architecture and interiors, especially the In Residence series on Nowness.”
That building complex, named ALICE, is the first of its kind, an environmentally-friendly. creative space designed to host artists and scientific researchers, with art galleries and work spaces, including research spaces for biomedical, physical sciences and engineering, in two towers. Wong’s music will play in the lobbies of each block — the North Tower and The South Tower. The complex is dubbed by its creators, as “A Wonderland For A New Generation Of Supercreatives.”
The complex takes its name from an acronym. A: Alice. L: Learn In A Collaborative Setting. I: Integrated With Shared Media Facilities. C: Curated With Art. E: Eat, Live, Work And Play. From the ALICE promotional brochure: “Alice will bring together dreamers, thinkers, and makers within a vibrant environment of venture suites, shared media facilities, and an assortment of flexible work-live-play-learn spaces.”
Wong says she considered the commission a privilege that she took very seriously and drew inspiration from.”That to me,” she says, “was motivation in itself — realizing that I was given this privilege to write music for anyone who walks through those glass doors. During which, I entered these long songwriting sessions which got me into these ‘zones’ where I surrendered completely to the process. And that resulted in a soundtrack that evolves with each phrase, and with every listen. I believe it lives and breathes in the space that it is playing in right now. There are 3 different music loops, playing at 3 separate times of the day — morning, noon and evening, to reflect the mood of the people who are passing through, and the light that enters the space.”
Wong’s press kit describes the experience of creating the music and how it affected her. “It has been a whole new songwriting experience for me,” she writes. “The process has been meditative and exploratory, a year long journey that has led me to incorporate new sounds, form new songs, new progressions, crafting longer songs than normal, and getting into states of flow during long, uninterrupted sessions of playing and composing –I was truly in a state of bliss, much like falling in love.”
I asked Wong how precedents in ambient music, by Brian Eno and others, influenced her creative output. “While searching for inspiration,” she says, “I listened to a range of music including Ashra, Beach House, lo-fi chill hop compilations, and Sunbeam Sound Machine. And naturally, I also looked up Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ and Air’s ‘Music for Museum,’ as I intended to create something with ambient leanings since this was going to be a soundtrack that would be played in a public space. At the same time, I considered the curator’s brief, and branding for the building, which was in the vein of ‘Alice In Wonderland.’ Hence, aside from being ambient, I also wanted to incorporate some of the more fantasy, surreal-sounding sonic elements and progression as well — which for me, undeniably is the dream project.”
Previous works by The Analog Girl, starting in the early 2000s, have incorporated abstract lyrics with a variety of electronic pop forms, from trip hop to straight ahead techno pop and ambient. Following the release of her 2017 album “Golden Sugar Crystals,” Wong is working on a new album from The Analog Girl, to be released next year.
As for her music for ALICE, The Analog Girl has reason to be pleased. “It is one of my proudest work to date,” she says. ALICE is a project of Singapore-based FARM, a design studio that brings together architects and designers to create a variety of leading edge buildings, including housing projects, cafes, hotels, temples, and work spaces, and The Boustead Development Partnership.
