NATÁLIE ZEHNALOVÁ

AI FEN: THE POWER OF BREATHING

Her music is powerfully delicate and delicately powerful, like a calm and confident assurance that these two qualities are by no means mutually exclusive. Its texture invites the listener to sit with it and observe its flow and the various components she thoughtfully weaves together. Elements of drone, ambient, screamo, techno, and darkwave have their place and purpose in experimental pop soundscapes of the Prague based Polish-Chinese musician Ai fen. 

With her solo project, Ewelina Vlcek-Chiu set out to examine the layers of her own past and her own identity. She chose her Chinese name as her artist name as a means of coming to terms with something that has accompanied her throughout all her life but for a long time remained unaddressed. She does not peel the complex layers to show them off or shed them, instead, she observes them closely and tries to understand and untangle the mechanisms that brought them into being in the first place. In doing so, she’s not as much revealing herself as she is always already transforming and evolving further.

Music & Production by Ai fen
Performed by Ai fen
Master: Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering
Video directed by Ai fen and Jan Vont
Video by Jan Vont
Camera by Emily Brandi (static shot) & Yvon Teyssslerová (moving images)

How we conceptualise what is happening to us and around us is central to the song I Like Breathing. The track predates the crisis, appearing on Ai fen’s debut postforever which came out in February, but its message has been all the more compelling in the past months. It is a gentle yet firm reminder to remember to breathe, to return to the present through breath and realise that our existence is pure consciousness and potential. The music video is, on the contrary, the product of poetic commentary on the period of unprecedented stillstand and uncertainty of March, April, and May. It draws from this particular point in time which has been both extremely calm and profoundly violent, in the literal sense to many and figuratively to the rest by thoroughly shaking our notions of the world. 

In the video, we see Ai fen wearing a face mask, which was obligatory in public at all times in the Czech Republic. The story is told through the mask while everything else stays still, Ai fen merely is there, breathing and accepting the viewers’ gaze. Though the mask, we enter the manicured gardens surrounding the Prague castle, which serve as a metaphor for our own homes. Like the animals kept in the castle gardens, we have everything we need in our houses and apartments. But deprived of the option to leave, we came to experience our homes in a radically different way. The creators wanted to gesture towards the discomfort we felt within our comfort. Ai fen directed the video together with artist Jan Vont, with camera work by Emily Brandi and Yvon Teysslerová. 

Natálie Zehnalová:

You describe your music as “screamo pop” or “trauma pop”. What makes you want to scream? What demons are you facing on the record?

Ai fen:

I came up with the description “screamo pop” spontaneously when releasing my first single As I Thought where I alternate between screaming and really delicate, innocent vocals. This was the first time I had ever used the “screamo” voice and it was exciting and disconcerting to discover it. I especially loved figuring out how to jump between the two vocal extremes within the span of a few seconds, and it made me realize to what extent I had been holding myself back in the past, particularly out of a fear of having my voice viewed as ugly, aggressive, or unpleasant. It became clear to me that this fear of having my voice viewed “negatively” was an extension of having myself as a whole viewed that way. I realised how intricately the voice is related to identity, particularly in regard to its suppression under the guise of social norms and expectations. So vocal experimentation is at the forefront of this project because it is the voice that encapsulates identity. Allowing myself to take risks with my vocal allows me to take risks exposing myself, being vulnerable and raw. Screaming, in particular, contains so many nuances. Your question “what makes you want to scream” has the implication that we scream because of external factors, and although this may often be true on a first glance basis, what truly makes us scream is emotion arising from deep within the self: it is our intention and interpretation of reality that evokes our reactions to it. My traumas arise out of having interpreted events in a way that has been deeply manipulated by social conditioning, cultural expectations, and the way and where I was raised. In this project, I try to move that aside to see how I’ve reformulated events within myself molded by these influences and how they’ve crystallised in harmful behaviour and thinking.

Screaming isn’t just an expression of hostility or aggression in my work; it’s also about pleasure, liberation, frustration, catharsis. As I Thought is about split personalities and desires, finding yourself wanting something that you've been told you shouldn’t want, the guilt that goes along with it and the ultimate decoding of the structures surrounding that guilt. I sing in outbursts of screaming on that track and return to very gentle, lullaby-like vocals to express that disparity I’m feeling between a culturally sanctioned life and set of desires (that I love and am deeply invested in) and another set that is considered taboo, perhaps even evil, but is desired all the same. In I Like Breathing, the track that I’m premiering the video to here, the screaming at the end is very different. The track is about focusing on being, on the now expressed by the subtle, often unnoticed yet crucial act of breathing. In the end, the screaming is about the dissolution of the self that breathes, but not in a negative way: as an act of liberation, transformation.

