Spaceman (Qing-Feng Wu album)

Spaceman (太空人, Tài Kōng Rén)  i s Taiwanese singer-songwriter Qing-Feng Wu's debut solo studio album, co-produced by Qing-Feng Wu and Showy Hsu, released officially on September 6, 2019, containing twelve songs. The overall production of the album follows the core concept of “communication/ dis-communication" that is well resonated with the contents of the lyrics, music, packaging, music videos, marketing campaign and the following concert. Before Spaceman was officially released, it already made 70 thousand pre-order sales. After the album was released officially, it was successively ranked the best-selling album of the year in Taiwan's album sales charts.

Background
Spaceman is the debut solo studio album released by Qing-Feng Wu after Sodagreen disbanded. Qing-Feng Wu intentionally took a break from creating any music from 2016 to 2017. He didn't start to write any songs until the beginning of 2018, and he has also started to learn music arrangement since then. As Qing-Feng Wu organized his old works while creating the new ones, he gradually came up with the entire concept of the album. Spaceman collects twelve songs; six of them are his recent works and the earliest work traces back to 2002. The collected pieces are all inspired by Qing-Feng Wu's life experience; many of them were written due to his realization of the darkness in the human nature.

Concept and Composition
The background narrative of the album is "the illusionary world in the mind's eye of a spaceman". Qing-Feng noted "The image of the hero of the album I have in my mind is a man lying in sickbed, seemingly unconscious, as no one can tell whether a paralyzed man like him really has another world inside of his head and whether or not he himself knows that he isn't awake at all." The themes of the songs present several contrastive pairs referring to "communication and responses", "consciousness and memories", "self and others", "dreams and awakeness", "sanity and insanity" and "illusion and reality". The 12 songs resemble 12 chapters that are well coherent, but each of them also stands for an independent piece, while remaining an exquisite narrative as a whole.

Visual Concept and Album Packaging Design
Qing-Feng Wu had examined the concept of paradox and ambiguity greatly in his lyrics, which inspired the designer to translate the conception into the album packaging to imply that the audience have to juxtapose the design back and forth to figure out the true and the false. Malaysian photographer Lin Zhong and stylist Yii Ooi, through the theatrical arrangement of the images, collaborated to bring out two sides of the singer - sometimes crazy and bizarre and sometimes childlike.

Music Production
The music arrangement of the works collected in Spaceman contains elements of electronic, psychedelic, theatrical, world music, folk, rock, post-rock, avant-garde, classical, R&B, Hip Pop and so on.

Background of collected tracks
“The Carnival in Babel” (巴別塔慶典, Bā Bié Tǎ Qìng Diǎn) discusses the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel that explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages which led to all sorts of disputes while satirizing the miscommunication among people in a humorous manner. The title track “Spaceman” (太空人, Tài Kōng Rén) depicts the sentiments that may be "unremarkable to the casual eye, but unforgettable in some people's mind", as the song was inspired by an ambiguous relationship the singer once had in the past. The music is arranged with simple guitar chords to bring up the ordinary texture of life. Qing-Feng Wu said that the lyrics of this very song are his favorite among all the lyrics he has written so far.

“Influenza” (傷風, Shāng Fēng) talks about the phenomenon "when people hurting each other has become common practice". The term “傷風”, generally known as "cold", can be interpreted as "Po Shang Feng” (破傷風, Tetanus) as well as the abbreviation of the idiom “傷風敗俗” (shāng fēng bài sú, morally corrupt). From a first-person narrative, with the style of magic realism, “The Forgotten Town” (失憶鎮, Shī Yì Zhèn) depicts the state of consciousness of amnesia (失憶症 Shī Yì Zhèng, pronounced almost the same as the song title “失憶鎮” in Chinese), insanity and nonsensical babbling. The audio mixing presents the multi-track mixed vocal that drifts back and forth, far and close, creating a sense of temporal and spatial isolation and an impression of displacement. “Story~lines” (線的記憶, Xiàn De Jì Yì) adopts the relevant concept and terminology of "lines" in Geometry to portray the emotional condition of human beings, from existing in isolation to gradually bonding with others.

“Outsider”, about 10 minutes and a half long, is the final chapter of "Autobiography of A Madman". Producer Showy Hsu (徐千秀) added a 4-minute long, post-rock instrumental piece when he was arranging the music. Qing-Feng Wu was therefore inspired to write a monologue to go with it, and also had it serve as the annotation of the entire album. “The Echo Collector” (回音收集員,Huí Yīn Shōu Jí Yuán) is only instrumentalized with drums, Marimba and the layered vocal. The vocal shifts between left and right channel to imitate the echo effect auditorily. The word choice of the lyrics comes from the other 11 songs; structurally, if “Dream Translator” (譯夢機, Yì Mèng Jī) is the "Prologue" of the album, “The Echo Collector” would be the "Table of Contents". “The Echo Collector” depicts that "the present moment" of every individual is interwoven and accumulated by countless echoes in the past, as "echoes" refer to the words, allusions and messages that come from families, schools and societies. Qing-Feng Wu once noted that the song also speaks for his opinion about work creation; in other others, no creation is a purely original invention of one's self.

Critical reception
Spaceman has received mainly positive reviews. By August 12, 2020, Spaceman received User Rating of 8.1 (reviewed by 2,016 users) and 8.0 (reviewed by 9,908 users) on Douban Music (豆瓣音樂).

The host Momoko from Hit FM (radio station in Taiwan) gave recognition to the album, noting that Spaceman shows a different side of Qing-Feng Wu; aside from enjoying music of various genres, audience can also sense the diversity in Qing-Feng's vocal. The Beijing News (新京報) praised the album for being well executed and delicate in details.

Music videos
Every song in the album has its own music video that was released on YouTube in the form of “The Project of Spaceman Film Festival" (太空人影展計畫, Tài Kōng Rén Yǐng Zhǎn Jì Huà) . The contents of the 12 videos resonate and connect with one another. The imageries and objects displayed in the end of each video serve as the opening of the following video; the 12 pieces therefore are connected together to create a cycle to be in consistent with the track arrangement as the beginning track echoes the ending one.

Charts
Also see Wikipedia entry "2019 The Best-Selling Albums of The Year" under "List of Best-Selling Albums in Taiwan"