Waiting for Your Return brings together a wide collection of recordings for an anthological overview of the style. Taking in it’s early beginnings in the work of the pioneering composer Li Jinhui – whose 1927 song “Drizzle”, featuring the vocals of his daughter Li Minghui, is often referred to as the first shidaiqu record – through to more polished 1930s & 40s examples, when China’s western-influenced popular music & movie industry reached it’s golden age with the prevalence of the Seven Great Singing Stars (Bai Hong, Bai Guang, Gong Qiuxia, Li Xianglan, Wu Yingyin, Yao Lee and perhaps most prolific of all, Zhou Xuan).

Included in the collection are tracks recorded right up until the music’s demise in Shanghai in the early 1950s – during which time the Chinese Communist Party denounced shidaiqu as “yellow music”, outlawed nightclubs and pop music production, and destroyed western-style instruments – following which, much of these singers would decamp to Hong Kong where many saw further success throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.

„Biking to the center of Montreal’s 200 acre Maisonneuve Park, I found a quiet spot in the grass and sat down with my guitar and old H1 Zoom microphone. It was a morning in late May, and I was in the midst of trying to finish several projects. Feeling stuck and at a loss of inspiration, I decided to come to the park in an effort to clear my head. I took my guitar out from its case, set my microphone in front of me, and began recording improvised ideas.

I spent the next few mornings there, recording between the sounds of distant sirens and planes flying overhead. Back at my apartment, I improvised some additional woodwind arrangements with the help of a cheap flute and an old leaky Bundy clarinet, and using samples made from these two instruments, I also made flute and clarinet synths which were used on several tracks.

Unsure of what to name the tracks, which were originally labelled “Maisonneuve 1-20”, I decided to write a 20-line poem à la Robert Frost which would serve as the album’s track titles.

The result of this experiment is morning in the park, recorded between Maisonneuve Park and my apartment.”