Singapore - modern republic - tropical South East Asian sun, rainswept palm trees side by side with 4-lane expressways, information technology, strict government control and the world's busiest port. Not really the kind of place one would expect to find the survival, let alone resurgence, of traditional forms and instruments, or maybe the most obvious?

Mark Chan has been Singapore's best kept musical secret until now. Trained for 9 years in traditional Chinese flute, 6 years as a Western Counter-tenor, speaking English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Indonesian fluently, he is very much an amalgam of all the various influences that make up his world. A world where English is the lingua franca throughout the region between the disparate nationalities and cultures but where people's mother tongues are ever-present, lying close to the surface of the skin, most often reverted to in times of emotion, laughter, stress and deep poetic expression.

Mark's recording career started more than ten years ago. His singer-songwriter approach back then took the more easily accepted commercial pop-folk route with his album releases with WEA and Polygram in Singapore:              "Face to Face" and "Book Of Dreams".

His deep involvement as theatre-composer with the new wave of Singapore theatre starting in 1988, however, coincided with a momentous and far-reaching personal odyssey - rediscovering his Chinese roots and his passion for all things Asian (and trying to reconcile it with living in a heavily Westernised environment) - he returned to his early love for the forms and voices of the traditional instruments he grew up with as a boy - the flutes (Di & Xiao), the Erhu and the Guzheng, ... a childhood spent watching Chinese opera, participating in Buddhist and Taoist rituals and ceremonies, countless hours of learning and playing the Di and Xiao, years painting in Chinese xieyi style and also in Western oils, a youth obsessed with religious ecstasy - long overnight jam sessions with Indian religious vocal, tabla and sitar ensembles, vigils with his Catholic Aunt, his extensive childhood and teenage travels throughout the Asian region, (to China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, India) combined with travels to as far afield as Mexico, Egypt, Turkey, Italy, Scotland, Kazakhstan, Australia, France,the US and several years of study in the UK. from the time he was nine til the present day.

This rediscovery of roots and commonalities in diverse cultures fused in unique ways with his singer-songwriter soul (combining his teenage love for writers such as Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Paul Simon) producing a music both immediately universal, lingeringly Asian and uniquely his own. The music he has composed for Singaporean (and now also Japanese and Australian) theatre has caught the imagination and attention of audiences and critics everywhere. He has been the sole Composer-in-Residence for Theatreworks (Singapore's foremost English language theatre company) for the past 7 years. In 1994, he released a limited edition CD "The Other Actor"  a compilation of some of the music he had created for Theatreworks up until then.

In 1991 Mark released his third album "China Blue" and it marked the critical turning-point in his recording career. For the first time he dared to release a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks on the same album, a mix of songs in English, Chinese and Indonesian, an amalgam of Chinese flute, Indian sitar and tabla, modern keyboards, vocal lines without words.... If all this seems like a haphazard and motley mixture, listening to the actual music and songs soon dispels this. There is a calm centre, an integrity to the spiritual vision that overseas and underpins all that Mark creates. He has been quoted as saying,

"My music is Chinese, yes, Asian, yes, in that I am an inheritor of a spiritual and aesthetic tradition that attempts to reconnect Man with Nature. But my music is very much Singaporean too. I am a modern man, I live in the real world. I think not just in Chinese but also in Malay, and even more in English. I have to deal with modernity, greed, racism, politics, post-modernism, global warming, post-colonialism.... My work tries to heal the shattered bonds that noise, modernisation and greed have broken and dismissed as old-fashioned. I am never happier than when I am walking in starlight, sitting in the shade, sleeping by the sea, basking in the sun, sailing with the wind. I try to share some of that magic I have discovered in my work...... We are connected back to ourselves and thus to God (call him what you will) when we remember our place in the world. My music, my writings, are like bridges, reminders of where we should return....If we can."

His two albums following China Blue -"Nature Boy" and most recently "Travelling Under The Light Of The Full Moon" complete a trilogy that is enticingly lyrical, unashamedly melodic, subtly exotic in its fusion of diverse instruments, and spiritual in the lightest, truest sense. Don't be misled by the fact that he sings almost exclusively in the English language on Travelling Under The Light Of The Full Moon, this man's heart rests gently with the Ancients of his heritage, even as he is driven to create music for a tired and harried world.

"I think I knew what I had to do when I finally realised how hungry my soul was and I couldn't find very much in the stores that spoke directly to my hunger..... I guess I make music not just for others, but also for myself!!"

The trilogy of  albums :  China Blue, Nature Boy & Travelling Under The Light of The Full Moon

The Other Actor

free improvisations at the Substation

forward to Travels/Pics