Goh Lee Kwang — Hands CD

Band: Goh Lee Kwang
Title: Hands
Label: Herbal International
Format: Album, CD, Digifile
Release Date: 2009
Country: Malaysia
Genre / Style: Experimental, Avant-Garde, Abstract, Electronic, Ambient, Minimal
Streaming Link: Bandcamp

* Price excludes postage and handling fee.

Remarks: 
Cover Art (Painting) – Melissa Lin.
Composed, performed and recorded by Goh Lee Kwang between 2005 - 2008, Malaysia.
Packaged in a six-panel digifile.

Goh Lee Kwang (family name Goh, Penang, Malaysia) is an enigmatic sound artist from Malaysia.

Goh has created sound installations, sonic-visual interactive installations, single and multi-channel videos, improvised music performances, field recording, tape music, works for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for theater, dance, film, and has exhibited in venues in both Asia and Europe.

Goh's works focus on the various possibilities of natural sound and recorded sound, crossing the boundaries of digital and analog, electronic and acoustic. They go beyond language, allowing audiences to experience the work directly and in their own personal way.

With a career spanning over two decades, Goh fearlessly explores the vast expanse of the musical cosmos, crafting compositions that defy easy categorization. Seamlessly blending avant-garde, electronic, and experimental elements, he creates a sound that is both captivating and thought-provoking.

Review The Wire — Dan Warburton

On Hands, recorded between 2005 and 2007, Malaysian sound artist Goh Lee Kwang's instrument of choice is an old Roland Jupiter analogue synth, but toy keyboards, saxophones, bass and drums also thrown into the pot and merrily melted down by Max/MSP. Steering carefully between the unbridled hedonism of vintage synth outing - Pauline Oliveros's early work comes to mind - and there ecstatic noodling of latterday neo-psychedelia, the opening "Godot Is Coming I" revels in primitive awfulness of the instrument, mercilessly exploiting its wayward intonation, farty parps, loopy swoops like childlike glee. Electronic music hasn't been this much fun since Vernon Elliott's inspired doodling in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for Oliver Postgate's Clangers. But it's not all fun and games: the ominous thudding percussion of "Hands III" is intercut with thunderous woofer-unfriendly rumbles and high register shrieks worthy of Kevin Drumm.

It's a display of openminded eclecticism typical of Kwang, whose musical tastes range from the austere static drizzle of Drone with Tim Blechmann to the gnarly no-input mixing board of 2007's Good Vibrations. Here the album title is significant - for all its hi and lo tech wizardry, this is good old hands - on composition, with a fine ear and shrewd sense of pacing and structure, and Kwang's most exciting and varied release since 2002's Nerve Center.