Joáo Cocteau, Berlin, Germany 

2 March  to 1 May, 2012

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You & I sets music and writing in direct conversation. Singaporean artist Song-Ming Ang (born 1980, Singapore) invites the public to send him something personal, in the plain and in the figurative sense. He does not dismantle their words. He keeps sources visible, voices intact, and context in place.

 

He responds with care. For each letter he composes a mix CD-R from his iTunes library. The playlist reads as a letter in return. Tracks act as sentences and phrases. Sequencing becomes syntax. Tempo, key, and timbre carry the work of grammar. Music answers text as a form of translation across media, what critics might call intersemiotic translation. The exchange is epistolary in spirit and analytic in method.

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The project rests on an exact proposition. Meaning lives not only in words but also in arrangement and tone. Ang treats popular music as a serious medium for thought and relation. He reads each letter closely, absorbs its cadence and concern, and composes with precision. The mixes are never generic. They are considered arrangements that hold faith with the original voice while proposing a new way to hear it. In the process distance shortens. Words acquire musical limbs. Music learns to bear the weight of speech.

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In Berlin, You & I begins with intimate exchange and widens to the collective. A private message becomes a shared experiment in how meaning travels between writer and listener, sender and respondent, page and playlist. The work operates as an ethnography of listening. It shows how affect moves through form, how memory becomes audible structure, and how a sequence can perform a speech act by making care tangible.

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Humour and metaphor steady the tone, while an encyclopaedic ear anchors the practice. The piece asks clear questions with academic consequence. What counts as authorship when response is compositional. How does citation sound when it appears as a track list. Where does interpretation sit when the reply is heard rather than read. The gallery becomes a reading room that listens, and a listening room that reads.

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You & I advances a simple claim with large reach. Language is not only what we write. It is what we arrange, repeat, withhold, and tune. By recombining tracks, Ang shows how communication lives inside and outside the self, in memory and in the room, in feeling and in form. If we listen with attention, we answer one another more fully. If we treat music as a public language, intimacy becomes legible, portable, and shared.

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