Whether or not you’re aware that you’ve heard Victoria Cheong’s haunting voice, it’s likely you have. The artist–known as New Chance–has backed Jennifer Castle, Chandra, and 2017 Polaris Prize winner Lido Pimienta, as well as collaborated with Willi Williams.
Being a supporting vocalist is a distinct skill involving modifying one’s own voice to embody someone else. Mastery of it seems otherworldly to me, like voice throwing or mimicry, one step from the uncanny Focusing on audio channels somewhere in the inbetween can be disorienting; complex sound hiding in plain sight. That’s one (among many) reasons why it is such a joy to hear New Chance’s debut solo album – it is wholly unique.
Rejecting the common high-postproduction of vocals, Real Time pulls from old-school harmonics in 60s pop and R&B recordings, as well as jazz influences with Karen Ng’s (Andy Shauf, The Weather Station) ascendant sax playing. Each track flows through stream of consciousness monologues and beautiful forest soundscapes – words adrift in a river of contemplation.
Water is a theme throughout the album lyrically, and is reflected in the music. Real Time points out the parallels between water and technology: both are beautiful, powerful, dangerous. What can be a tool for growth can be manipulated just as easily. Humanity’s dependence on algorithms has begun to drown us, and in “Adriatic” the album comes to a close in the empty repetition of one phrase: “it’s over.”
The ending is terrifying. It’s confusing. It’s great.
Because it’s not sad, or dramatic, or self-indulgent, it just…ends. Isn’t that how it usually goes?
Throughout the last year we (we is critical) have lived along our independent timelines, and maybe now it’s time to reconnect to real time, together. What better way than through this music, in all of its fleeting, floating, techno ponderings. Real Time asserts that through algorithmic rule and all we weather, we are intertwined.
So at once ambient and alien, pulling the listener through settings and philosophies as empty and abstract as outer space or the deepest seas, New Chance explores cycles of regeneration. The lyrics tackle big themes for secluded times: how does one navigate personhood in an age of technology? And most of all, what does that really mean?
Real Time may not offer answers, but it’s meditative reflections on time and identity may guide you somewhere as original as what you’re listening to.
