Eclectic, daring popster Rainbow Chan hurls the kitchen sink from her closet
Taking a break from tracking her debut album, Rainbow Chan traveled to Iceland, where she played her first overseas shows, sampled field recordings, befriended Björk’s personal harp-maker and tested a delicacy called hákarl (rotten shark). Returning to Sydney after a stopover in Hong Kong, where she’d lived as a girl, she scrapped the 15 songs she’d already recorded and wrote a new one, “Skinny Dipping” about the wildest thing she’d ever done.
“I was getting a bit sick of myself, so I went back to my roots in pop music,” says Chan, who’d released 120 copies of a handmade, four-song EP the previous year. “‘Skinny Dipping’ completely changed the game for me, because it sounded so far removed from everything else I’d written. I wanted to not be so singer/songwriter-ish, so experimental. To write something different, something about youth and life, something upbeat. I wanted to use the sounds of my childhood, when I had this really old-school, imitation Casio keyboard and preset beats. I wanted to recreate that sound using samples to create my own loops, following that vein of classic pop songwriting, but doing it in a twisted, left-field kind of way.”
The chirpy little keyboard that launches “Skinny Dipping” sounds like moonlight, with a sky full of stars twinkling on Cronulla Beach, then builds into a delicately multilayered, spritely poptronic party, as Chan celebrates a friend’s 21st birthday, dancing in the water and wondering “where those boys and girls have gone/fading with the waves on the shore.” It’s as sweet as summer gets, the centerpiece of Long Vacation (Silo Arts), a six-song EP filled with the sounds that have been bouncing around her head for years: glockenspiels and music boxes, Frédéric Chopin and Steve Reich, girl groups and electronics, Hong Kong pop, Shanghai jazz, American rhythm ‘n’ blues and Japanese television theme songs.
Once the new direction arrived, the rest of Long Vacation was easy, recorded solo inside Chan’s closet over a six-month period that began in fall 2012. “It’s very DIY, very genuine, very intimate, literally done in a cupboard among the clothes and shoes,” says Chan, who performs solo with a handful of instruments and a Roland sampler. “Whenever I felt I was ready, or whenever I got the inspiration, I just did it then. I was so fresh, the songs came together really quickly, and I spent most of that time deconstructing them afterwards, taking away layers, refining, revising and reshaping the sounds the way I wanted them.”
Classically trained in piano, saxophone and voice, Chan moved to Sydney at six years old, growing up in the suburbs, studying Mandarin on the weekends and listening to mix tapes compiled by her grandmother in Hong Kong. Those tapes, segueing from Del Shannon to Chinese folk songs to Skeeter Davis, are still the sounds that drive her, and after years of composing pieces about heartbreak, she’s tickled to write about the everyday epiphanies of getting a new haircut listening to pillow talk or swimming after midnight.
“I love the immediacy of pop,” says Chan, who next plans to start a pop band with her sister, focusing on ’60s Japanese rock ‘n’ roll. “I’m a sucker for really nice melodies and harmonies, and I’ve gotten to the stage where I have to be honest and true, to go back into myself and write pieces from within. At first, I was a bit unsure, asking myself, ‘Is that a little too cheesy, too corny?’ But I decided that’s OK if it’s too cheesy, too corny. Because that’s me.”
—Kenny Berkowitz
