5 Questions with Joel Ma
Producer, artist, multi-instrumentalist and sometimes rapper, Joelistics (Joel Ma) is recognised as a unique voice in the Australian music scene.
Under the moniker Joelistics, his anticipated debut album Voyager arrived in 2011 and was nominated for an Age Music award. Written whilst traveling with a laptop between China, Mongolia and Europe, it opened up a new lane in Australian hiphop.
Currently, Joel operates a series of music studio in Brunswick, Victoria called Oven’s Door studios.
(Credit: Kemal Ezedine)
No.1
First things first: what was the impetus behind Joelistics Presents Film School?
That’s a big question. I guess having spent the last four years working as a producer for and with a great group of artists, predominantly women who are of Asian descent—Moju, Haiku Hands, Parvyn Singh, Hailey Cramer, Mindy Meng Wang—Film School is the culmination of those creative relationships and my own investigations into my cultural history. My father is ABC (Australian-born Chinese), I was born in Malaysia and have at times lived in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand. This project is a distillation of that and my love for abstract hiphop ambient music and weird beats.
Musically, Film School is my Pan-Asian psychedelic project. The roots of it stretch back to a trip to my birth city, Kuala Lumpur, which was a kind of fact-finding family history trip. While there, I did some digging for vinyl and scored a good amount of old Canto pop from the 60s and 70s, as well as some dirty old funky records. Asian funky.
A lot of the tracks on the Film School album started as beat sketches and odes to my family history, using samples off the vinyl from Malaysia as talismans of memory. [When I got] back to Melbourne, I continued writing and producing slowly and haphazardly: I began layering the work with live instrumentation, guzheng, cello, drums and worked with singers who could relate to the “third culture kid” vibes.
Some of the tracks were long, rambling improv jams, some were 2-minute beat pieces and some were sculpted pop songs. It took the visual side of the project to focus and finish the album.
No.2
The short film is described as an “audio-visual project”, consisting dance, film, animation and of course, music. How did you come to putting these elements together?
This record is all about collaboration and is a non-commercial entity. During the first lockdown, I was having conversations with a friend (director Rhys Graham, who I had worked with on a previous Joelistics clip (Out of The Blue) about Film School and the nature of the work. I played him some of the tracks, and due to the nature of iso life and the onset of the pandemic we were both getting ghost vibes, so we organised a group of dancers (who were also of Asian background) and immersed ourselves in Chinese and Japanese ghost stories and imagery and shot the majority of the clips in the break between the two Victorian lockdowns.
Some of the dancers include Tony Yap who describes his style as “Malaysian shamanistic dance”, Yumi Umiumare who comes from the world of avant-garde butoh and performance, a young dancer named MaggZ, and a performer named Elle Shimada. So much talent.
No.3
There is a haunting quality and a sense of dread to the film’s first single ‘Yokai’. Are the other parts of the film going to follow this thread, or will they explore other themes?
I think the themes of Asian psychedelia and a sense of dread carry through the project, but that is interlaced with hope and sensuality.
During lockdown, I became obsessed with dreams and memories and the idea that they are not stored; they are recreated every time we think of them. So with the film, we tried to show—in an oblique way—the fear of losing memories, the ever-so-slight shift in how we picture things when we remember them and the quietude of memory degradation. Also with the music, I wanted to weave an eerie feeling built from loops, reminiscent of the empty streets we were allowed to walk for one designated hour per day and the distant sense of dread and hypnotic patterns of lockdown life.
I see the dancers as personifications of our collective fear of sickness and loneliness, and how those fears dance at the edge of every moment we hold dear.
No.4
You’re primarily known as a rapper, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. What do you think producing Film School did in terms of bridging your practice, or what did you learn in the process of making it?
I think making Film School was about me giving myself the license to really explore long-form instrumental music without worrying about how it would be received commercially. I mean, if you’re going push the boat out, what better time to do it than during a global pandemic?
That said, I think I’ve always been more inclined towards experimental forms even when operating in a ‘pop’ world. I love the grey area [that exists] when high art and street style come together.
No.5
What do you hope to express through Film School?
On one level, l I hope to document the experience of living through the year 2020—which was no small feat for any of us.
On another level, Film School is a document of my own fears and anxieties surrounding the pandemic, lockdown and isolation, while also having my first child in May.
On yet another level I hope to express a kind of Asian futurism in the music that blends elements of hiphop, electronica and traditional instruments, and then on another level I hope to create something beautiful and unnerving, uplifting and pensive. I guess I’m hoping to express something inherently paradoxical.
(Top: Joel Ma; Bottom: The Film School dance crew - credit Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore / Caesar Rodrigeuz)
Watch the live premiere of Joelistics Presents Film School: Still the Quivering Air on 3 Dec, 7PM on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. And catch Joel Ma and Film School collaborators in conversation with Margot Tanjutco.
Joelistics Presents Film School: Still the Quivering Air is presented as part of Mapping Melbourne 2020-21.
More information here.
Watch a snippet from Film School below: