Cicada: Fifteen Years of Field Recordings from Typhoon Morakot 2009 to the Source of the Danda River 2022

30-second overview: Cicada is a fully instrumental independent band founded in Taipei in 2009, led by pianist Jesy Chiang (Taipei National University of the Arts M.A. in Art History), with a four-person lineup of piano, violin, cello, and acoustic guitar. Starting with the White Wabbit Records debut Scattered Time in 2011, all works released over 15 years have contained no human voice. Their themes move from western coastline erosion (Coastland, 2013), to marine ecology (Where Have You Gone, 2017), to mountain forests (Hiking in the Mist, 2019), to river headwaters (Residing above the River's Source, 2022 — a 15-day, 120-kilometer expedition through the Central Mountain Range). Their 2024 15th-anniversary retrospective Returning revisited the coastal theme. Their film score A Man received Japan's Academy Prize; they completed a full Japan tour in 2024; they have shared a stage with Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds. Core methodology: let nature speak for itself.

Jesy Chiang learned something during scuba diving training in Orchid Island (Lanyu):

✦ "The only thing you can control is your breath."¹

This sentence does not appear in any Cicada album (their songs have no lyrics), but it is the best key to understanding this band's 15 years of creative work. Once you've submerged underwater wearing a diving mask, all surface-level control fails: you cannot go faster, cannot go slower, cannot explain yourself. You can only be honest with yourself and keep breathing.

This realization later became the philosophical foundation of all of Cicada's musical work. They let instruments become translators for nature — not narrators providing commentary over it.

📝 Curator's note
The Mandarin music world typically handles "nature" in two ways: lyrical (writing sea waves as longing) or advocacy (shouting about protecting the environment). Cicada takes a third path: sonic documentary. Treating nature as the subject of an interview, not as a backdrop for projection.

The Typhoon Morakot News in 2009

The first seed of the story fell in August 2009.

From August 7-9 that year, Typhoon Morakot made landfall in Taiwan, causing the worst typhoon disaster since World War II. Xiaolin village was completely obliterated, multiple mudslides struck the Kaohsiung mountain areas, and several river courses were rerouted. News footage showed entire villages swept away.

Jesy Chiang watched that news and began composing.²

The timing is crucial. Cicada was founded in 2009, almost simultaneously with Morakot. A band that carries the gene of "documenting disaster" from its very first note — this determined that all works over the next 15 years would not be "lyrical nature" but "nature as witnessed."

The Art History Graduate Student Who Played Piano

Jesy Chiang's background differs from most musicians.

She holds a Master's degree in Art History (specializing in art criticism) from Taipei National University of the Arts — her background is not in traditional piano conservatory training.³ This credential determined that her compositional methodology is entirely different from classical musicians: she treats composition as narrative construction, not abstract form. She completes a piano solo draft first, then uses abstract imagery (for example, "a bird flying over") to let other band members translate into specific instrumental techniques.³

She described her composition process as intuitive in interviews:

"I'm very intuitive — when I sit at the piano and the rhythm aligns with the inner imagery, the motif emerges naturally."¹

Describing the water-current rhythm of the title track from 2022's Residing above the River's Source, she said:

"When you encounter a rock, the feeling is 'whoa?' — and then you flow around the side."¹

This mode of description is very art-history: treating sound as visual imagery, treating rhythm as narrative verb. Her other profession is publishing editor. She has run both jobs in parallel for 15 years — editing books by day, composing by night. This dual daily routine prefigures the pace of Cicada's consistent output over the years: slow, steady, each album with a distinct theme.

The current Cicada lineup consists of four people: Jesy Chiang (piano, composition, lead), Hsu Kang-kai (violin), Yang Ting-chen (nickname Peach, cello; a professional performer who attended a music-focused elementary school and graduated from a music university), and Hsün Yu-yang (nickname Xiao Cai, acoustic guitar).⁴

Through all 15 years, not a single song has contained a human voice.

Telephone Poles Growing from the Water on the Western Coast

In 2011, White Wabbit Records released Cicada's first full-length album, Scattered Time, recorded at Lirifeng Studio on a vintage piano with multi-track simultaneous recording.⁵ The album's style had not yet fully developed — the original version had an "indie rock flavor" and was occasionally categorized as post-rock by critics; it was not until the 2020 reissue that it was reworked into a pure neo-classical version.⁵ This detail matters: it took Cicada almost ten years to polish their sound into its final form.

The 2013 album Coastland was the turning point.

Shifting from personal relationship themes to territorial issues, Jesy Chiang chose a subject rarely seen in Taiwan's media landscape — the degradation of the western coastline. Land subsidence, salinification from aquaculture, rising sea levels — these problems had been accumulating for decades, occasionally reported once in the media then forgotten. That year the band personally visited four specific sites along the coastline: Fangyuan in Changhua, Chenglong Wetlands in Kouhu, Mailiao, and Budai in Chiayi, traveling south along the border between land and sea.⁶ Jesy Chiang, looking back at that field research trip, left behind one very precise impression:

"The western coast has a grey tone — telephone poles grow out of the water — it's hard to feel pure happiness."⁶

"Telephone poles growing out of the water" is a concrete, visual object: once land subsidence and rising sea levels set in, telephone poles that once stood on land end up protruding from the sea. The disappearance of Taiwan's western coastland, the subsiding aquaculture land, the salinifying farmland — these processes are all concrete enough to photograph, not abstract environmental concerns.

Cicada documented this scene in instrumentation. No lyrics saying "our land is disappearing," no chanting "protect the coast" — only piano, violin, cello, and acoustic guitar simulating the soundscape of sea wind, tides, salt, and ruins.

The Scuba Diving Training in Orchid Island

From Coastland to the 2017 album Where Have You Gone (White Forest), the band's lens shifted from the land's surface to the ocean floor.⁷ The trigger was a training session: Jesy Chiang joined volunteer training with Taiwan Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association, learned scuba diving for the first time, dived into the sea off Orchid Island for the first time, and personally entered a coral reef ecosystem for the first time. Every subject animal (Chinese white dolphin, dolphins, coral, sea turtles, city cats, highland birds) on _Where Have You Gone_ corresponded to a scene she witnessed underwater.

"The only thing you can control is your breath" is the realization she came to during this training.¹ This understanding later became the structural foundation of all Cicada music: you cannot control nature — you can only respond to it with your instruments.

Tracks like "Fly" use instruments to simulate the rhythm of dolphins swimming, the extension of humpback whale long calls, the light and shadow of coral reefs.⁸ At the time, the conflict between offshore wind development and Chinese white dolphin habitat was a focal environmental issue in Taiwan — Cicada engaged in no advocacy activities, simply preserving the sounds of that period of history.

The Sudden Downpour at Jiaming Lake

In June 2018, the band hiked to Jiaming Lake.⁹ During that trek they encountered a violent rainstorm. That rain later became an important piece on the 2019 album Hiking in the Mist — the track "Sudden Downpour."

This process reveals Cicada's field methodology: the anchor point of each work is a specific present-tense moment, not a conceptual "mountain" or "forest." After the 2018 Jiaming Lake trip, the band members continued hiking Qilai South Peak and Hehuan North Peak, each trek becoming source material for a particular song.⁹

Guitarist Hsün Yu-yang (Xiao Cai) later described the qualitative change in the band during this phase with a very precise term:

"Like a documentary."¹⁰

This phrase creates a clear contrast with Cicada's earlier aesthetic. The early Scattered Time (2011) was "impressionistic of mountain-climbing" — band members looking back at mountains through the filter of their own emotions; Hiking in the Mist began turning toward "documentary-style," stepping back to let the mountain speak for itself. On the surface it appears to be a change in mode of expression; what truly changed was the relationship between creator and subject: from lyrical subject to witness.

_Hiking in the Mist_ was nominated for Best Instrumental Album Producer at the 31st Golden Melody Awards.¹⁰ This was the first formal recognition in the Golden Melody Award system for a fully instrumental, vocally silent band that doesn't use idol distribution channels.

Tanhsiwan, Tsuitsuiku, the Danda River Source, Fairyland

The 2022 album Residing above the River's Source represents the ultimate expression of Cicada's field methodology.

Jesy Chiang led the band members on a 15-day, 120-kilometer trekking expedition, crossing four valleys of the Central Mountain Range: Tanhsiwan → Tsuitsuiku → Danda River Source → Fairyland.¹¹ The expedition's destination was special — they were seeking the headwaters of a river, not a mountain summit.

This choice of subject is itself a major aesthetic leap for Cicada. From coastline (2013), ocean (2017), mountain forest (2019), to river headwaters (2022), the places they document became increasingly deep, increasingly hidden. Jesy Chiang returned from the expedition with a realization:

"The river's source is not a single location — it is the collective sum of pools throughout the valley plus underground flows."¹¹

This understanding is precisely reflected in the musical structure. The title track of _Residing above the River's Source_ runs 11 minutes, containing temporal variations that mimic water flowing around stones, the texture of forest birds, the timbre of wind through the trees — it writes the sounds of an entire watershed, not a single point. The album has 9 tracks ranging from 1 to 11 minutes in length, presenting different scenes from the expedition.¹¹

The band ran a FlyingV crowdfunding campaign to complete this album, releasing it on December 27, 2022. A music film was produced simultaneously, filmed on-site in the mountains.¹²

📝 Curator's note
The numbers "15 days, 120 kilometers, four valleys" are themselves an MRI image of Cicada's methodology: a complete geographic documentary, not a casual day trip.

