Four years in the making, for her first full-length album on New Amsterdam Records the composer and vocalist Mingjia Chen presents a collection of through-composed songs which still carry the discursiveness and formal spontaneity of recitative or more melismatic arioso. Half-scrawled thoughts and ribboned reflections tie together in a manner at once reminiscent of Broadway or the opera, chamber pop with a folkish whimsy or else something more mundane, where collaged samples and passages of improvisation vie with the strictures of orchestration to produce an aleatoric music.
Written for herself and the thirteen-piece Tortoise Orchestra, on the lengthy centrepiece ‘Saint’ buttressed by an eight-strong choir Mingjia warily probes and offers earnest entreaties to Santa Maria as she swings her thurible, chows down curried chickpeas and contemplates an unholy tryst. It’s an especially personal if not quite diaristic song whose images and themes radiate across the album, which variously draws inspiration from Chinese mythology and magical realism while weaving stories ‘truer than the outcome, little bubbles that are all their own. The story does not merely arrive at the truth, the story itself becomes the truth’.
