Electronic artist Mun Sing – also known as Harry Wright from Giant Swan – released his debut LP at PANKE Berlin in June 2023. I wrote a music review of his new debut LP on June 16, 2023.
Music review
Electronic artist Mun Sing – also known as Harry Wright from Giant Swan – released his debut LP at PANKE Berlin on Thursday night.
The album was heavily influenced by the death of his father in 2020. With a mix of pensive piano and deconstructed bub & bass sounds, his music deals with themes of sudden loss and grief.
Inflatable Gravestone takes listeners through a journey of discordant rhythm, linking themes of grief through electronic beats that consist of sudden, abrupt changes in the groove of his songs. Amidst the initial chaos of sound, the randomness of the loops eventually starts to make sense – much like the tumultuous emotive processes of humans.
The track Squabble is a song that initiates such a sense of disorientation. Through its sudden and blunt industrial sounds, the song starts to initiate a rhythm that shifts in tempo. Listening to this, it showcases a focus on the emotions that one deals with experiencing pain, loss or grief. Never unilateral, always unexpected.
This album introduces feminine lyrics through songs like 'Mercy at Your Cadence' with jerky beats and disconnected industrial sounds. Mun Sing introduces plasticky lyrics that compliment jolting electric beats, but with sudden stops. As his Bandcamp says, "Wright deliberately suspends moments of resolution and groove in favour of drama and jerky, unexpected cartoonish humour, taking as much influence from the likes of the Art Of Noise as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu."
Loss and grief are definitely suspended through unexpected pauses in his beats. The listener never knows when the interaction will happen and metaphorises how absurdism and nihilism can come into play through certain stages of our lives.
The album is really personal to the artist and showcases moments of dedication to his father and his battle with substance abuse. Mun Sing's direct reference to quotes from his father's journal during his time in rehab. Quotes like "you feel no guilt" and "enemy in the self" are sung through smooth and poetic vocals that compliment the sense of deconstruction and chaos in his beat-making. One can suppose that these contradictions express the ailments of his father's addiction and the different coping mechanisms that he underwent to fight it.
Inflatable Gravestones is deeply affectionate and deconstructs the emotions felt when battling sudden loss or grief through unexpected, irresolutive pauses – but as Claude Debussy once said, "music is the silence between the notes." Grimey, unexpected yet real, the album showcases a healthy dose of absurdism (and its correlation with nihilistic human behaviour) through an interpersonal musical experience that echoed through the music & art café at Panke Culture.
