During these field recording periods Lien spent many long days and even longer nights on lofty mountain tops with his field recording gear, he visited waterfalls, hot springs, tea fields, temples and Aboriginal villages in order to record what he saw and heard. By the time he entered the studio in California last month he had amassed well over 100 hours of recordings.
"It was a relentless challenge and one that involved a lot of traveling around. Recording natural sounds can be difficult for obvious reasons, but recording people in a natural environment can be even more problematic," he said. "It is as much physiological as it is technical. You need to make the subject comfortable and try to get them to not think about the microphone."
Unlike many of Lien's previous field-recording ventures in Taiwan where time constraints often meant that he could only record specific pre-arranged sounds, his recent trips allowed him the freedom and leeway to search for previously unheard sounds, songs and music.
With the help of his cultural consultant, Yo Yuan-keng (游源鏗), Lien recorded an ancient three-piece Attayal head-hunting dirge and a song sung by loggers during the Japanese occupation for the first time.
"I guess I'm one of the few people to have heard the Attayal head-hunting tune and lived. Listening to it changed my stereotypical idea of what a headhunter was. The three songs pointed to headhunting as being a deeply spiritual act," said Lien. "The music was very moving and there was a genuine human quality to it as opposed to savagery and aggression."
Lien might have walked away from his visit to the village of the once notorious headhunting Attayal tribe, but there were a couple of incidents earlier this year when his field recording work did almost cost him his life.
The first of these occurred while recording the sound of the volcanic vents that release boiling water from the subterranean rivers around Turtle Island. Lien's diving gear malfunctioned and he was almost dragged away by the strong underwater currents off the Ilan coast.
The second and, according to Lien, more frightening of the two incidents took place at a waterfall near Tatung when, along with a friend, he found himself trapped in circular current.
Needless to say, he didn't meet his maker and, while he wont be jumping off any waterfalls in the near future, Lien is ready to take fans in Taiwan on a enjoyable and moving musical journey from Ilan's lofty peaks to its shoreline in the coming week.
Performance notes:
What: Matthew Lien: `A Journey of Water'
Where: Nationwide from this evening, June 11 through June 20.
Today, Hualian County Cultural Center (
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