mui zyu - Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century (Master Rabbit Tape Variations)

Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century (Master Rabbit Tape Variations) is an ambient/drone reworking of mui zyu’s debut album to coincide with the traditional East and South East Asian celebration, Mid-Autumn Festival.

On deciding to create this work, mui zyu said, “I wanted to make a moon-kissed version of my record to coincide with the Mid-Autumn Festival (often referred to as the ‘Mooncake Festival’) which I was raised celebrating with family and friends. So-called ‘ambient’ music is my default listening position and although there are moments of more expansive space in my recordings to date I’ve normally gravitated to more conventional song structures and arrangements. To move into a different headspace for this project, I imagined myself as some version of the Chinese folklore character ‘Master Rabbit’ operating from a studio on the moon reinterpreting the songs.”

Continuing to work with co-producer Luciano Rossi, they altered the original recordings with analogue and digital processes including guitar pedals, tape machines and computer software to create these new iterations.

Taking inspiration from some of mui zyu’s most listened to artists including Hiroshi Yoshimura, Stars Of The Lid and Sarah Davachi and considering soundtrack ambiences used in video games and films, most notably Alan Splet’s haunting exterior/interior recordings for the film Eraserhead and immersive noise shows from musicians including Sunn O))) and Okkyung Lee, mui zyu created an ambiguous guide to help navigate the process of creating these new recordings.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated by many East and South East Asian cultures, of her own experience mui zyu says, “when I was a kid my family would get together during the Mid-Autumn Festival and share ‘mooncakes’ - beautifully molded pastries with symbolic designs often filled with lotus seed or red bean paste and a salty egg yolk in the middle. My parents told us the salty egg yolk inside represents the full moon but I thought it actually was fragments of the moon inside.”

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