Goh Lee Kwang — The Lost Testimony Of Rashomon OST CD

Band: Goh Lee Kwang
Title: The Lost Testimony Of Rashomon OST
Label: Herbal International
Format: Album, CD, OST, Digifile
Release Date: 2011
Country: Malaysia
Genre / Style: Experimental, Avant-Garde, Abstract, Electronic, Noise, Stage & Screen, OST
Streaming Link: Bandcamp

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Remarks: 
Choreography – Yukio Waguri
Choreography, Art Direction – Lee Swee-Keong
Music By – Goh Lee-Kwang
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 Cyclic Defrost  — Stephen Fruitman
Music for a multimedia stage production loosely based on Rashomon, a short story about moral ambiguity written in 1915, but based on a thousand-year-old tale from a Japanese collection of thousand-year-old tales. It is far more well-known and celebrated around the world as a classic film by Akira Kurosawa, though he borrowed only the name and a fragment for his story about the subjectivity of memory.

Kuala Lumpur-based Goh Lee Kwang is one of Southeast Asia´s most fascinating and prolific multimedia artists. He produced this score for Nyoba Kan, a postmodern dance company that ”showcases ugliness and indecency, while integrating it with philosophies of yoga, Buddhism, qigong, modern dance and other forms in its ongoing meditation on inner wisdom and universal compassion and mercy”. The Lost Testimony of Rashomon proves to have a life beyond the stage, as his ambient soundtrack relates the tale with vibrant detail and great restraint – Goh is otherwise not normally shy about making quite a racket. ´Rain´ and ´The Spirit of Rashomon´ are light and beneficent, but then things turn ugly. ´Masago – Extorting a Confession´ is twelve minutes of deliciously drawn-out and tortured tones, death by a thousand cuts in stereo. Goh proceeds to ingeniously harness the muscle of Anglo-European industrial music in order to conjure a coven of ´Witches´ glimpsed distantly across wastelands and through thick fog. ´The Judge´ is a pitch black, unrelenting, stentorian rebuke; finally, a thunderstorm washes it all away.

When listening to music written specifically to accompany images on stage, screen, or video monitor, the original story is reduced to fleeting shadows and the music is forced to recall its own version of events. Goh´s recording succeeds admirably as a vivid parallel cinema of sound.