Chapter 3 - I bow to the entire history of us (Interview with 飄華 Glide)

“[Humans] start to walk with two feet, they learn to hunt and gather. Culture comes into being, it spreads like a virus, it builds civilizations and histories.” / “Birds no longer chirp to the beauty of the sky. Animals no longer roam the cement floors, once green and moist pastures.Drawing circles, “This is where I stand, and this is where you should be.”” / “Divide and conquer, the fiercest of them all” / “Now, I bow to the entire history of us. Goodnight [and tune in again next week].”

— Translated Introduction in 飄華 Glide “你的偉大經已全部播映完畢 I bow to the entire history of us”

// 泥沼叢林間出現陌生的腳印。宰牛烹羊，牙牙學語，建立文明。鳥訝異天空不再屬於自己；走獸被鋼筋水泥阻止縱步；你我畫地為牢，為土地立了塊人類紀的里程碑。萬物之靈，各執一詞；爭論無靈，武力統治。// 然後，物極必反。//「你的偉大經已全部播映完畢，下星期同樣時間請收睇...」//

—Introduction in 飄華 Glide “你的偉大經已全部播映完畢 I bow to the entire history of us”

Last winter night in some tucked away industrial building-slash-communal space-slash-stage in West Kowloon, people made space for cigarettes and bathroom breaks, their smiles revealing just how content or buzzed—from excitement or the alcohol, it was hard to tell—they were. A surge of relief washed over the crowd: moments ago, the room was still sweltering with residual heat, not by kinetics (it was impossible to move), but from the sheer impact of having been sonically dragged across the floor by a twenty five minute long-allegory from Glide 飄華 about the entire history of humanity.

In the season finale of a TV series, there is often a 2001: Space Odyssey-esque flashback: An alien monolith appears in a prehistoric veldt, homo sapiens learn to use bones as tools, homo sapiens use bone as weapons, then boom, Space Race, American spacecraft Discovery One sets of for Jupiter, HAL (an AI-like intelligence) attempts domination, a rescue plan launches, old age, and lastly, a foetus enclosed in an orb of light floats in space.

Despair, catharsis, sublimation. Return to square one. “Seeds of doom, planted beyond the years. Born to blossom, bloom to perish.” Most importantly in the finale, a new season ensues.

History writes to repeat itself. Against the backdrop of human existence, Glide chooses to observe happenings as they are. Sometimes, their songs assume the omniscient narrator. Devoid of judgement, removing the self, ego, the other, like a fly on the wall.

In real life, Glide has always manifested as an under-the-radar presence. Playing in private, guerilla shows, producing highly limited prints of CDs, and befittingly, a “free pricing” tag to tie in their egalitarianism. Quantity has never mattered; what they seek out are circumstances of chance encounters. After all, the five members come from a tight-knit community of independent musicians, as band members of 崩口碗, as producers and DJs in sound projects and underground fixtures. They could appeal to the market, but their social media maintains minimal to no engagement except links to their tracks. They skip the superfluous introduction and grandeurs of speech. They adhere to a rule of “no interviews.” They let music do the talking.

It is rare to encounter a collective that carries an ethos as thorough, articulate, and straightforward as Glide. “Unadulterated” sounds like an offbeat term to describe these music veterans, but it works. They have no intention of running a band, they are simply gathered to make music. The members came together on the occasion of one member’s birthday and eventually, a fortuitous music experiment that became a workshop, involving not only the four members, but musician and artist friends. It was only a matter of four months from their first encounter to workshopping and producing their first printed CDs. The “here and now” is a decisive element, as it goes hand-in-hand with the creation of their songs. Every day they were to gauge their personal limits, someone would suggest a prompt, others responded, repeating to the point of exhaustion and by the end of the day, a song. The fruits of their sessions were eventually compiled into a mixtape titled《漂流歌單》. If you browsed this eclectic concoction you would be pleasantly surprised by its range and goofiness, from psychedelic rock, post-rock, to hip-hop, reggae, and more.

For Glide, the element for surprise far precedes the need for perfection, so much that they consider themselves to be “playing a game” (when making music). In Glide, the game mechanics offer the shape that informs their creative process, and to top off, a narrative visuality. Each member writes on paper a wish. The wish becomes a command.

