I’m called Yukes玉刻, a commercial video producer and performing musician living in Shanghai. I primarily perform with traditional Chinese instruments and synthesizers together. I have been working with synthesizer brands as they enter the Chinese market.

While learning trombone and piano as a kid, I really wanted to play guitar but was too proud to get a teacher. So I tried myself, and failed. I tried bass, thinking it’d be easier, but still failed. After finding the ukulele in high school, I figured hey, if this instrument is easy, there must be other similarly easy instruments. From there began a lifelong passion of discovering acoustic instruments from around the world. I moved to Shanghai in 2017 and have been playing traditional Chinese instruments, which has offered so much positive affirmation and excitement from crowds and fans.

I finally sat down to learn electronic music production after floundering with it for many years in 2016 when I took a Lynda.com class on Maschine. From there, everything else started to make sense.

I began fusing the two interests and it created a very active source of performance opportunities, a social media following, and quite a few interactions and later dealings with brands of both electronic music equipment and instrument manufacturers.

Justin Vernon inspired my love of soft music, The Decemberists inspired my songwriting, Iron & Wine inspired my acoustic performance, and Nicolas Jaar was my primary influence for electronic music production.

Boris’s Flood has hypnotized me like nothing else could.

I’m originally from New York, but I studied abroad in 2015. I was developing a career in VFX in New York but I was very unhappy. I asked a professor what I should do to feel like an actual artist. He told me, ‘go to another country, and learn an art form with your hands.’ So I chose Shanghai, and started to teach myself the guzheng, as well as a few other traditional art forms. I was so happy and inspired, I really felt I wanted to come back.
A year later, I was directing a commercial for Coca-Cola, organized one of NYC’s largest projection mapping public art displays and was having a vividly interesting career, but every day I kept thinking about going back to Shanghai. I felt more ‘awake’ there, being so far from home and out of my element. A dear friend pressured me into checking ticket prices, and I booked a one-way ticket.

Life in Shanghai has its ups and downs, like anywhere else, but it’s got so much charm and it’s brimming with potential. It’s not a hard city to live as a musician, and it’s quite easy to network and connect with brands coming to the country.

After teaching myself the guzheng (failing the class due to my lack skill with the Chinese language, but stealing one from school and persisting to play anyway), I brought a few instruments home: the Bawu巴乌 and Hulusi 葫芦丝 which are incredibly easy to play, like the recorder, but with very distinct and interesting sounds.

I found a tremendous source of peace when sitting and playing a pentatonic harp; you can close your eyes and paw at it like a cat, and it’s still going to sound beautiful. Similarly, the 1.5 octave flutes were so easy to knock out a solo on. I later learned Xiao, a pensive bamboo flute, and have since been able to play incredibly calm and wonderful sounds.

I find my own electric performance without an acoustic instrument lacking. The Terra was the first electric instrument I felt that scratched the itch of a melodic, expressive acoustic performance on stage.

I studied trombone, both jazz and classical, as well as piano, but I hated them all until I was older. I admired my older sister, who went to college to be a music therapist. I got a hand-me-down MIDI controller, which I wish I knew how to use when I was a kid. I also had a cheap Yamaha electric piano, but I remember only playing with the tubular bells and sound effects.

I was pretty late to the game. I got my first synthesizer in 2017, a Novation Mininova, from Tom Lee Music in Hong Kong. A friend of mine had one and played a beautiful pad on it; with zero research or understanding of the market, I got one right away. It’s a fantastic machine, but it’s not the best for learning. I remember reading through the manual, and while the first twenty or so pages made sense, it quickly devolved into a fever dream of unfamiliar terminology. I mostly played presets.

I was visiting a girl I liked at her booth at the Music China expo in Shanghai, and we took a break to check out some synthesizers. She pointed at a Moog Grandmother and said “that’s the synth I have.” I pretended to know and said “oh yeah… that’s a good one.” I went home and spent weeks studying synthesizers, the different brands and types… now I know the whole landscape of what’s available, and that girl is now my wife. So it worked out.

