INDEX
Theme 1: “The most embarrassing thing in life”
DEAN: I recently cut off the tip of my finger. It has grown back a lot, but I forgot to pick up the piece and couldn’t sew it up. It’s starting to look a lot rounder now, though.
Morley: No way! Was that an accident?
DEAN: I accidentally cut it off with a knife (laughs).
SKY-HI: Was that an attempt to lose your fingerprints? (laughter)
Morley: Did you have to change your passport?
All: (laughs)
DEAN: I rushed to the plane as I was about to miss it. I might have managed if I had picked up the piece I had cut off and soaked it, but I was panicked. It didn’t stop bleeding for about two hours and ended up blood all over the check-in counter. It was embarrassing.
Morley: When I was, you know, about 10 years old, my father had a reel-to-reel tape recorder at home. So I recorded my voice and listened to it, which sounded so horrifying that I couldn’t believe it was my voice. It was my first experience hearing my own voice objectively, and I was very embarrassed by it.
When I turned 18 and heard my voice recorded and equalized in a soundproofed studio for the first time. It was so wonderful that I thought, “this was my real voice.” It was eight years of running away from my embarrassing voice, thinking, “This can’t be right.”
DEAN: I understand (laughs). When I was recording with a 4-channel MTR, I was also embarrassed by my voice.
SKY-HI: Since I started producing other people’s music, I have spent an overwhelming amount of time dealing with the components of the voice during the recording stage, so I have more input on the vocalization process. So, although I have been active in music for more than ten years, I finally understood the proper use of my voice when I was over 30 years old. I haven’t had much to be embarrassed about since then, but it was there all along.
Theme 2: “Music I got into when I grew up”
DEAN: If being an adult means when I finished school, it was right around the time I started working in Greater China, so it was Mandarin pop music (popular music sung in Chinese). Even now, when I go to karaoke, I almost always sing only Chinese songs. It’s not the same feeling I had in junior high school when I was into metal and grunge, but Mandarin pops is definitely a part of my life and I think it’s a great song. Just recently I was in Greater China for a few months on business, and when I listen to it there, it fits the atmosphere and changes the depth of the scenery.
Theme 3: “Turning point in life”
SKY-HI: Morley must have as many turning points in your life as there are joints (laughs).
Morley: In terms of ups and downs, yes (laughs). As an extension of what I said earlier about my voice, when I was a sophomore at Harvard University, I went to a studio where I could study electronic music.
There we were experimenting with a tape recorder, and the most radical thing was that if you pulled the tape until just before it ran out, the brown part of the tape would peel off in a ragged manner. When I played it back, the pitch and volume would be out of whack, and I would hear sounds I had never heard before.
The experiment was so shocking and it blew away my previous idea that the recorded truth was being played back as it was. It was a mystical experience in which I learned that voice and reality can be reshaped like clay. Ever since, I’ve gone off the rail and headed to untruthful direction (laughs).
DEAN: Moving across countries and language areas was a destructive experience. This could be why something new is born, but when you go to a place where language and religious beliefs are different, the concept of “What makes a us us” is so different, and no matter what you do, you have to enter into that place. Hence, it makes me think about what the truth is. Some say it’s propaganda, some say it’s an act out of love, and some take the position that it could be either one or the other.
It would be easy to say we became objective, but everything is possible. There are no guidelines, no pride. Anything is fine unless it’s illegal. I think the world is a place where there is a unified lineup of “this is justice.”
