Recording a musical ode to Taiwan

He might have been a winner at the Golden Horse Awards two years ago, but Zhang Yu-wei (張羽偉) certainly hasn't let the achievement go to his head.

In fact, fast forward two years and the singer-songwriter is much the same relatively unknown nattily-dressed musician who took to the stage to receive the award for Best Original Film Score only to be ignored by the press in the media frenzy that goes hand-in-hand with the glitzy event.

"The whole thing was pretty amusing. I hadn't made much of an effort to dress-up for the occasion," recalled Zhang. "I remember sitting in the auditorium holding the award for about 20 minutes before I even had my photo taken. I was wondering what I was doing there, as nobody had a clue who I was."

As a complete outsider, Zhang took away an award for his musical score to Chen Hsin-yi's (陳芯宜) film Bundled (我叫阿銘啦). Quite an achievement, especially for an artist who had never had a hit and an even greater one considering Zhang's rather unconventional approach to his music.

"I used electronic equipment to enhance a project once, but wasn't happy with the results," he explained. "It was too clean, too faultless and quite inhuman. There's nothing at all wrong with a bit of human imperfection here and there. A missed chord, a cough, it makes the end result all that more genuine."

While Zhang's folk/rock hybrid brand of music continues to lurk some where on the peripheries of the mainstream and underground scenes, the musician set tongues wagging recently when he signed a deal with Taiwan's Wind Records -- a label with a predominantly New Age catalogue of musicians.

"It was quite a break from tradition for the label. And at first I think [Wind] was pretty wary about signing such a contrasting act," said Zhang. "As the project progressed, though, management became increasingly open to the idea and let me record how I saw fit. There was no interference in the studio whatsoever."

While the finished product cuts a musical swathe through genres ranging from rock, folk, blues and even traditional Taiwanese ballads, neither his record label nor the musician see the release as just another record.

Littered with social commentary, How Will You Live Your Tomorrow (明天要按怎過?) is a portrait of Taiwan as seen through Zhang's eyes, or rather his six-strings. It is something that the balladeer likes to refer to as his "music-documentary."

His audio creation paints an amusing if less than rosy picture of life on Taiwan. In liking the production to a fly-on-the-wall documentary rather than simply an album, Zhang hopes to open the ears of the listening public to the Taiwan he discovered.

Cutting his teeth in the music industry 20 years ago with an album entitled Lover (愛情) -- an acoustic album on which Zhang's rough edged vocals crooned their way through simple folksy melodies -- and following it up shortly thereafter with an equally mellow production, The Very Best (出狀元), Zhang was to find life in the love-lane increasingly dull and restrictive.

"It was a frame of mind. Being young I felt the need to experience and explore love though music," continued Zhang. "But as grew older and wiser, I found myself moving away from simple human emotion and instead began to view my surroundings and the environment in which I lived in much the same manner as a documentary film maker would."