Multidisciplinary musician Li Xingyu constantly seeks sounds that often go overlooked. In his career as a recording artist, he’s explored the sounds of the world’s largest rainforest for his experimental Amazon trilogy, and travelled through Xinjiang to improvise with dozens of folk musicians for the album The Farthest Place from the Sea. But central to the Beijing artist’s passions are whales—they’re in the name of his band Whale Circus, and his auditory art project 52Hz Sound Cabinet is inspired by the mysterious 52-hertz whale. Guided by that fascination, Li launched an expedition to record whales in their ocean habitat—and turned his experiences from the voyage into an album of field recordings and ambient and neoclassical instrumentals, arranged in a personal style blending the physical properties of sound with its perceptual artistic expression. An Elegy for the Ocean Vol. 1 – I Feel You is the first chapter in a series exploring the sounds of the sea. In early 2024, Li set off from the Haikou harbour for the project’s inaugural destination, Weizhou Island, in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Guangxi province. The artist’s comprehensive preparations for the expedition included learning how to pilot a boat. “I tend to spend a long time preparing,” Li tells Apple Music. “I acquire the necessary scientific knowledge first of all, and then use what I’ve studied to plot a route. Then I search for meaningful connections between that route and artistic expression.” The journey ultimately resulted in recordings of Bryde’s whales, other ocean life and sounds of the marine environment. “Making field recordings feels like live improvisation,” Li says. “You’re constantly thinking about what you’re looking for and you’ve got to make snap decisions about what to keep and what to drop.” He tackled his mountain of raw material using a range of recording techniques in the service of one central idea: “What’s intended to be expressed determines whether audio gets edited or processed.” Li’s compositions were guided by the need to use the sounds to tell a story. “I typically approach music using the mindset of a film or novel,” he says. “First, I decide on a core—the thing I really want to express—and then work on the album structure. Only when that’s in place do I start working on the music. And I choose instrumentation and recording techniques based on the album tone.” His nature recordings and environmental sounds are woven through the narrative: in the howling sea breeze, tape hiss and rocket engine of “INTRO”; the blend of glitch effects, ambient music and IDM elements on “My Dream”; and the call of Bryde’s whales buoying poet Li Bai to the moon on “The Last Story”. “For me, field recordings, instrumentals and vocals all serve the overall story,” Li says. “How they are deployed depends on the design of the listening experience. On this album, sounds play the important role. When composing, I record my notes based how the changes in those sounds make me feel.” With a concept and structure in hand, Li designed his story to span the entire LP. “I prefer a holistic approach,” he says. “It’s like the difference between a feature film and a short—an album has the capacity to express something far richer than a single track does. And structure, narrative and complexity are great creative motivators.” A fairy tale lies at the album’s heart: “A father tells his child that our dreams turn into whales in the ocean,” Li says. “When we meet our dreams, we’ll hear both the past and the future.” Li shares an especially memorable story from the expedition: “One day, when we had finished recording and were looking for a place to stop for a meal, we encountered a whale with a propeller scar on its dorsal fin. It swam around us silently for 40 minutes before making its exit. That was the most unforgettable moment of the trip. Whether it was coincidence, or whether there’s really some power in the world unknown to us, I can’t say, but in that moment I felt the connection of our two souls.” The artist also offers a word of caution, however. “On the surface, this story is romantic but when linked with the reality of the social environment, you’ll realise the implication,” he says. “Due to hunting and destruction by humans, the ocean’s whales are declining in number. We’re gradually losing our dreams.” Below, Li Xingyu breaks down for Apple Music the sound of selected album tracks. “INTRO” “This record uses all real instruments, recorded using lots of unconventional methods. On the opening track, I used a century-old, run-down piano with most of the keys broken, so you had no way of knowing what sound would come out, or if the note that sounded would even play the next time. I love randomness and uncertainty—like how life itself is full of serendipity. I used a voice recorder so old that it ate the tape during playback—the warbles on this track come from the actual state of the machine, not from any deliberate effect. At the end I added the noise of a rocket firing. Listeners might not be able to identify the sound but that’s what makes it special—its presence is significant and irreplaceable, no specific interpretation required.” “Memory III: Among the Dead Corals Around the Island” “The environmental samples on this track were recorded when we put in at Xieyang Island for the night. There used to be lots of coral in the vicinity but it’s all died off now. The ocean floor is like a huge coral graveyard and dead coral is everywhere on the beach. The first half of the track is a little dirge-like—and that’s how I actually felt. Ecologies that formed over long eons were wiped out in a few short decades and I’ll never have the opportunity to see those beautiful coral reefs reborn. The intense distortion and bass on the second half are sounds recorded underwater from our whale-watching boat. When whales are feeding, dozens of craft swarm in, engines roaring. It feels like you’re next to an airport runway. To make the sound less intense to the ear, I reduced the volume a little—but when we were on the boat and that engine noise picked up, there was no point in even wearing earphones.” “The Last Story” “The eerie bullfrog sound that starts the track is actually the audio signal of over 700 Bryde’s whales that we recorded and combined like they were from space. The undulating analogue synthesizer sounds like a mysterious, distant message. When composing this piece, I had just finished watching Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, so the audio effect here reminds me of Voyager 2’s lonely, romantic journey. Sometimes I wonder whether humanity will still be around by the time the probe’s message is eventually received by extraterrestrials, or if we’ll no longer exist on this planet. Those space-bound radio waves and the story of Li Bai are our past and future, which echoes the fairy-tale theme and is part of two other projects I’m working on right now.”