Tik Tong Songs

[Mirtha Hinrichs]

Foran amusing way of seeing just how diverse these songs/singing styles are, I've listed the songs with the singers who made them famous below.So here's the humorous exercise: pick a singer's name in the left column, and try to imagine them singing particular songs in the second column! (I'll start you off. . . Julie Andrews singing The Power of Love, Jim Croce singing Sway, Huey Lewis singing The Sound of Music, etc.) 1. Dean Martin / Michael Bubl Sway 2. The Bee Gees How Deep Is Your Love 3. Bill Medley (Righteous Brothers) & Jennifer Warnes The Time of My Life (duet)4. Simon and Garfunkel Scarborough Fair 5. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons Who Loves You 6. Neil Diamond Play Me 7. Bay City Rollers / Dusty Springfield I Only Want To Be With You 8. Julie Andrews The Sound of Music 9. Richard Marx Right Here Waiting 10. The Beatles I Want To Hold Your Hand 11. Tony Bennett I Left My Heart In San Francisco 12. Jim Croce I'll Have to Say I Love You In a Song 13. Fred Astaire The Way You Look Tonight 14. Huey Lewis & the News The Power of Love 15. Chris Tong She 16. Linda Rondstadt & James Ingram Somewhere Out There (duet) 17. Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas18. Frank Sinatra Once Upon a Time 19. Jeffrey Osborne On the Wings of Love20. Petula Clark My Love

Hom Yu: We are actually brothers growing up together and I saw his birth when I was 4! Mong Tong started in 2017, at that time my brother moved to Taipei, and before that we had played in different bands but never really released music together, so why not?

Hom Yu, Chi: We always read and discuss things together first, and then we make drum loops and record guitar/keyboard improves based on that beat. After that we edit them and rearrange the whole thing again, making everything sound right. We might sample interesting sounds at this point. By adding samples from TV shows, movies, games or even the environments, basically we try to make our songs like you are playing video games.

Hom Yu, Chi: The most difficult part when recording was that we used a real spring reverb pedal on each percussion sample in this album. To keep those all-important details intact and still get a spacey feel, we spent so much time and effort to make sure everything was right. After finishing the demo and sending it to Go and Tomo, they loved it and wanted to release Mystery 秘神 on vinyl. We are really thankful for their help!

Chi: Later Li-yang from Scattered Purgatory first introduced both of us to Guruguru Brain in 2019. We had a couple of conversations with Go and Zeze; we talked a lot about video game music and space age pop, and they decided to release our album into vinyl. Thanks to them!

This is not your first release. You also released a couple of recordings on tapes and A History of Brightness was released on CD. Would you mind to share a few words about those recordings and how would you compare them to your latest release?

Chi: My other band Dope Purple has released a record under Senko Issha, a label for noise music, free improvisation lovers in Taiwan. Mong Tong has collaborated with labels like Future Proof, Karma Detonation Tapes. Both of them have great artists and release good quality cassettes.

Recorded between 1982 and 1990, the twelve tracks include five from Tong's acclaimed 1985 solo album Theoretically Chinese, produced by former Associate Alan Rankine and featuring a stellar cast of guest musicians including Jah Wobble, Steven Morris, Simon Topping and Dave Formula. Two tracks are dance remixes previously only available on an Italian 12-inch single.

There are also two memorable Tong songs recorded with Tuxedomoon, namely Albert Camus tribute The Stranger and In a Manner of Speaking, the classic song later covered by Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, and more recently by Nouvelle Vague. Thanks to the Nouvelle Vague cover, IAMOS has become something of a standard, featuring in the soundtracks of several high profile movies and television shows.

Listen to the opening minutes of Shook, the 2023 album by the Atlanta-born, transatlantically based, globally minded quartet Algiers, and you might wonder what's become of the drummer. For a song and a half, the only pulse is machine-made: first, a shopworn sample from "Subway Theme," the click-clack beat that raised the curtain on cult hip-hop film Wild Style in 1983; then, a spray of hi-hat artillery mined from Zambian rock but forged in the digital furnace of Ableton Live. It's only in the final 60 seconds of "Irreversible Damage" that sticks meet skins in real space: Following a verse from rap-rock warhorse Zack de la Rocha, the song's industrial rattle pivots to the loose double time of Mediterranean folk, and a cloud of bashed cymbals and swung toms rolls in, nudging those rigid intervals off the grid.

