William Henry Meung – A Spectrum Of Ecstasies

The tracks assembled on ‘A Spectrum of Ecstasies’ were produced and recorded by William Henry Meung at Allbell Chambers, an historic building which houses a number of artist studios in Ōtepoti – Dunedin. William would arrive early to his studio throughout 2020 and 2021, booting up an array of electronic devices – synthesisers and sequencers – in a ritualised act resembling some sort of pre-flight initiation. As if attending to a spaceship console, he would begin building “loose structures”, organising patterns from the flight deck until landing at something pleasing.

By refusing to lock his instruments into a single timeframe, a decision which may have produced a more ‘organised’ result, William’s recording/composing process creates the opportunity to enjoy and explore a more organic soundscape of machines in overlapping conversation. In the absence of any additional pre-mix post-production, the compositions represented here arrive directly as they were rendered to William’s portable digital recorder. As he recalls, “I wasn’t really inspired by anything other than listening and responding to the instruments”, favouring instead “the way different lengths of repeating melody and rhythm play against one another, falling in an out of phase … In some ways this album explores the opposite of sequenced music, while being a lot more mechanical and synthetic in nature than my previous recordings.”

During ‘A Spectrum of Ecstasies’ we encounter these overlapping patterns which fall in and out of step; conflicting phases and phrases appearing as snippets of conversation taking place in some alien syntax according to an organic grammar, though one which is unknown to us.