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As people were carousing outside in their Halloween costumes – I have to look up a revised definition of Halloween costumes as it is now becoming more of a masked ball with a slight hint of its original reference, I stayed home and put on the finishing touches to a new song, Watch your Back. 

Before that, Adrian and I went to the opening of a photo exhibition held by Lancaster, Adrian’s former love interest. The function took place at one of those artsy-fartsy spots in Huashan Culture Park – old industrial buildings turned into a bobo scene: vintage shops meticulously studied and copied after the European ones, exhibition spaces, cinemas restaurants and coffee-shops. Lancaster’s exhibition was to be presented in one of those coffee-shop / bookstore – the art and photography section was surprisingly well supplied.

They currently had a good selection of books on Shoji Ueda, whose one-hundredth anniversary was celebrated last year in Japan. Lancaster’s photos were extremely well framed – “They must have cost ten times more than the photos themselves” Adrian observed. Some of them were quite beautiful. The subject was his recent trip to India – with Adrian who, coincidentally appears on the shot that was used as the cover for the exhibition. Having been to India myself, the pictures didn’t surprise me beyond measure. It may be cliché to say so but India is such a colourful and photogenic country, it is virtually impossible to make an uninteresting photo. The guests were mostly celebrities and former colleagues – Lancaster used work as a producer in the pop music industry. Adrian was quite irritated by that. “All these people never dare to step out of their comfort zone when they travel, so of course they will marvel at Lancaster’s pictures, as they present a totally foreign world to them.” Well, Adrian is a hipster and a true artist by nature. But I had to agree with him. Most of what had been said at that opening was just a collection of commonplaces. 

Once home, I turned on my computer and listened once again to Watch your Back. A little something was missing. The beat is destructured. I had started the song more than a couple of years ago, when I was  working with Sheu FangYi and her hip hop dancers. One of the dancers, Wei Ting had left a strong impression on me: his feline way of moving and his agility had deeply impressed me. I thought of doing a short piece of music for him. The early sketches remained undeveloped for at least a year. Then I started adding some backing vocals, more percussion and guitar, and shape up the structure of the song. I liked this brutal beat. It would go and stop, giving the impression of disconnected parts of a body.