A Felicidade

Reflections on my new old album

Listening back to this album for the first time in years leaves a strange taste in my mouth.

The album was written and produced between 2019 and 2021 while I was living in Taipei. It was one of the happiest times in my life, while also being one characterised by fear and paranoia about the pandemic, and guilt about my absence from everyone back home.

I was in a relationship with someone I adore, had great friends and felt I belonged to a community more than I ever did before. But there was also a residual feeling that I didn’t belong - I remember feeling like I was moving through the world like a ghost.

‘A Felicidade’ translates to ‘happiness’, and in essence, this album is a personal exploration of what that means, and to what extent the ideal of happiness is attainable.

I’m not sure how people will react. Reviews from friends include calling it ‘bloodyminded’ and ‘alienating’, but I thought it was the poppiest and most accessible thing I’d ever done. In retrospect some of the lyrical content is admittedly a bit juvenile, but alas..

It was entirely recorded at home, in the spare room which for some reason had tiles all over the walls despite not being a bathroom, using a rudimentary Ableton setup and a borrowed guitar (thank you to Ai-Yin for lending it to me).

At the time I was listening to a lot of bossa nova (Elis Regina, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Vinicius Cantuária, Arto Lindsay), Mount Eerie, 7038634357, Miki Nakatani (Sakamoto produced album), Café del Mar, the entire Quantum Natives catalog especially the Cclcng album, spending quite a bit of time in the club (Final), and I watched every Agnes Varda film. I can hear all these influences.

I owe a huge thanks to Awe IX and Quantum Natives for releasing it. Despite the wait to get it out, there was never any chance I was going to release it with anybody else - they are the only ones who, for this particular release, could truly get it right. I feel blessed that it also heralds the rebirth of QN after a protracted period of dormancy.

A Felicidade is a celebration of my life at the time and the people in it, and it’s hugely exciting that it’s finally going to see the light of day.

~

A Felicidade is available now via:

Quantum Natives map

Mediafire

Bandcamp

Soundcloud

Awe IX made this video for Funeral Livestream that I adore. We filmed it together in Wai’ao in January 2022. That’s another story…

There’s a lyrics are available at the download links above or here, and I’ve written some track-by-track notes below.

~

A Felicidade

During the short-lived, voluntary lockdown we had in Taipei, I learned how to play ‘A Felicidade’, an old bossa nova standard, on guitar. I always wondered how the lyrics were correctly translated, which basically explains what you hear here. Literally “sadness has no end, happiness yes”, but Portuguese doesn’t really use ‘does’ / ‘do’ verb constructions like English, so “sadness has no end, happiness does”? I still don’t know the answer and at this point I don’t feel like I ever need to know. This opening track is something of a statement of intent for the rest of the record: as in life, what sounds or is pleasing is often obfuscated by noise. With my mind, it can be hard to experience joy undiluted on account of all of the interior distortion. That sound of kids cheering in the beginning of the track was a cute coincidence - they were playing in the little park across the road, it got captured and I kept recording.

Funeral Livestream

This song’s about watching my nan’s funeral on a livestream from overseas. It created a weird barrier between my family’s grief and I, which didn’t feel like mine because of my geographical and emotional detachment from my family. There were many of them I didn’t recognise because of the flattened image on my laptop, and the effects of time and aging. I had the thought that I should pull the tab out into its own window - this was a significant and sacred event after all. But then again, no-one could see me, and no-one would ever think about whether I watched the funeral in its own window or as one amongst ten tabs.

New Technology, Old Houses

A meditation on the comparative speed with which our our bodies age in relation to our built environments, the churn of technological change powering away in the background.

Vague Recollection

A silly interlude that I hope communicates something of the sense of joy I was experiencing.

Irreconcilable Distance

A song about loneliness, I guess. About wanting to connect with others, and often falling short, even when I get close. At first I liked the anonymity that I was afforded by feeling like a ghost, but it also seems that living in a country without a particularly good grasp of the language and where I was visibly other was beginning to bother me.

People My Age

This period in history aged us all.

Cliff’s Edge

Second of the three instrumental interludes. This one has some samples I wanted to play with.

Empty Stage, Blank Wall

My favourite lyrics on the release - I think I was re-reading Fernando Pessoa at the time. Another expression of the bittersweetness of being a ghost.

Man Who

Playing games with words, I was trying to hint at these lines being truncated versions of themselves, that they should be completed by the listener. I like the latent violence of the line “I’ve never seen a man whose face reassembled mine”. This is the same period where I made Sites of Humiliation and was reckoning with my gender identity in quite a visceral way.

The Difference Between Happiness and Joy

Third interlude. Nothing much to add other than I like these and still consider them integral to what I am trying to communicate here about happiness - they probably do so better than the songs with lyrics.

Tears of a Stranger

On a hot summer day, I taught a business English class at a bank’s office in the postmodern corporate architectural wasteland of Nangang (I think I found the exact location on streetview). After the class, when I was walking across the grey, paved expanse of the office complexes, one of the students chased after me. She was crying, and proceeded to tell me about how her boyfriend had left her, how miserable she was and how she wanted to end it all. It was horrific, especially when she explained the shame of crying on the train and having people move further away from her rather than providing any words of comfort or consolation. I don’t know why she decided to talk to me. Perhaps because I was a ghost, there was no way that talking to me could harm her, and she clearly needed to talk. I wish these lyrics were better, so they could do justice to this story and this person.

Exasperated Gratitude

Listening back to this song, I hear the bittersweetness of my life at the time: my love and gratitude for those around me, but also my fatigue and guilt. I can see the faces of the people around me at this time - none of whom I regularly see anymore, and many of whom I miss every single day.