for flute solo and two turntables

Chu-Yin

2015

This piece emerged from a fruitful dialogue with flutist Ivan Bushuev and draws inspiration from the concept of a labyrinthine novel, as imagined in Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths. In this narrative, a character can exist simultaneously across multiple realities—alive in one chapter, dead in another.

The flute part was pre-recorded onto two turntable discs—labyrinths of canyoned sound—which are played in canon with the live performance. By altering the needle placement, the narrative fragments and flash-forwards, disrupting linear progression. In this setup, the character loses its privileged status, sharing its presence with two sonic shadows.

The title of the piece is a variation on Zhulong, a mythological figure from Chinese folklore—a red, torch-bearing dragon whose light was said to cast no shadow. While Zhulong is not related to the ouroboros, its imagery of light, looping time, and cyclical motion subtly echoes the themes of the piece. The name has also been loosely interpreted as “the shadow of a torch,” which inspired the idea of parallel existences and flickering realities.