Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 and Tim Shiel - Sleeping Tiger on the Bund 蓄势待发 (Official Video)

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Pre-Order Digital + Vinyl ~ http://bit.ly/sleepingtigerYT

Chinese/Australian avant-garde composer Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 and her Melbourne-based contemporary Tim Shiel, share their new single “Sleeping Tiger On The Bund 蓄势待发” from the collaborative EP 'Nervous Energy 一触即发'.

"Sleeping Tiger on the Bund 蓄势待发", Tim and Mindy’s first single for the Music in Exile label, references the juxtaposition of Shanghai’s Bund district, where the city’s ultra-modern and ceaseless pace of life meets protected heritage sites. It symbolises a constant struggle in Mindy’s creative process; inspiration drawn from ancient traditions trying to find relevance in a modern world. The tiger references a popular Western view of China as a sleeping threat, which may at any moment awaken. As Mindy says, “There is a special and complex feeling of power and strength in this song. It is clean and thorough, strong yet soft; decisive and delicate. It is full of a dynamic and urgent sense of time.”

Alongside the single comes the official music video, directed by Tim Shiel. Featuring images of the Bund, Shanghai's ultra-modern district, the video finds common ground between the pace and modern energy of the single with the visual depictions of urban Chinese life. Exquisitely highlighting the co-existence between fast and slow, old and new, the collaboration explores existence at its core while setting the tone for future collaborations between Mindy and Tim that extend across multiple musical styles and histories.

Tim Shiel says - "Like a lot of people, I find machine learning and AI to be equally transfixing and frightening. This video is just me dipping the toes in the machine learning water to see what it feels like. It’s far from exhaustive and it all comes from filtered through a certain aesthetic lens but nonetheless I think it's a snapshot of both the diversity and the normalcy of real urban life in China. I’ve never been to China but I’d love to go. Mindy talks to me often about the balance between the ancient beauty of China and the more modern infrastructure and faster pace of the cities. From a distance, it feels to me like a part of the world that is simultaneously very slow and very fast - so I like that this clip tries to capture that, busy moments in urban life are paused and then stretched, hinting at bigger, longer timescales."

“Sleeping Tiger On The Bund 蓄势待发" is out now. The debut EP, Nervous Energy 一触即发, is out March 12, 2020 through Music in Exile / Above Board (UK/EU).

https://musicinexile.com.au
https://aboveboarddist.co.uk/

Original photography by Pen Tsai, Max Van Den Oetelaar, Michael Discenza, Edward Xu, Katherine Gu, Weiwei Hsu, Yurii Liu, Javier Quiroga, Laputa Z, Antonella Vilardo, Riku Lu, Jean Beller, Kevin Olson, Adi Constantin, Geng Zhang, Olena Tarasova, Chastagner Thierry, Touann Gatouillat Vergos, Marco Montero & Denys Nevozhai.

Inspired by videos created by Jonathan Fly:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj5kYW_8gnU6lFEMSZyKq1Q

Virtual camera zoom effects were created using a custom Google Colab adapted from Manuel Romero, with additional code from Jonathan Fly, implementing the 3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image paper from Simon Niklaus, Long Mai, Jimei Yang, Feng Liu. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05483

Additional post-production assistance from Ziggy Cross & Dean Shiel.