Communal energy: a conversation with Ciel

On Nov. 26, Ciel facilitates a two-hour beginner’s Ableton workshop at InterAccess, where registrants will learn how to build a drum rack from scratch. Photo by @keyistudio

“I think a lot about dreams and our unconscious world.”

Speaking over the phone on the long train home from Montreal, Cindy Li (aka Ciel) is soaking in the afterglow of one of the first out-of-town gigs she’s DJ’d since lockdown restrictions were lifted and discussing her new EP, All We Have is Each Other. Li’s first for the Brooklyn label Mister Saturday Night, the release is washed in collectivist energy, full of revelatory pivots and anchors to personal histories and psychic resonances.

Written mostly over the first year of lockdown, it reels with sampled materials Li sourced from personal field recordings and daily pandemic viewings of films like Scanners and Putney Swope, capping off with a “Rosebud” à la Citizen Kane — a map of sorts to where Li’s head was at over that time, expressions of isolation, and a bridge to desires, dreams within dreams.

“I’m very fascinated with the intersection of mental health and mysticism,” Li explains. “I think I’m more of a materialist — I don’t really believe in mysticism; I don’t even really think I’m that spiritual — but music to me is like a spiritualism. It’s hard to explain. You can’t really see it, but it has great power to influence the mind. And I guess because I make music, for me it’s kind of like therapy in a way. It’s very therapeautic for me.”

“Mesmer,” the EP’s centrepiece, is named for the mesmeric state of those affected by “dancing mania” (aka “dancing plague” among other names), a historical, centuries-spanning social phenomena wherein mass groups of individuals would inexplicably burst into erratic dance. On that track, the crystal wine glasses Li received as a Christmas gift from her boyfriend’s mother provide a quivering melody, while random sounds she encountered touring China in 2019 — noises from an arcade her friends took her to, a buddhist temple she visited in Xi’an — provide effects and affects, re-connecting worlds and frequencies otherwise severed by time and distance through sacred play. 

On “Hearing Voices (Club Mix),” Li fashions a sampladelic swirl out of similar impulses.

“I actually wanted to do a flip of this iconic UK garage track “Cape Fear” from KMA Productions,” Li reveals. 

Both sampling a tense exchange between characters portrayed by Juliette Lewis and Robert De Niro in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, while the KMA Productions track is boiling over with energy before Lewis’s reflections on paradise arrive a minute in and everything grinds to a halt for a moment just to go full volcano at the end of the monologue, Ciel samples Robert De Niro’s biblical rage into a circle, the track swirling with kinetic energy around it but denying it a sense of direction, release.

“I feel like what’s recognizable about my production is that there’s always a shift in the arrangement where it might be kind of one thing the first half and the second half kind of flips it on its head.”

As one of Li’s tracks, “Hearing Voices (Club Mix)” is something of an exception to that rule, but as an inversion of “Cape Fear,” it couldn’t be more her own.

Turning experience inside out is important, Li says.

“I don’t think you’d be surprised to learn that my substances of choice in a nightclub are very rarely amphetamines or drugs that make you dissociate,” she volunteers. “My favourites would be psychedelics because of what they can do for the mind and the tremendous power they have to essentially induce waking dreams that can also really tell you a lot about yourself. I’m sometimes very stuck in a way of thinking that sometimes can be self-defeating; doing psychedelics is a way to think and see beyond my perspective and my sort of instinctive way of conceiving the world. And that’s really important for personal growth.”

Li talks about the pandemic with similar perspectivist tact.

An in-demand DJ, when COVID-19 put gatherings on ice and wiped event calendars clean, Li took it as an opportunity to further explore her identity as a producer, establishing a workflow that kept her in front of her music every day.

“I really believe that you have to do it every day or you’re gonna forget things,” Li explains. Armed with the extensive plugin library from Native Instruments, in isolation, Li leaned into something new.

“I stopped using a lot of my gear and I just became pretty much entirely in the box,” she says. For her, hardware just introduced unnecessary obstacles. “Sometimes I only work for a couple hours, other days I’ll work the full six-to-eight. It really depends how I’m feeling. But even if I’m just working for an hour, it’s still important. And I didn’t want to spend that hour just trying to get sound to come out of things.”

Li found a surge of productivity in the pandemic, and eventually stamina for longer work. Between her Peach Discs premiere in 2017 and the start of the pandemic, Li had three solo EPs under her belt; by the time she emerged from lockdown she had another two (Trojan Horse and All We Have is Each Other), as well as her first live set. The latter premiered at Mutek at the end of the summer, Li at the helm of an Ableton Push interface and a mixer. 

While All We Have is Each Other is typically representative of Li’s older, more preset-dependent methodology (“Hearing Voices” is an exception — Li sourced the drums from real life using the Koala Sampler app and some cutlery on an hour-long walk through her neighbourhood hitting random objects), for the live set, Li built her sound from the ground up, crafting a drum rack in Ableton Live and letting a custom sound palette inform the work as a whole (as part of Together Apart, on November 26, Ciel facilitates a two-hour beginner’s Ableton workshop at InterAccess, where registrants will learn how to build a drum rack from scratch; more info at toronto.paris).

“I still use preset racks all the time, but I think that if you’re working on an album or an EP or writing a live set, I think generally it’s good to create one drum rack that you use for the entire project, mainly so it sounds like it’s an entity that belongs together rather than a whole bunch of disparate sounds. It’s really like a cheat sheet for cohesion,” Li explains. She also finds drum racks conducive to her sampling tendencies. “I love to make drum racks where some of the sounds aren’t from drums — sounds I recorded myself doing or I sampled from a movie, or from an old song that really means a lot to me.”

Heading into the winter, Li’s secured a grant and studio space to hunker down in, with dreams of actualizing her first full-length.

“I haven’t started writing it yet, but I think writing my live set really prepared me for working on a longer project,” Li hints. “I don’t wanna give too much away, but I will tell you that I’m in the process of looking for Chinese instrumentalists and I’ve already bought some Chinese percussion instruments.”

Ciel’s ‘Intro to Ableton: How to Start a Track’ workshop runs 3 p.m. - 5 p.m. EST November 26, 2021 as part of Together Apart’s conference programming at InterAccess. More information at toronto.paris