Ishikawa Kei's _A Man_

Between 2021 and 2023, Cicada took on the film score for Japanese director Ishikawa Kei's film A Man (Aru Otoko / ある男).¹³ After the film's 2022 release, it received recognition at multiple major Japanese film festivals, becoming one of the most highly anticipated works of that year.

Jesy Chiang's observation about this collaboration:

"I realized that the band's authentic sound itself was the reason he was attracted to us."¹³

This was Cicada's first cross-border entry into mainstream commercial cinema, and the mode of collaboration itself was distinctive: Ishikawa Kei didn't ask them to change their style for the film — he placed the band's existing sonic aesthetic directly into the film. What he was seeking was a methodology, not a film composer.

From October to November 2024, Cicada completed a Japan tour: Tokyo (Oct. 20), Nagoya (Oct. 10), Omotesando ARC (Nov. 4), Unit Dome Festival (Oct. 27).¹⁴ During the tour the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs supported free admission for students; there was also a Taiwanese mini-market at the same venues. The scale of this tour confirmed their standing in Japan's post-classical circles.

What Is "In Between"

On July 19, 2024, Cicada released Returning (Coastland Revisited), their 15th-anniversary retrospective collection.¹⁵

This is not an entirely new album — it is a reinterpretation of existing tracks from Coastland (2013 western coast), Gazing at the Sea Level, Where Have You Gone (2017 ocean), and other earlier albums. Why this move at the 15th anniversary? Jesy Chiang's answer explains it:

"After focusing on river sources, I began to focus on 'in between' — between mountain and mountain, between mountain and water, between forest and land."¹⁵

This "in between" represents the final stage of Cicada's 15-year methodology. They have already documented specific places (coastline, ocean, mountain, river headwaters); what they now wish to document is the gap between place and place: those spots that cannot be named, the process of connecting one place to another.

Reinterpreting the coastal pieces written 11 years ago is the concrete practice of this "in between" concept: from the band that had just begun field work in 2013, to the band bearing 15 years of methodology in 2024, what is the "in between" period? This album is the answer.

The Cicada's Philosophy of Witnessing

To understand why Cicada is unique, one must start from the philosophical foundation of their entire methodology.

Most musical works that deal with "nature" or "environment" themes use one of two approaches: lyrical (writing sea waves as longing) or advocacy (using lyrics to call for protecting the environment). Cicada takes a third path: sonic documentation. Band members describe their role in natural contexts as like elements — wind, whale, tree, flowing water.¹ Instruments serve as nature's vocal cords.

This philosophy has concrete correspondences in the music: guitar creates wind sounds, violin simulates the beating of bird wings, cello is the low frequency of water flowing over land; temporal values correspond to the rhythm of water flowing around stones and the arc of bird flight; textural density corresponds to different ecosystems — sparse in deep ocean, dense in forest, rhythmic in rivers. The recording arrangements for each album conform to these rules.

Those Places Are Still There

Fifteen years, approximately nine albums — Cicada has left behind a rare practice in Mandarin independent music: a fully instrumental, vocally silent band that refuses idol distribution channels, using personally visited places as the foundation of musical creation. From the telephone poles growing out of the western coast, to breathing beneath the coral reefs of Orchid Island, to the sudden downpour at Jiaming Lake, to the cypress forests at the Danda River source — they have used instrumentation to write Taiwan's specific geography into a sonic archive that can be repeatedly listened to.

This archive will outlive advocacy-style environmental songs. Because it does not depend on the issues of the era, does not depend on crowd emotion — it depends only on one simple fact: those places are still there, waiting to be walked again, to be documented again.

In Taiwan of 2026, the environment continues to retreat: coastlines continue to erode, coral continues to bleach, forests continue to fall. And Cicada's next backpack is already being packed.

The name "Cicada" was always a declaration of this work: don't look for us with your eyes — use your ears.

Further reading:

• Waa Wei — belonging to the same 2010s independent music ecosystem, taking the vocal rather than instrumental path
• Chthonic — emerging in the same period but taking the outward-facing angry band path as a counterpoint
• Sunset Rollercoaster — within the post-rock spectrum, taking the vocal narrative path
• Lu Kuang-chung — another path in independent music
• Pop Music and the Golden Melody Awards — the institutional context of Cicada's Best Instrumental Album nominations
• Taiwan Independent Music — the independent music spectrum post-2010s
• Taiwan Forest Ecosystems — the landscape context of Cicada's Hiking in the Mist and Residing above the River's Source
• Taiwan Marine Ecology — the ecological background for the band's 2017 ocean-themed album
• Taiwan Mountains and Climbing Culture — the context for Jesy Chiang's mountaineering philosophy

References