ArtScience Encounters with Kin Leonn: Ceaseless Benevolence In The Eye Of The Cascade

The work reimagines the central waterfall of this architectural feature as a luminous source of all; a primordial spring of life at the heart of the natural world.

Kin Leonn’s 20-minute looping composition draws from a specialised palette of field recordings, electronic textures and organic instrumentation. The piece is composed of three main movements: ORIGIN | CASCADE | GLOWING HEART. Structured to flow seamlessly between scenes, the piece is a continuous sonic ritual charting the imprint of time and connecting various environments in a looping cycle that weaves in and out of atmospheric passivity and narrative activity.

Artist Statement

I’m standing now at the foot of the Oculus, and I find my gaze naturally ascending upward, following the lines from the grounded earth to open skylight. It’s such a simple act, gazing skyward, but it’s one that’s typically limited in a modern society of indoor offices and handheld distractions that live right in front of us. Yet, it has a profound psychological influence on the way we view and relate to reality; patterns of thought are altered when one’s horizons are expanded into a wider, extra-personal space. Research suggests that the very act of shifting our vision upward actually coaxes our brains into a more creative state.

I like the posture of looking up. People naturally do it in moments of curiosity. Awe and wonder. Admiration. Even thanksgiving. I composed the piece with this in mind – a sonic ritual, a continuous daydream. The 20-minute ambient journey comes in three parts – each part an exposition for the narrative of this daydream I wanted to create for the space. ORIGIN sets the scene, blinking the listener out of the current day and into dreamspace. CASCADE sets forth a myriad of luminous activity. GLOWING HEART anchors the soul into the warmth of existence eternal. The piece is designed as a continuous, seamless loop, and every scene can serve as a starting point since the listener never knows which posture they will take upon entering the space.

Field recordings are a huge part of my compositional process, and I wanted to bring them into the space not just as background noise, but as though they were fully a musical part of the composition. I imagine environmental sounds, in all their unpredictability, to be a kind of beautifully complex jazz that also contains real information about reality. In the same vein, I treated some real instruments as though they were mimicking field recordings – behaving erratically and with an ambiguously organic texture. Part of my world-building process involves allowing these two sets of sonic elements to sit with each other for long periods, listening for happy accidents in their harmony. There are pockets of these generative moments scattered across the composition like seeds.

About Kin Leonn

Kin Leonn is an artist, composer, pianist and producer. Affectionately known as the “ambient boy from Singapore”, Kin Leonn’s creative nascence as founding member of electronic act midst in 2015 established him as an exciting, versatile presence within Singapore’s thriving underground music scene. In 2018, he released his debut solo album Commune as the youngest new artist under KITCHEN. LABEL, following up with two releases, Endless and Faraway Vicinity, in 2020. He has played sold-out concerts at The Projector and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in Singapore, and performed at Servant Jazz Quarters and Cafe Oto in London. In 2020, he was invited to design a 6-channel ambient experience for architect Sean Gwee’s A Love Letter to the Lighthouse in the Expanded Field in collaboration with London’s Architectural Assocation.