PREVIEW
What: Scars & Scarves, FOONYAP and Ruby Karinto
When: Friday, 8 p.m. (doors at 7)
Where: Martin Batchelor Gallery, 712 Cormorant St.
Tickets: $10
Carol Yap is gunning for the area in her live performances where the unexpected and imperfect crash into each other headfirst.
“People respond to authenticity and they respond to vulnerability,” Yap said this week from a tour stop in Kamloops. “And they both require a lot of courage to display publicly.”
Courage and perseverance play central roles in Yap’s journey to create a musical identity as the artist FOONYAP. She hasn’t fully realized her dream just yet, but she’s already winning given that her current guise — think a violin-playing Björk, but without the dance beats — bears little resemblance to her younger self.
That’s a victory in Yap’s mind.
Yap, 29, was raised in a strict Chinese-Catholic household by immigrant parents, who enrolled her in violin lessons at the age of four. By the time she was 11, Yap was taking courses at the Royal Conservatory of Music.
With the immense pressure from her parents, Yap felt there was little room for error, in life or music.
“I come from a very hyper-critical culture, very competitive. I always felt a sense of inadequacy — I was never good enough, no matter what I did, and the environment I grew up in encouraged that feeling.”
Though it took years, Yap eventually defied nearly everyone around her. She left school, stopped going to church and quit playing the violin. It’s clear by talking with Yap, who answers questions thoughtfully and at a measured pace, that the emotional scars from her past are many and complicated (it has been suggested that her upbringing shared elements with that described in Amy Chua’s controversial book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother).
And yet Yap remains in Calgary, despite the memories the city triggers. “I think it’s more important to develop who I am. That’s more important than where I am,” she said.
“There may come a time when I need to relocate, but for now, this whole process and journey is internal. It doesn’t really matter where I live. I can sit and face those feelings anywhere.”
Palimpsest, a singularly brave piece of explorative art released in October, took Yap four years to complete. It’s no wonder, with songs such as Woolf and Plath (with the lyrics: “Come back to me, I’ll be your heart/I’ll beat for you when life is too hard”) and #2 (“When I call, no one comes/When I fall, no one runs”).
The motivation behind the album and the redemption that has come with it is not spelled out in her lyrics; rather, she uses interviews with the press as a window into her pain. Through the media, her story is getting out and Yap is discovering that fans are coming to her shows to share their own stories.
“It doesn’t matter what background they come from, they recognize that the emotional pain has perhaps carried through and impacted their decisions as an adult.”
Palimpsest isn’t about lamenting over what came before, Yap said. It’s about recognizing the shame and alienation she felt as a child, and making decisions to move beyond it as an adult.
“It can be viewed as a rebellion, of course. But I think the deeper meaning is realizing, as you’re growing up, that the rebellion is actually happening inside your head. It’s very painful to go back and rewrite the emotional patterns that you carried into your adulthood. How do I rewrite that script and make decisions from now on?”
Her live performances offer no emotional easy way out. FOONYAP concerts are draining for both her and her audience, Yap said. But she is left with a positive feeling afterwards. “This has been a very therapeutic process.”
The tour to support Palimpsest brings Yap to Victoria for what will be her local debut as FOONYAP (she has played Victoria previously as a member of Calgary indie folk act Woodpigeon). She will sing and play her violin through a series of loop pedals, which allow her to accompany herself on guitar. The end result will be a singular piece of art, warts and all.
That is precisely what Yap is trying to accomplish at this stage in her career: Art for art’s sake, no apologies.
She still struggles with a lingering sense of perfectionism, but that feeling is dwindling as she matures.
“I very consciously have to make a decision when I’m performing that I’m not performing to play all the notes correctly, that I’m performing to express myself. And I struggle with that every single day and every single performance.
“I really make a commitment whenever I perform to perform from the space where I write music from. As long as I do that, I always have a good show, no matter what else is happening.”