The Many Masks of Indie Musician Jonathan Yang

London is abrasively chilly on the December day we meet Jonathan Yang, huddling for warmth in the bustling basement of an independent Brixton coffee shop. “Anywhere is better than Hong Kong,” he protests, as we rearrange layers of fluffy clothing and clear table space for steaming black Americanos. “It’s not that I enjoy gloominess, but I really enjoy the cold – if you’re cold, you can make yourself warm.”

Yang left Hong Kong in 2022 — fleeing a claustrophobic quarter-century at the mercy of his hometown’s ebbs, flows and expectations — to study for a degree in sound art at University of the Arts London. The move has changed the 28-year-old musician, profoundly, in ways he still hasn’t quite made sense of. “I feel like this is my second year of actually living as myself,” he says thoughtfully. “Whoever this Jonathan character is, I feel like this is me, two years old. Before that was like the story of someone else. These two years, I’m like me.”

A conversation with Yang, who is a songwriter, sound artist, dancer, dramatist, student, Muay Thai competitor and armchair nutritionist, can be an exhausting experience. One minute, he might be musing on the phenomenology of the acoustic experience; the next the inherent masculinity of martial arts. A few breaths later, he’s discussing his role in “Hong Kong’s coolest band,” David Boring, then berating the debilitating effects of the seed oils commonly used in East Asian cooking.

Yet whatever the subject, this boyishly handsome wunderkind is the most engaged of interlocutors, bursting with youthful passion and arresting insight. Yang’s big bold eyes hold you in a warm embrace as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of both the world around him – and more than anything, his place in it. “I’m actually trying to get my shit together when I try to talk to people, because whenever I expand on something, sometimes I get too excited – not all people like it,” he adds. “And I don’t really like being social. It’s a mask. It’s nice to talk to people that want to communicate, but sometimes the threshold of trying is too low, and you’re like, ah, ‘I tried, I’m done.’”

Behind the mask

This frenzied energy is the last thing you’d expect from listening to Yang’s music, from mournful, acoustic dirges to fidgety electro-rockers and, most recently, the angular audio art collected on his new album Amalgamation. This interpersonal freneticism isn’t a ploy — no front for the morose auteur within — but the struggle being played out in real time. “It’s completely sensible that this [dichotomy] happened, because art has to be you – and what you show to people isn’t actually the whole part of you,” Yang reasons. “It’s the part of me that I don’t usually share with people. It’s part of me that is deeply inside. And it’s fundamentally me.”

Yang, his art and his insecurities are undeniably a product of environment, of an adolescence shaped by Hong Kong’s inflexible school system, despite attending the comparatively liberal HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity. “I am proud [to be from Hong Kong], but at the same time I hated it,” he says. “It’s the weather, it’s the culture, it’s the things we don’t talk about. I was so affected by the education system.”

His reaction, like so many, was to pick up a guitar in his early teens. The first song he learned to play was “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz, kickstarting a years-long obsession with the schmaltzy American singer-songwriter that would shape more than just his fledgling songwriting efforts. “I learned [music] from imitation,” he says. “I learned from putting myself in his shoes, like acting. I tried to think like Jason Mraz — after researching him, watching his interviews, listening to his songs deeply, making my associations — then I tried to be him,” says Yang.

“And then I did the same thing for Thom Yorke.”

To Yorke and back

It is reassuring to hear Yang make this admission. The Radiohead frontman is a perennial influence, arguably casting a longer shadow over the dominant art-rock aesthetic of the 21st century than any other single individual. But Yang’s assimilation of Yorke can feel uncanny and unnatural – his aching, nasal falsetto whine the sincerest form of flattery-bordering-on-parody. It was especially evident on “Sleeping on the Edges” from Yang’s debut EP, Before I Head South, which in fairness was released when the musician was only 21. 

“When I was playing a Radiohead’s song [at home], my family was like, is that you?” remembers Yang. “I was like, fuck off! I wish I could write [Radiohead’s] ‘How to Disappear Completely.’”

Yang’s Yorke intoxication lasted well into adulthood; it’s evident in the haunting vocal delivery and moody chords of singles “Red Flag” and “Riverbed,” the first in a string of five singles bridging the gap between the EP and 2022’s debut album. Yang’s lyrical choices in the latter don’t help – almost directly quoting Yorke with lines like “it’s gonna rain today,” “pack your clothes” and “I don’t long belong here.” 

“I was good at imitating,” says Yang. “I put masks on myself. That’s a tactic for me – to get rid of myself,” he adds. “I [was] having a lot of identity crises. I got to a point that I needed to face myself, but then when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t see myself. I saw a stranger in front of me.”

