Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 & Tim Shiel

Early in 2020, the music community was forced to close its doors, not only to the outside world, but to each other. Creative partnerships were lost, performances cancelled, studio time scrapped.

In response to these limitations, as is often the case, innovation and cooperation blossomed. Melbourne’s Music in Exile label, a not-for-profit aimed at profiling musicians from refugee and migrant backgrounds that give the city its world-class reputation in the arts, kick started the new Building Bridges series, aimed at keeping individuals connected and inspired during lockdown.

Nervous Energy, a collaborative effort between Chinese/Australian avant-garde composer Mindy Meng Wang 王萌, and her Melbourne-based contemporary Tim Shiel, is the first product of this series. Over the course of the year, as COVID restrictions ebbed and flowed, Tim & Mindy worked ceaselessly on developing new material, first recorded by Mindy on her 21-string traditional guzheng, and then shared with Tim via the internet to be reworked into something neither had imagined possible.

The result is four compositions that oscillate from breakbeat to minimal house influences and laid-back dub and pop sounds, underpinned throughout by an acoustic instrument almost two metres long and thousands of years old. It is a hymn to the world Mindy inhabits, a place where tradition is forced to adapt with changing values and different cultures.