On Friday, simultaneously at Cloud in Phnom Penh and The Pizza Garden in Siem Reap, listening parties will be held for the new six-treack release The Psykic Elektric Experience by Joshua Chiang. Josh was good enough to answer some of LengPleng’s pressing questions.
LP: It’s been a long time since we’ve heard the name Psykic Elektric – when were these songs last performed? Why now? And how much of the original line-up are we hearing here?
JC: The last gig was performed on 29th Oct 2022 at the Halloween party at The Deck featuring also Spiked Gravy and Soselo Summer. All the instruments were recorded with the original band members. For drums Mike Forster felt it would sound better using midi samples than if recorded live, so he worked with Professor Kinski (Jan Mueller) on them. The sound engineer, my friend Izu from Singapore, added some ambient synth where he felt it was needed.
LP: Being a more dance pop/rock oriented collection than your previous releases, did you approach the material with a more punchy sound in mind or did the songs themselves pretty much tell you what to do?
JC: I formed Psykic Elektric with the intention to perform the more dance-oriented songs I wrote, and they were often influenced by synth pop and more modern EDM bands like Daft Punk and even Air, but when you recruit rock musicians to perform dance songs, something interesting happens… So while the core of the songs remained the same as when I first recorded the demos myself, they took on a more aggressive sound once the band came together. And then I started writing songs around the band’s strengths, more guitar-oriented pop rock, like The Mire and So Instagrammable. I guess the fact that I released the songs under my name and not as Psykic Elektric points to the sense that the band is done but the songs we recorded needed to see the light of day.
They were recorded in 2022 when gigs were hard to come by due to COVID-19, but the fact that it took so long to mix was due to many factors, chief of which was my friend Izu doing it as a favour and as project to hone his mixing/sound engineering skills. Being a perfectionist, he spent an extraordinary amount of time making sure every tiny detail was flawless. It’s amazing how modern he made the recordings done mostly in my home studio. And he could only do it outside of regular work hours – so the final final final final mixes were completed only in June. That’s also how I also ended up releasing Side A of the new album of songs, All Of Things I Know, recorded after 2022, in June of this year.
LP: Do you have any plans to revive PE or is this the last hurrah to make sure the songs don’t get lost?
JC: I think PE is done, or more like, I’m done with PE. The songs for PE happened when I was looking around at the Phnom Peng live music scene and discovered there’s a niche for a dance-rock oriented band waiting to be filled. But by the time we reached our third year, I felt a bit boxed-in by PE because I felt the constant pressure to write more songs that fit the style of the band, while simultaneously feeling inspired to write the Britpop-influenced songs that ended up on the second solo album, and when my wife Liwen and I decided we needed to move to Siem Reap to open our souvenir shop of original artworks produced by me, I knew the band was done.
As for the songs… there were several other songs that PE performed regular that I plan to record in some future date but I have no idea if they would sound like PE, or something else, only that Izu would be involved somehow.
LP: If you’re not planning to bring back Psykic Elektric are these songs just going to remain in the streaming realm?
JC: I’ve been performing Perfect World as part of my solo live shows, and the remaining songs will now be performed as part of the setlist with my new Siem Reap band Joshua Chiang and The Dropping Shoes together with the other original songs from my other releases. We’re a trio now, with me on guitar, Stephane Hebert on bass and Carlos Alonso on cajon (and drums in future). We’re missing a lead guitarist now, but that can either wait, or I can slowly pick up the slack. The live music culture is a bit different in Siem Reap than in Phnom Penh, but I’m taking a break from writing new songs at least for the next two years, so that’s plenty of time to practice with the band the 40-over original songs I already know by hard.
Check out the visualiser for the first track, Dive, here on YouTube.
Joshua Chiang and The Dropping Shoes will perform at New Leaf in Siem Reap on October 5.
