落霞集 (The Songs of Eventide)

As a song cycle, ‘The Songs of Eventide’ made its debut in public performance by Rainbow Chamber Singers(RCS) in 2017 and was recorded the same year. Though only two years later in 2019 was it released as an album, with RCS’s art director Chengzhi Jin being the songwriter. The album features a fantastic first-person narrative of the protagonist and his family who were cast away on a deserted island. While the song cycle is composed of seven singles, each and every one represents a different moment of the main character’s life, all of which add up to a nebulous fancifulness. No answer is given as to whether it is the result of the hero’s overactive imagination or a land of real existence. Nevertheless, the fact that the beginning and the end of the song cycle are identical gives the impression that life is predestined to come full circle.
In 2017, with the collaboration of Hongjen Huang, the Taiwanese audio engineer, RCS spent half a year honing in on its studio album ‘The Song of Eventide’. With a musical hall as the recording venue and aided by the technology of analog audio, RCS strived to make the output more substantial and detailed, so as to optimize the audience’s listening experience.The album design was a collaboration of Chinghsuan Lin the planner, Wanjou Lu the designer and Chengzhi Jin the art director. To achieve the desired effect, they invited kids to create lyrics using Chinese calligraphy brushes while mingling them with hand-drawn illustrations that were both dark and innocent. Enigmatic and paradoxical, these lyrics corresponded to not a few abstruse scenes in the design, but at a closer inspection, you could still distinguish a myriad of colors in them, which helped demonstrate the protagonist’s mind as seemingly chaotic but also harboring great possibility and vitality.

落霞集 (The Songs of Eventide)

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