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Natálie Zehnalová:

What pushed you to explore your “other-ed self”?

Ai fen:

Although I am biracial, growing up my Chinese heritage was never directly addressed. I think this is a result of my father and his sisters’ own difficulty with understanding it as a result of growing up in Poland, where they, of course, stood out and must have felt isolated and confused. I often feel that I inherited this isolation and confusion, but had it compounded by the fact that we had immigrated to Canada and then the United States, “melting pots” where all racial and cultural identities are supposedly accepted under the sheltering guise of a new identity. The reality, especially in small cities like the Midwestern town we moved to in the States, is that if you’re not white then you’ll have a difficult time assimilating or blending in, even if you are a second or third-generation immigrant. As a first-generation immigrant of different ethnicity, assimilation is complicated by the fact that you’re simply odd for those around you: you speak another language, have other customs, you’ve come from a place many have never heard of. Because of that, at a very young age, I had to defend my identity and I found that my answers were never good enough. If I said I was Polish I was met with protests that I didn’t look Polish, if I said I was Chinese I’d be looked at dubiously since I don’t look “full” Chinese, being American or Canadian also didn’t work depending on where I was or what language I was speaking. So being “other-ed” at such an early age definitely made me very sensitive to identity, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised that this sensitivity also made me very defensive, creating various mechanisms that allowed me to play along with my own expectations and perceptions, not only to others but also to myself. What I’m interested in doing in this project is stripping all that back and looking at those parts of myself that I myself have other-ed and the reasons behind that.

Natálie Zehnalová:

postforever deals with the common understanding of time as linear, which implies that after every era there will come another one which we can then label as “post.” Do you think our notion of time will change now that it’s clear that progress as we understood it since the beginning of industrial age, in the sense of “more, better, faster,” can’t keep on going? 

Ai fen:

I hope so! I think that with the COVID-19 situation we’ve been overwhelmingly shown how the churning wheel of capitalism really CAN just stop. I don’t want to undermine the heartbreak and hardship the situation has brought on many, of course, it has been devastating. But at the same time, a lot of assumptions about the way we live have been revealed as false. In Prague, the most visible effect is the lack of tourists, the closed down shops of pointless touristic baubles that no one really needs and that don’t say anything about the culture anyway. For me, this opens up a space to restructure industries like tourism: let’s not return to the tumult of the cheap, fast, and abundant. I think that a lot of how we perceive time is driven by our notion of labour: we work to make money for things and experiences that we are manipulated to feel we desire, and as you said, it’s always “more, better, faster.” If we rethink our desires out of a place that is beyond the superficial commodity fetishism that an advanced capitalism demands, our sense of time will change as well.

Natálie Zehnalová:

What inspired the song Blood Millennials? And what do you think is the greatest struggle of our generation? We were the first to have so many options, but I feel that we didn’t always know how to navigate these freedoms.

Ai fen:

Blood Millennials was inspired by my inability to put down my phone, my realisation that I’m addicted to it and all that comes with it. The instant gratification of social media, the depression when there’s a lack of it, the flood of information and the anxiety it causes. The chorus of that track reads: 

“Brain is driftwood, going with the flow.
Plastic in the water, white noise, no snow.” 

So there’s also a gesturing towards the guilt we feel at having so much luxury, so much comfort at the cost of the environment. 

Millennials are often cited by older generations as lacking discipline, of being lazy and spoiled, of having no struggle. Although it’s true that we don’t have a definitive struggle such as a war, I think that our trauma comes out of being born into the expectation that “Here, you have everything. Now don't dare to feel anything but bliss.” We’re always being told how lucky we are, yet our planet is in grave danger, our future is uncertain in a massive, global way. We have been set up in cushy life to be distracted by capitalism that accelerated during our youths and which we’ve all been indoctrinated into. In other words, we’re at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we should be self-actualising and moving into a different way of thinking, a consciousness drawing on collectivity and harmony, but we simultaneously find ourselves in a world that does everything to distract us from this. We have everything, but we’re constantly told that we’ll never have enough, never be enough. So I think the millennial struggle is learning to navigate that, to live in deep and profound gratitude for being in a position to question existing structures and to be brave and focused enough to do it.

Natálie Zehnalová:

What was most challenging about learning to produce music yourself? In what ways did it influence your music-making? 

Ai fen:

Learning to think about the whole picture. Working with someone else you have your role, you write the melody or the piano line, the lyrics, the beats, etc. When you work alone and produce all of the music yourself, you have to think about the mood you’re trying to create in its entirety. For me, there was also a feeling of boundlessness, of an ability to really experiment and push beyond the pretty, especially with the voice. Although my collaboration with Dan in ba:zel is very open, it just isn’t possible for me to try on all those variations of myself when anyone, even someone so close, is present. 