“I want an arms race” — B minor ascends to F-sharp minor. “I want an atomic explosion” — give a little Zach Hill to the bassline. “We are crossing the Naihe bridge (奈何橋)” — echoes of past lives linger and reverberate, holding on for dear life.

Listening to the song “_Edward’s” feels as though I’ve assumed a role in a gameplay, tasked with a mission, working towards a build-up and delivering a resolution. Is this a goal or process-oriented method? The goal—to deliver something—becomes the process. The wish can be a scenario, an emotion, or it could be musical. A story is prescribed for what depicts the music. If you can withstand the music’s turbulence, and see the cyclone for the calmness at its eye, you will come to realise: all is but a game that God plays.

//「你今晚出唔出去？」喪鐘響起。「點解我會喺度㗎？」上橋，不再回頭。「天生萬物以養人，自思自量！」信可信，非常信。劇本完成，不日上映。//

—Introduction in 飄華Glide “_族 | _Edward’s”

To understand Glide’s music in binary or linear terms is to set yourself up for failure: there will never be one truthful, correct perspective.[1] In post-structuralist terms, Derrida posits that the signified is never fully communicated through the signifier. There lies interpretive value in music, subjugated to context and lived experiences. The “omniscient” narration in Glide’s music entails multiple narratives. “_Edward’s” was written against a social backdrop, but would engender different sentiments when layered over different contexts. You could see it as a dystopian satire, or you could complicate the story with the framework of nationalism,[2] populism,[3] Foucault’s panoptic gaze, docile bodies [4] and its criticisms, and re-consider what it means to live in an Orwelllian state.

// 人類被人工智能取締前，我們卻早已降服於人的智能。//

—Introduction in 飄華 Glide “你的偉大經已全部播映完畢 I bow to the entire history of us”

Recently, I have been experiencing a moral panic regarding the likes of artificial intelligence. As a humanities graduate, I foresaw my job being taken over by ChatGPT or its improved iterations. Kids will be asking “when will we ever have to use this in real life?” in language classes, instead of mathematics class. Coding becomes the language to write discourse with.

“Or you could try to think you’re not doomed, because if you think you are, it becomes true for you.”

In a sense, Midjourney is not so far from modular synths. In modular synths you are patching codes together to create a sound, and with good mapping you create a song of desired effect. In Midjourney, you feed prompts that are mediated into codes (011010010100) to create pixels, and with a well-curated prompt you create an image of desired effect. There are still traces of the human hand—for example, mods / admins to censor words or concepts. Maybe it’s not about consumption or domination or what have you in sci-fi narratives;[5] maybe we just need to learn to work with them.

Or you could, in the words of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, let it happen. “It” has no morality projected or value ascribed.

// … 呢一個時空 呢一個維度裡面 嘅一個應酬動作 / 佢唔存在於過去亦唔存在於未來只有當下 大家只有安守本份 擁有當下嘅對方 唔會擁有更多 / (捕捉你 最無價嘅偶遇) (Everything...I touch...) / 但係亦唔會失去當下所擁有嘅野 / 呢個就係我 同埋你 而家必須要專心集中精神去做嘅事情 //

—“獲得你笑臉” 漂流歌單 2018-2019

Time is a construct that Glide debunks. There is no consideration of the past and the future, nor of beginning, progression, and end. There is only the present, or an ineffable feeling of everything everywhere all at once—like a dream, or the trips you go to when you put silly little stamps under your tongue. In a similar vein, Glide is an oxymoron in its Chinese name 飄華: a majesty that is only ephemeral, at once abstract and real.

Glide could be a band, a compound of floating atoms, a fortuitous encounter, or simply a piece of work. In the future they could go electronic, or they could pull a collaboration not unlike the Metallica & San Francisco Symphony, or have an orchestra cover their band while they watch in their seats. The only constant is to keep everyone, including themselves, guessing.

[1] Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition. The grand narrative is no longer viable. Introduction of petit narratives.

[2] Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. (1983)

[3] Gustave Le Bon. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. (1895)

[4] Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (1975)

[5] Films that imagine and discuss a techno-futuristic world and AI such as Ex-machina, Ghost in the Shell, and other cyberpunk dystopias.

Illustration by Clara Wong