Huihui Cheng: Calling Sirens

Contents 1. Me du ca 2. Narcissus & Echo 3. Messenger 4. Calling sirens 5. Your smartest Voice + video (online): your turn

On this portrait CD, the composer Huihui Cheng, who grew up in China, presents a colourful spectrum of playful, mysterious and unreal-sounding sounds produced by instrumental-vocal and electronic means. The CD is complemented by videos and a smartphone game, which reflect the intermedial dimension of her works, including dance, performance and video installation. The works of Huihui Cheng stand in a field of tension between old and new. Titles such as “Narcissus & Echo” or “Calling Sirens” are borrowed from Greek antiquity. Their sound language, on the other hand, is fresh and contemporary and is realized with the means and media of the present. The combination of seemingly contradictory or distant elements is also an essential basic idea of Huihui Cheng. Expanded sound bodies play an important role in several of Cheng’s compositions. In “Me Du Ça”, for example, the soprano’s (snake) hair consists of tubes that function as extensions of the body. By blowing and scratching into them, sounds are created and others, such as filtering, reverb or delays, are triggered. In the piano solo “Messenger”, too, the sound is not produced in the conventional way, but by means of a piece of clothing that is directly connected to the strings via nylon threads and causes them to vibrate.