Natálie Zehnalová:

What is home for you? 

Ai fen:

For me, home is a sense of returning. It’s a return to safety and comfort, and there are many kinds and connotations of feeling safe and comfortable. These can be rooted in the past or present. So for example, I feel immediately at home whenever I am with my siblings because I return to the security of that close, sibling relationship which is both stable and unchanging and constantly evolving. And I feel I am home when I am with my husband because our relationship is such a warm, loving, and encompassingly secure one that informs much of my present reality. When I visit my grandparents in their little country home in Poland I also feel at home, that sense of escaping the real world I had when I would visit them from the U.S. as a kid during summer holidays is still there and that’s very magical. But there are also new people in my life that I feel a sense of home with, and it’s a different sense of home that excavates a part of me that’s otherwise hidden. Those people are rare, but when I meet them I become instantly addicted to that feeling of a novel, yet secret home. 

Natálie Zehnalová:

In what language do you feel most comfortable? In what language do you usually think? 

Ai fen:

When writing I definitely feel most comfortable in English, having been raised in Canada and the United States and completing all my studies in English. I did a masters in Critical Theory and all the philosophy, literature, and theory I read was in English, so that language holds the most technical sophistication for me. Growing up, we always spoke Polish at home and it is my first language, but because of a lack of contact with people my own age to speak Polish with, until recently it was this language of comfort and familiarity. It wasn’t until recently that I started to write in Polish and that was pretty revolutionary for me, also because it required letting go of a fear of being judged since I have never learned to write properly in Polish. I’ve lived in Prague for over a decade and I feel equally comfortable expressing myself verbally in Czech as I do in English. Because I moved to Prague as a young adult where I became involved with the local art scene, the language was immediately about communicating complex ideas. It wasn’t until we began touring with my other project ba:zel that I started to get comfortable doing that in Polish, although grammatically and pronunciation wise my Polish is decidedly superior. For a while, I lived in Barcelona, and at the time whenever I spoke Spanish I became a different person: someone who didn’t have any obligations or fears, someone on perpetual summer holiday. Although my Spanish is pretty poor these days, I mention this to illustrate that languages hold the capacity to develop hidden personalities and nuances that can be called out at a moment’s notice. Moving between languages within a single conversation is called “code-switching” in linguistics, and I think this is a very apt description. 

I don’t think that anyone really ‘thinks’ in a language, it’s only when we wish to ‘catch’ what we’re thinking that our brain converts our thoughts into language. And it does this into the most appropriate language at hand if you speak multiple languages. So, it depends on who I’m around, where I am, what I’m doing. The same is true of my dreams. 

Natálie Zehnalová:

How did you meet the Polish poet uroruro, who you collaborate with and who seems to play an influential part in your life?

Ai fen:

I met uroruro at one of the ba:zel gigs in Poland. He also organises events and he immediately invited us to play in Poznań. We became really good friends and we went to Poznań to multiple events he put on. He was the first person I ever saw perform Polish poetry and it was an incredibly powerful experience because it transformed Polish from this family language to a field of new and exciting potential. 

Natálie Zehnalová:

The two of you were supposed to do an artist residency together, which had to be postponed. Can you tell me more about the plans that you had?

Ai fen:

Two years ago, I asked uro if he would collaborate with me on my debut album. I wanted to have Polish, my native language, on the album but at the time I didn’t feel capable of writing the text myself. Because I love how he uses the language I asked uro if he would write a text coming out of issues the album addressed. I sent him the tracks that I had had at the time along with the translated texts and explanations of what each track was examining. He called me and told me I had given him a lot to think about and that he’d be in touch. Three months later he sent me an amazing gift: a series of 12 poems called cykl/on/forAi-fen along with a cassette tape of himself performing the text with sound design by another Poznań based artist called Radar. It was a beautiful, overwhelming gift but I felt that it was a complex and complete work unto itself that I wouldn’t want to cut into. Then last year I was playing an experimental improv set with my other project ba:zel and I suddenly started singing in Polish, I jotted that text down and started working on the track that would become MYŚLIWY. Working on it I continually had the feeling that something was missing, one night lying awake it occurred to me to use samples off of the cassette that uro had sent me. I really loved the result, the mix of performative poetry with my own music and text and thought it would be wonderful to actually create something intentionally with uro. So I asked my friend Sráč Sam, a visual artist, curator, and the owner of a gallery in a little town in Southern Czechia if she’d be interested in hosting us as residents. She loved the idea and developed a program with other artists featuring events, concerts, and discussions. Ours was to be the third and last of the series. We are currently in contact with the gallery to figure out a different time for the residency. 

