[Interview + Premiere] FEYXUAN – Weak & Divine (Album)
* Pour lire la version française de cette entrevue cliquez ICI!
It’s with a lot of excitement that we present you the premiere of the most recent release from Grimalkin Records, a fantastic EP by FEYXUAN. Unveiling the very theatrical Weak & Divine, telling the story of Amadeus Vu, the work of the multidisciplinary artist based in Detroit is gripping. Navigating on experimental and unreal electronic horizons, their music surprises and fascinates with its accuracy and veracity. Listen without further ado to the incredible Weak & Divine while reading the friendly and apposite interview that Xuan gave us.
To buy the album, it’s HERE!
To follow FEYXUAN on social media: Bandcamp – Instagram – Patreon – SoundCloud – Twitter – YouTube
You’re a music producer, a writer, a poet, an illustrator, a designer, I was wondering what led you to be so versatile and I was curious to learn more about your journey to become a multidisciplinary artist?
I think of it all as part of the same process of telling an immersive story. Visual and audio aesthetics are integral to making a transportative piece of work, but I find that a lot of the games that are “labeled” immersive tend to be, personally speaking, very light on the touch when it comes to telling an actual story with characters. For example, Journey and Gris were games I could never get into despite being praised for their immersion, but for me, personally, these games only had a dominant visual aesthetic, with a subtle audio aesthetic, and there was no actual story with characters to populate the world.
There were no words.
For me, doing art & music is an extension of who I am as a writer, as a storyteller. An immersive narrative experience is about wholly and completely entering someone’s “world,” and all the ways that are unique to their life experience, especially in the realm of the fantastic.
Your music is sort of a theatrical electronic new wave which is really original and captivating. Your albums are often bound to a particular story, for a game, a novel, etc. When do you start to integrate music to your project and what does your creating process look like when you start producing an album?
The story always comes first, though it may not be fully developed by the time I start working on an album. Lately, my most recent work – and the work I see myself doing for the rest of my life – is in the line of grand orchestral soundtracks for my experimental poetic narrative games. Weak & Divine is unique in that it’s my first EP I’ve ever done, and the unique maelstrom of thundering fey chaos in it fits very well to the lyrics in the EP, which were taken from my libretto (opera script). The libretto is called THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH, which is out with Flower Press right now.
My first full-length album, LIAR LIONESS, is out on my bandcamp, and I started it at the same time as I was writing the visual novella script it is paired with, and I found that the narrative and the music influenced each other. LL has mostly your regular orchestral instruments, clean compositions traditional of what you’d expect of an orchestral game OST, but with arrangements that are meant to be noticed, instead of fading into the background the way a lot of generic strings do. LL’s composure reflects the strict prose of the novella, which is to say both were exercises in restraint, developing skills in areas such as symphonic composition and game design.
My current OST project is for my 2021 visual novel, Ochitsubaki, which is a return to the experimental, and incorporates my new orchestral composition skills with some of the ominous synths and sound textures that are in W&D. There’s heavy usage of traditional Japanese scales and instruments such as the koto and shamisen, as well as Chinese influence in my use of the dulcimer akin to the way a yangqin, which is a Chinese dulcimer, would be used. The Ochi album really brings together delicate, complex orchestrations with the fey chaos that dominates W&D, particularly in the last song of the EP.
Your new album Weak & Divine tells the story of Amadeus Vu, a queer transgender and disabled man who will become Empress of Heaven. Can you tell us more about him, the world he lives in and the way your music helps amplify this story?
[TW: CSA] In the myth of Amadeus Vu, seen from her eyes in the heavens, she uses he/him pronouns when she is pretending to be the mortal man she once was on earth, but in the heavens, after the narrative in W&D, she uses she/her pronouns. In her myth, she is never a “mortal woman”, but she is a god and a goddess now.
Amadeus is a CSA (child sexual abuse) survivor who became a surgeon, a rising star in medicine, before she contracted what’s referred to in the narrative as “fairy rot,” which is an unspecified chronic illness that has a lot of the traits that my own chronic pancreatitis gives me. That is to say, extreme fatigue and chronic pain. But Amadeus’s world has fairies in it, and the Fairy Emperor, Silverbell, gives her a little something for it, something that makes her functional, though not without its side effects.
“Love is choosing, the snake said. / The kingdom of god is within you / because you ate it.” — Margaret Atwood, “Quattrocento”
With the Emperor’s medicine, Amadeus is well enough to enact her rituals of becoming Holy–which is to say, killing and eating folk: The Folk of the Air, humans, and The Folk so very Fair, fairies. You become god by eating the kingdom of god– “the people who live on this earth,” as Amadeus says.