For such a distinctive, exuberant player, raised in the era of college-radio darlings gone Hollywood, Algiers' collectivist vibe would seem an unlikely fit. Tong, now 44, says it's exactly where he needs to be. From a tour stop in Austria, Tong joined me on Zoom to discuss the fluid role of the rock drummer and the value of treating the music industry like a community, even when it's hard.

Daoud Tyler-Ameen: When you perform with Algiers, you're often playing along with pre-recorded samples. To do that, you kind of have to surrender the drummer's canonical role as timekeeper: The playback has final say over how fast or slow you go, and if you drift away from it you'll be in trouble. Is that a restrictive feeling, or is it freeing in some ways?

Matt Tong: It's restrictive insofar as there are plenty of heart-in-the-mouth moments. We're a very ambitious band, and quite often we try and do more onstage, and bring more equipment, than a bunch of people in a van really should be carrying around on tour. It doesn't take much for a misplaced limb to disconnect something: The other night, Ryan accidentally ejected the SD card with all the tracks on it midway through a song, so we had to fudge our way through it. But something that's liberating for me is, that part of my brain that has to think about timekeeping just switches off. And I do naturally start playing a little ahead or behind the beat given whatever mood I'm feeling; you can still subtly influence the way a song comes across live doing that.

You know, I'm notoriously sloppy at timekeeping. You don't have to wade through too many live Bloc Party reviews to find someone going, "Matt Tong sucks! He's playing the songs too fast! It's all over the place!" But I was always much more of a mood drummer, I guess. For me, it's perfectly natural to speed up a bit during the chorus, or if the audience are really into it. I'm like that, and I'm entirely happy to suck up any flack that comes my way because of it. The drummers I always looked up to were like that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think specifically in this band, I'm serving the music, and that was always my intention going into it. Everyone's aware of what I can do: I do write music, and I feel somewhat creative. I'd like to think by now that the other members and collaborators of this band understand that I'm open to performing any number of roles. But I'm not going to force the issue unless someone really needs me to. ... Sometimes the job of a musician isn't necessarily to actually play something. Sometimes it's just to validate someone else's idea, or to make a suggestion that nudges them into a different direction. It's not always about playing together.

It was very different back in Bloc Party, because at the time I joined the band, I don't think they'd really worked with a drummer who felt like a peer. And whilst I wasn't as technically gifted as some of their previous drummers, I seemed to be a bit more relatable to the rest of the band, and we could actually talk about ideas. There was more space for me to try to incorporate my own vision into the songwriting.

That approach means that at any time, you can clearly discern who is doing what, and even the drums get a lot of spotlight moments. The song "Like Eating Glass" has this stuttery, really distinctive drum part; even though there's singing and melodic elements happening, the drums are effectively the hook.

Yeah, I think it was really important to not really foreground any of us. One thing that's been odd for me in this band is being amongst a group of people who, for the very first time in their lives, were beginning to learn what becoming enmeshed in a touring cycle was like. The longer we ground out dates, the more I could see how hard it was for the rest of the band to confront that there are conditions within the music industry that make it almost impossible for community-forming to exist in a real, tangible form. And something I really loved from the beginning was this intent to reach out and try and find a community, to be open to meeting all manner of different kinds of people on tour. ... You see how it runs through pop and hip-hop: Collaboration is useful and fertile and interesting, but a lot of the time it's a strategy. Here, there was this real intent to show that we are actually part of a wider community.

This is a weird question, but do you think of Algiers as a rock band? I know that labels are limiting and the genre thing can feel like kind of a trap, but I'm curious if self-identifying that way does anything for you.

I mean, there's no simple answer. We've never lived in the same city, or even the same country, so we don't necessarily carry that aura of a crew of people who hang out and eat and drink and live in each other's pockets. Going into this album cycle is about as prepared as we've ever been: We've done like a month and a half of solid rehearsals, which we've never done before. There are times that I've really struggled with that, and it's been quite hard to figure out where I fit. But I think there's always been this hope that maybe we could operate in opposition to some of the more traditional ways of thinking about a band, and I think ultimately the music reflects that.

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