Don’t you just love albums that immediately hook you in? From the get-go 秋月 (Music From Autumn Moon) by Tats Lau Yee-Tat is music with a palpable “it” feeling you can never quite shake. Ostensibly a soundtrack album for Clara Law’s misunderstood film, Qiu Yue, this release functions more than that, perfectly capturing the worldly electroacoustic experimentalism of this creative renaissance man and, in a way, a rapidly changing Cantonese society.
There are few parallels I can think of in the English-speaking world to compare to Tats. Born in Hong Kong, in 1963, it wasn’t until the early ‘80s that he’d outgrow his beginnings as a multi-instrumentalist playing in various underground Hong Kong punk and metal groups, to transition into the truly gifted pop maestro with a nose for bleeding edge styles that’d most would get to know him for. Early influences of English New Wave and Japanese technopop afforded him the ability to create groups like OEO playing on the YMO-leaning electropop he wanted to create.
It would be a while before Tats could really take off on his own. Building on the strength of his writing for Cantopop legends like Alan Tam would help Tats push for his own turn in the limelight. Together with friend Anthony Wong they’d take off as the musical duo, Tat Ming Pair, creating some of Cantopop’s most wonderfully different, and quite lovely, electronically-tinged pop hits. In the same year they’d release their debut, 1986’s 達明一派II – Kiss Me Goodbye, Tats also began his side hustle, as an actor in feature films. By the time the group had decided to go into indefinite hiatus, Tats had solidified this side hustle into a real thing, drawing notoriety not just as an actor but as a composer and arranger.
The early ‘90s would be when his career as singer turned actor, quite possibly, brought out the best of his work (or at least presented a turning point). While his previous music drew, largely, from influences outside of Hong Kong, Tats work on films like 1991’s The Tigers and Autumn Moon began to expand on his exploration of ethnic folk music and instrumentation. It would be 秋月 (Music From Autumn Moon) that proved just how deftly he could capture visual ideas in the musical world.
Spoiler alert: For those who haven’t seen Qiu Yue you might want to skip this paragraph. For those who’ve seen the movie, you’ve realized the knotty ideas it was trying to capture. Shot in long takes, the movie revolved around two characters — one a Japanese traveler in his 30’s aimlessly revolving his life around food, sex, and sleeping, the other an adolescent, 15-year old Chinese girl whose family left behind in Hong Kong when they emigrated to Canada in search of a better life — who somehow find a way to bond over their increasingly lost ties to their past and homeland (and somehow find a way to find something in their past to admire).
In between all the gorgeous, and surprisingly, unhurried shots of Hong Kong in the film, Tats floating soundtrack plays like a wandering memory hinting at shared roots coalescing into something personal and bittersweet with the story. Songs like the opener “Speechless” have that breathless quality, neither here nor there, just a slowly closing cycle, that those who understood the film really admired about its soundtrack. Ambient jazz, sweeping soul music, it all seems there are once “foreign” things that now leave this aether informing Tats elegiac moods, Hong Kong now has this forlorn, nocturnality, soundtracking the serrated cosmopolitan edges.
What’s fascinating about 秋月 (Music From Autumn Moon) is how the movie itself plays a role in the music, too. From the spoken word of “Spring Flower” mixing with the sampled dialog from the movie, it appears, Tats was unafraid to create his own take on what the story meant. Inklings of neo psychedelic and New Age music washing away to essences coloring the sonic storyline. Somewhere one of the main themes “Drifting” splits into even more intriguing side quests. There Tats shows his ability to connect with Anglo folk, creating the title track “Autumn Moon” that harkens to the music of Fairport Convention — yet, sounding like something far more otherworldly, by drawing from his own folk experimentation.
How would you describe songs like “Faded”? Those are the songs that many who took the time to buy the album (based on the brief snippets played in the film) remember the most. Those are the songs that certainly capture a scene that even the movie can’t quite film. Pitter-patter of drums in “Journey To The Moon” journey the vivid fusion even further. Could it be that Tats was on to a new world music, one that was drifting beyond any scenery, any space, any existing image, any handheld camera would capture? 秋月 (Music From Autumn Moon) gives us a peek in that direction.