The reason why Amadeus does this is because she refuses this narrative of traumatic helplessness. She was a helpless boy, once–the man who abused her preyed on a little boy, and even if she isn’t a man in the heavens, this is the way she frames her narrative. Being disabled often means that, in some ways, you are powerless against a predatory medical system, especially as a hypermarginalized individual–disabled, neurodivergent, queer, a person of color.
Amadeus wants to become god as the symbol of ultimate agency–she doesn’t care so much about using her godlike powers, she just wants to have the ability to have power, to move around the world as someone powerful, not as someone helpless. Even as a mortal in his prime, Amadeus still has that fear of a young boy who has been preyed upon, and part of the way Amadeus reconciles that with herself is by preying on others–not and never sexually, emotionally, or intimately–but in the way that a shrike preys on a grasshopper. By killing and eating it.
Now, going back to the music–I’ve heard before that my poetry really comes to life when it’s read aloud because of the intonation, the emphasis, and the intensity, as well as some of the musicality coming through easier when it’s spoken. I can’t sing, but I can voice-act my own work, so that’s what I did for W&D. I think the best example of how alive my work becomes is in the finale, where the thunderous instrumentals and the otherworldiness that the whole EP is filled with comes through in the complex, rolling storm of the extremely intense, ominous, and almost malevolent lightning strike of voice acting and whiplashes of instrumentals.
Also, you can read more about Amadeus HERE!
The proceeds from the sale of tapes will go to Answer Detroit, a sex worker collective fighting for decriminalization of SW. Why did you choose Answer Detroit and can you tell us a bit more about this organisation?
I chose Answer Detroit because I really believe in supporting sex workers in every way possible, as one of the most vulnerable parts of the population that is also composed of many of my hypermarginalized siblings, particularly QTPOC. Answer Detroit was founded in 2019 by a group of sex workers moving towards decriminalizing sex work. One of their initiatives right now is The Detroit Sex Worker Mutual Aid Fund which shares resources for Michigan-based sex workers and their families. Another one of their initiatives is a support group for Michigan sex workers every Monday from 6-7PM. Yet another one of their initiatives is to decriminalize poverty by ending cash bail.à
You’re the art director of Lazy Adventurer Publishing as well as a graphic designer for Grimalkin. Where does your inspiration come from when you have to create the cover of an album? Is the music always the main source or do you find ideas somewhere else?
Doing graphic design for Gr is actually very little of my own influence and very much the music artist’s! It doesn’t sound very impressive put like this, but the music artists give me some photos and some loose direction, and I just put everything together.
You recently released the single 天百合【AMAYURI】 in anticipation of the release of OCHITSUBAKI || 落ち椿, a visual novel. Can you tell us more about this interesting project see?
Yes! I linked to it in another answer, but I’ll talk about the summary a bit.
A fallen camellia is a beheading, every time, every petal falling at once: a severing.
OCHITSUBAKI || 落ち椿 is a game about translating trauma. It is a visual novel that combines a retro anime aesthetic with distinctly modern elegance, and it has three language options: JPN, ENG, and JPN translation. The ENG/JPN versions are two different renditions of the story, thus requiring a separate JPN translation, emulating what happens when you try to translate something as complex as identity. My biggest inspiration is the Sega Utena game, playing it in both ENG/JPN. The demo only contains the first two ENG chapters, an estimated 30-45min of playtime.
Hanashiro (he/she/they) and their few remaining kin all react differently to the trauma of being immortal and witnessing the apocalypse over and over again in different cycles of reincarnation. Shiragiku is unfazed and cheery and flippant and whimsical and capricious; Shirayuri is nowhere to be found; and Hanashiro? Hanashiro is planning on their death in 10 years, when the camellias fall, if they cannot find a reason to live by then.
Hanashiro and Shirayuri have witnessed THE END OF THE WORLD before. But no one believed them. Shiragiku has seen many, many apocalypses, but she has never been hurt by any one after the first. Shiragiku has remembered every single end; Shirayuri has remembered none; and Hanashiro only remembers some. Which? Even he doesn’t know.
Hanashiro misses speaking her fey mother tongue, but she can’t seem to find anyone willing to listen to her, not even her own kind.
And then she makes an enemy who just might. Their name is Lun Kochouran.
And they might be the first one in a millennium to learn the Amayuri tongue.
They also might be the first to kill an immortal.
OCHITSUBAKI is game by and for hypermarginalized people who know what it’s like to have to “translate” your identity and your trauma, talking about things like your gender or your mental health or your queerness or your race in a way the other person will understand, but that doesn’t mean is necessarily true to the source material of who you are.
Thanks for your time!