During the lockdown one of the first things I did was contact Jan Vont, the visual artist I work with on a regular basis, to do a video for MYŚLIWY, this is the result.

Natálie Zehnalová:

What comes after postforever? In normal circumstances, you’d have spent the past months promoting the album. But since those plans have come to a halt, have you been working on new material? 

Ai fen:

In explaining the title postforever I once asked and answered “What comes after postforever?” “Everything and nothing.” I meant this in terms of the concept of a postforever which referred to a letting go of conventional perceptions of time and values, but I think that it’s also true in a more literal sense pertaining to your question. I’m still going to do everything I had planned for the album, eventually touring and performing the material. So really nothing has happened because of COVID, but at the same time, everything has. Because I’ve been confronted with this gap, this space that seems sometimes insurmountably vast that I have to get through to do all those things I had planned. In that space, I’ve gone through many phases of fear, grief, doubt. It’s interesting how suddenly stopping opens up all these anxieties. And yes, as a result, I’ve been working on new material and in doing so facing the melancholy of the album I just put out already being “old.”

Natálie Zehnalová:

Your music is slow-paced and introspective, which seems fitting for this weird time. Is there anything interesting, surprising that you learned during this forced slowdown, about yourself or the society?

Ai fen:

In the beginning, I was incredibly ‘productive.’ I think like many people I wanted to “make this time count” and I was determined to do so through keeping a very disciplined schedule as I do in normal times. So I’d get up at 6.30 a.m, work out for two hours, work for three hours before breakfast, eat, then work again till dinner, then again after. For the first three weeks, I was producing a lot creatively and also working a lot to restructure the autumn with all the things that had been postponed. Soon it became evident that just falling into business as usual by autumn wasn’t going to happen, and I started to fall into deep ruts of depression alternating with moments of ecstatic joy. I’d think, “Why am I making new music when I won’t be able to play it for anyone?” Then I’d get into these excited moods where I was really just playing for myself and thinking “Fuck it. I don’t need to perform, I can just be.” And I’d vacillate between these two poles, still trying to maintain that mode of intense productivity. Then it all just fell apart and I couldn’t do a thing, that has been the worst because I’m constantly confronted with that feeling of being worthless. I feel so guilty for having so much, for being so lucky in where I am during this time of crisis and “wasting” it. So the hardest part of the lockdown has been trying to be nice to myself and accepting that I am where I am, and disentangling my sense of worth from my productivity and my identity from that of being an artist. 

Natálie Zehnalová:

How has it been to see people’s faces without masks again? How do you feel about life slowly going back to normal? I think, once again, we were all hoping for this to have a definitive end, to be able to draw a line and say it’s post-corona time, but now we see clearly that’s not how it works. 

Ai fen:

In Prague people still have to wear masks on public transport and in stores, technically in any closed spaces, as well. There are a lot of open-air events happening though, and there people tend not to wear masks. It’s been wonderful to go to these events and speak to friends face to face. I think this has really shown me how, despite occupying quite a lot of cyberspace, important physical contact is, being in an actual space together.

I love Prague devoid of the noisy crowds of tourists. I live in the centre and it was becoming unlivable. Now there’s a calm and quiet to the city that I imagine is similar to how it was in the nineties. The most depressing thing for me is imagining everything going “back to normal.” We have a chance now to reflect on what we want our cities and spaces we live in to look like. We can scale back vapid, mainstream tourism and focus on travel as something truly special that we put time and effort into planning, making it all the more precious. All of this fast culture is unsustainable for the planet and it’s not good for us either. In terms of being an artist, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the pressure to play a ton of shows each year to barely make a living or not even is also part of this culture of fast consumption. We’re easily bored because we have so much to choose from, so much stimuli. I’m hoping for a future where everything, including concerts, may happen less frequently but will be given more support and care.

Ai fen is the new solo venture of Polish/Chinese musician and producer Ewelina Vlcek-Chiu, also known as one half of the witchwave duo ba:zel (with Daniel Vlcek). Ai-fen is the artist’s Chinese name, given to her at birth as a counterpart to her first Polish name. In this way Ai fen is a nod towards an Other-ed Self, always present but hidden from view, an exploration of identity as a biracial, multinational, millennial woman.

Natálie Zehnalová is a writer and translator from the Czech Republic living in Berlin. She is currently studying Cultural Studies and Cultural Semiotics at the University of Potsdam. Her interest lies particularly in music and arts coming from outside of the anglophone world.