The music to their multi-award winning multimedia performance, ‘every dollar is a soldier/with money you’re a dragon’, was released by former Kakilang artistic director An-Ting 娉婷 and writer and performer Daniel York Loh. the soundtrack is a craftful sonically impressive release from both respective artists.
An-Ting 安婷 and Daniel York Loh use spoken word and electronic music to create a powerful lament on the immigrant experience, combining the harsh realities of the poor first Chinese settlers in London with the opulent world of privileged, but bitter, émigré William Waldorf Astor. They take in many reflections on the need for money and status as well as the right to call a place that can either reject or embrace you “home.”
‘every dollar is a soldier/with money you’re a dragon’ tells the haunting tale of the immigrant story with those of Chinese migrants through history, always “othered” as one homogenous mass. The delicate tones and effort that progress from beginning to end is a thrilling experience with a wonderful combination of classical Chinese instrumentation and electronic music.
Soaring across continents, oceans, and winter prairies, An-Ting’s score is a mesmerising fusion of unique “Asia beats,” a melancholic tack piano, a jaunty waltz, and elegiac erhu and pipa melody. It also transports us into the shadowy holds of ships, the eerie magnificence of Astor’s very own Xanadu of Two Temple Place, smoke-filled Victoriana London, even smokier opium dens, and the expanding concrete mountain range of Manhattan across centuries and all the way up to the present. The Upcoming calls the narrator of Daniel York Loh’s epic book, a renowned classical actor, “striking… his delivery of words portraying an array of emotions that perfectly complement the swell from the music.”
The soundtrack was first commissioned as a live performance at Two Temple Place, the gothic London mansion William Waldorf Astor designed and had built for himself. However, due to the pandemic, the performance was moved online. It also won the 2021 Arts Council Digital Culture Award (Storytelling) and was chosen for the esteemed Edinburgh Festival Horizon Showcase. The first live performance of it took place at the 2023 Kakilang Festival in Two Temple Place.
On the soundtrack, An-Ting 安婷 comments,“As a concert pianist with a heritage rooted in East culture, the prospect of creating a project that harmoniously integrates traditions from both East and West is incredibly exciting. I embedded the distinctive sounds of Chinese instruments into a contemporary style, conveying a different musical expression.”