I saw someone playing a Lyra-8, and it really shook my perspective of what synthesizers were at the time. I’ve seen them without keys before but… how would you tune it? I went home and researched it, and quickly became obsessed. Finding intervals by ear, voices modulating one another, it was all captivating stuff. It quickly became something I intended to learn when I got more familiar. Several years later, I was intimately familiar with synthesizers, and the Lyra-8 was my first analog synth. I adore it.

The Terra is not only the centerpiece of my setup, it’s become my favorite musical instrument, acoustic or otherwise. It’s completely changed how I feel about and produce music. I play some thirty different instruments and have probably a hundred different devices, and nothing comes close to the Terra. I often tell people, if I had to choose one musical machine to dedicate the rest of my life to, I’d throw it all away and stick with the Terra. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I want to cherish my appreciation for this machine.

Aside from the Terra, the Pipe is a regular feature at my performances. It gets the crowd riled up to see something so strange; the Terra catches eyes of course, but it lays flat on a table. The Pipe is a visual splendor, and it rattles speakers like nothing else in my setup.

The ROAT and Ether come out on experimental nights, as does the Lyra-8. I hope one day to work with a Dvina after trying it at Buchla & Friends, it was much easier to play than I thought. I also think the Cosmos may be a central feature of my ambient set one day, but for the moment, my setup is pretty full.

The Terra has, without exaggeration, completely changed the way I think about expression in electronic music. I feel intimately connected with it, and have a deep understanding of how the engines sound. I’ve never felt such control over a sound, even with my acoustic instruments. I now build sounds around the Terra, rather than playing sounds atop a beat.

It’s very nice to jump back and forth between an electric timbre and acoustic timbre for the communication parts of my music, be it melody or otherwise. I can’t use the two at the same time due to lack of hands, though I think I’ll start playing the Xiao through the pipe sometime.

Using the Terra at sound healing events I play at was my own idea, but it was a no-brainer. I’m no advocate for sound-healing, rather I think meditative and ambient musicians and sound-healing practitioners should have a stronger dialogue with one another.

It’s primarily a conscious connection with a very receptive audience, and delicate care must be given to respond to the attention (and some may call ‘energy’) that they radiate back towards you. Having an instrument that is as tactile, eloquent and expressive as you could possibly want is such a reinforcing cantilever to that performer-audience connection. Feel a swell of attention or energy? Let your fingers sink deeper into the instrument. Feel a lull? Sustain, and modulate.

Put simply, I want to convey to the audience a 50/50 mix of my own feeling, and the feeling I get from their response to the initial feeling. The initial feeling is always tranquil and calm. To have a tool that instantly projects your feeling in a clear and concise way makes the whole thing more succinct, less abstract, and clear.

I am the musician-in-residence at a friend’s venue in Shanghai. It's a little salon-style living room in an old house, full to the brink with synthesizers and gear. Amateurs and pros alike visit to jam and try gear. The Terra has been a permanent fixture here as the centerpiece, with now at least a hundred people who have tried it personally with a one-on-one tutorial. The Pipe is also permanently installed here, along with quickstart guides for each in Chinese, and alcohol wipes for the pipe’s mouthpiece.

I am regularly giving demos on the Terra, introducing it far and wide! It’s so incredibly well received here in Shanghai, complete amateurs and pro musicians alike have been picking them up and trying them. Hypothetically, if you completely disregard all context of how far synthesizers have gone since their inception, and look at the Terra as a completely new instrument, it’s rather easy to wrap your head around the basics.

I am taking a year or so off to get my Master’s degree in Marketing and Retail Science, but I will persist in making music in the coming year. It may mean I need to pack away the majority of my things, so it may just be me, a Terra, a Circuit Tracks and an interface. But that’s fine by me.

I am releasing a documentary soon on the birth of electronic music equipment in China, and have several engagements with the US Consulate in Shanghai coming soon. I may return to Wonderfruit festival this year if my schedule allows. Beyond that, I will continue to deepen my ties with the synthesizer community in China, and hopefully, around the world.

On the Soma Terra, dedicate one bank simply to tunings. Presets 1-12 are just a basic synth patch tuned to C Minor, C Major, C Maj Pentatonic, C Min Pentatonic, Blues, etc.. Presets A-D are my go-to’s. When you’re jamming, simply load your fav preset, then head to the tuning bank and load the tuning of the scale you’re playing in, then transpose everything to the root note.