What does sound remember? Probably everything. The room. The machine. A hand touching a string. Electricity getting nervous. A voice that forgot it was supposed to speak. William Henry Meung listens. Then records. Then cuts, shifts, layers, destroys - and remembers again.
Based in Queensland, Australia, Meung is an experimental musician, composer, producer, and visual artist whose practice has been quietly multiplying somewhere between outsider music, lo-fi electronics, noise, ambient, folk abstraction and sound art. Prolific would be one word. Compulsive another. He also releases under aliases like Belfry Bats or Richard Scowen. He is and was part of bands like Horsehead Nebula, the ladder is part of the pit, Wolfskull or New Primitive Error. His sprawling catalogue feels less like a discography than an archive of possible musics. Albums, fragments, collaborations, improvisations. One sound leading to another, then another.
Things are found. Things happen. Field recordings meet guitars. Loops circle without necessarily arriving anywhere. Drum machines stumble into samples. Voices dissolve. Melodies appear briefly before being swallowed again. Sometimes intimate, sometimes abrasive, sometimes strangely beautiful. Beauty being unreliable anyway.
Meung’s music often begins in improvisation. Record first, decide later. Performances become material; material gets cut apart, rearranged, layered, and returned in another shape. It is a method mirrored in his visual work, where found objects and existing materials are assembled into new constellations. Dada and Fluxus are somewhere in the family tree. Musique concrète might be hiding downstairs. And the recordings keep coming. Dozens upon dozens. No definitive William Henry Meung.
Now “Scrap Metal Rock Stars Melt Down”. During its genesis, the earth might have died screaming, while Meung was dreaming. But what does it matter: a dream of love or a dream of lies? It all comes down in the noise. A diary made from frequencies. Songs that might be sculptures, sculptures that might have been songs. Cheap machines, expensive accidents, repetitions, interruptions, ghosts. Industrial marks throwing off genius sparks, drifting down into the bone-machine zone. Scrapping metal, rocking stars, melting it down. A new Kashual Plastik is in town!
