Prepare to step into a realm of enchantment!
Our new single, ‘Three Pathways’, offers an electrifying glimpse into our forthcoming 2025 album, Memories of Magic—魔法の記憶—Mahō no Kioku.
Blending the ethereal with the experimental, this album promises to be a vibrant tapestry of sound, weaving themes of magic, animism, dreams, and fantasy into lush, immersive worlds.
One of the album’s most intensely magical moments is ‘Three Pathways’, an incomparable collaboration with Mindy Meng Wang – master of the guzheng – creating a truly dynamic ensemble, capable of crystalline, exquisite subtleties and tremendous, cinematic emotional power.
Let’s talk about how a work like this comes into being.
This wonderful lady, Mindy Meng Wang, noticed our Instagram page. We think there is a kind of magic that brings people together. It’s invisible and magnetic. And in our first few messages, we’d decided to work on a project together. Mindy is well-known here in Australia and around the world, having performed with Gorillaz, Regurgitator, Tim Shiel, Paul Grabowsky, Deborah Cheetham, AAO, Orchestra Victoria, SSO and many others.
Mindy is a master of the guzheng, which is a Chinese harp. It has a depth and soul which can’t be put into words. Tom (from Shugorei) made a trip to Mindy’s house. It was a balmy Narm|Melbourne spring day. We settled down in a quiet, peaceful room in her house, with just the right kind of springtime light streaming through the window. Mindy’s young daughter, Phoenix, wanted to be closely involved in the recording (Mindy had been touring in the UK and was freshly returned). For Tom completing this recording, it was a gorgeous, exquisite, uplifting experience:
It was around this time that Nozomi (Shugorei) traveled to Kanazawa, her hometown in Japan. This is when we knew what the music should be about: Three individuals, from three different places, coming together to create something special. A work of music and visual art which, without words, shows how art thrives when people of different experiences, backgrounds and traditions come together.
While Tom was working on the composition, Noz was completing videography around her hometown. Japan’s winter is ice-cold, and Noz captured these expansive, chilling scenes, featuring elements; snow, ice, water, frost, and human warmth, with a Japanese sensibility for landscape and architecture. Noz’s videography speaks without sound. It is deep, moving and vibrant. Noz also had children with her, and like Phoenix, they too were spiritually assisting: her daughter and son, Izumi and Takashi. Both of these little people are contributing artwork for Mahō no Kioku:
Nozomi arrived back in Brisbane, and in January 2025 – in Meanjin’s ferocious summer heat – it was time to complete the recording. Our summer must be unique in the world, and is felt in a way that speaks uniquely of this place. The music combines percussive and electronic sounds, and crucially, a dramatically ascending, boldly reaching, fervently yearning cello arc of iridescence, like Prometheus rendered as melody, expertly performed by Brisbane cellist Dan Curro. At this point in the music, the mild tenderness of the guzheng is transfigured with thunderous electronic bass and vast col legno: an invitation to the listener to release, and breath.
This music shows what we mean by magic, through memory; through vivid experience made sonic. Colours scintilate across visual and audible spectrums, with imminent, inescapable synesthetics.
But at its core, this piece is about traveling. Its players have traveled throughout their lives, boldly taking homes in new countries, with families and friends across continents. Without such risk and adventure, music like this cannot come into being. We have followed our pathways which have become entwined, and the integration of these stories is a tapestry forming a single and unique fabric; stories that we can tell without a word, in a way that must be some kind of magic, and born of memories.
Shugorei 