Debut album has a Korean twist
Rmike.alexander@fairfaxmedia.co.nz TELEVISION presenter Selwyn Toogood’s phrase ‘‘the money or the bag’’ has become a part of New Zealand folklore. A generation removed and 25-year-old Auckland composer Levi Patel has the opportunity to take both.
At the time – slightly before he had even ventured into music with two solo EPs ( Form and Of Sleep And Time) and a collaboration with Suren Unka ( 5 / 8) – he was working as bag model while at university completing a degree in software engineering and economics. ‘‘I was modelling bags for an online clothing store,’’ he says.
‘‘The owner came to New Zealand for a holiday. I had done the occasional TV commercial and he contacted me and said if i was ever in Korea, there was a job there for me.
‘‘It was coming up to my university summer break and I told him I could be in Korea. The next thing, it happened.
‘‘My time in Korea was really fascinating. As a child, I’d spent time in England and Europe with my parents where the culture is fairly similar to New Zealand. I only found out about a month before I left that I was going to Korea so I didn’t really have time to learn how to speak the language, but I did the best I could.’’
Since then, Patel has built a solid audience online as a burgeoning composer. One of his compositions, As She Passes, has already clocked up 600,000 listens on SoundCloud.
‘‘Making this kind of music, I don’t expect it to blow up,’’ he says. ’’I was amazed with the momentum As She Passes had. It slowly built up over a couple of years.’’
Curiously, his most impressive release to date, his debut solo album Affinity, has an unexpected Korean twist to it. You could say, it has been ‘‘Korea changing’’. Patel was contacted by Koreanbased documentary maker Nils Clauss, initially to produce music for a promotional video for a Korean university.
‘‘We worked really well on that,’’ Patel says. ’’He doesn’t have that many go-to musical sound people, so we have been working together ever since.
‘‘The first single off my debut album, Affinity, is closely related to another mini-documentary he produced called Last Letters. It commemorates the 304 lives lost in theMVSewol Ferry disaster. That track worked well with the documentary. It has families talking about the loss of children, parents or other loved ones.
‘‘It is just heart-breaking. There are moments in the film where a parent is in a child’s room and they remember fond moments. So there is that beautiful duality – a child who has been taken away, with the memories of that life that still live on.
‘‘Co-incidentally, with the documentary, one of the most powerful moments is the story about a son and his distant father. He had written a letter to his father and thought he hadn’t cared that much about it. The documentary shows the father with the creased letter that had obviously been read many times and yet his son never knew because his father didn’t write back.’’