How to disappear – and reinvent 

This realisation led Yang to abandon writing guitar-based music for a period, prompting a move towards electronic production – a left-turn announced with 2022’s abrasive, lyric-less beat single “Real” and its follow up “Nearly God.” “At some point, I found that I don’t really know how to write songs,” he says. “Every time I write, it’s like, what the fuck am I doing? I’m trying to fight my imitation impulse, right? I’m trying to find my own voice.”

Instead, under the early tutelage of fellow songwriter Tomii Chan, Yang immersed himself in learning the home studio skills that resulted in his debut long-player Yesterday’s Impressions, and ultimately led him to London and the experimental material found on Amalgamation.

“I haven’t been listening to Thom Yorke for a long time. I tried to shake that off – why should [you] listen to [me] when you can listen to Thom Yorke instead?” he says today. “I always come back to the core question – why do I imitate? My psychology. I’ve been so insecure my whole life. I don’t feel good as a person.”

Being Boring

Yang’s solo career is only half the story. In London, he’s a sometime member of noise rock band Red Mar, and he composed the soundtrack to The Sun is Bad, a 2023 animated short picked up by Dolby Atmos to be used as training material. As part of his psychological rebuilding, he has re-embraced his background in physical theatre and dance. He documents his martial arts bouts in a standalone Instagram account he dubs a “war journal.” 

More people will recognise him as a member of David Boring, the post-punk darlings of the Hong Kong scene, which he joined as bassist in 2018. “I sent a message to them after I released the EP [in 2017], I’m like, ‘Oh my god. You’re my favourite band in Hong Kong. Can we collab?’” he remembers. “I was very fanboy in tone, and then they’re just like, ‘Thanks,’” remembers Yang. A year later, they offered him a support slot. “Their logic is like, ‘Okay, we want to see what our fanboy is actually like in person.’”

Soon after, the quintet asked Yang to help out for a single gig — he didn’t even own a bass guitar at the time — an unofficial audition that led to his four-year stint. Yang doesn’t feature on the band’s only album to date, Unnatural Objects and Their Humans, originally released in 2017, but did record the singles “Jane Pane” and “Machine #3” and tour the US when the group played at South By Southwest and recorded a session at Weathervane Studio. “I’m forever very close to them. They taught me that one of the greatest skills of being a person is communication,” he says. 

Today, Yang still describes himself as a member of the band, despite the fact David Boring’s new, heavily electronic material — unveiled in late 2022 following a line-up refresh and Yang’s departure from Hong Kong — doesn’t employ a bass guitar on stage.

“Are we moving forward?” muses Yang. “I think David Boring could just finish after the first album. For me anyway, I felt like that album is so … right. It’s done its job. This album can just drop and you can just disband David Boring.”

Fundamentally me

The only time Yang’s verbal flow falters is when the conversation turns to the purpose of our meeting. By far his most brave and experimental release to date, Amalgamation is technically a mop up of leftovers – a jarring collection of electroacoustic off-cuts originally composed for theatre, coursework, film trailers and remixes. Yang was inspired to assemble the compilation following a similar recent release, Illumination, by fellow Hong Kong emigré That Travis – who features on the albums comparatively conventional opener, “Tunnels.” (Is Yang now, perhaps, imitating his friend and fellow songwriter-turned-sound artist?)

Amalgamation is a dense and oblique set: “Faceless” is a spooky spoken word piece, soundtracked with eerie strings and insistent mechanical whirs, before dissolving into animalistic panting. “Improv #1” sees Yang’s multitracked voice soaring and braying across registers, over an ethereal piano and scattered found percussion. Half the release is instrumental: “Tetsuo” is a barrage of driving mechanical beats and noises; “Deep in a Belly” and “Stomach Acid,” presumably, imagine a journey through the human body. The set closes abruptly with a spectral remix of Hong Kong musician Loisey’s beat piece “Confess.”

There’s little to hold these oblique sonic vignettes together. Yet Yang rates the somewhat random result higher than its predecessor, his debut LP Yesterday’s Impressions – a halfway house between sound art and the more conventional songwriting of his earlier days that was instead carefully assembled over two studious years. “I feel like the more that I try the more shit it will be,” he says. “In this album, Amalgamation, I didn’t even try. I was like – let me just put all the things together and just release it. It’s stronger than my previous album, but I’m not even trying.”

It’s clear, though, that his mind is already on the next thing. It’s a surprise when Yang lets slip that he’s begun re-embracing conventional genre aesthetics and song structures with his next project, an indie-electro album called Umbra Sits On You, slated for a 2025 release. He’s already debuted some of the material live, and a few weeks before we meet, had the opportunity to lay down raw acoustic versions of a few tracks at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. (“It’s just another studio, with a nice microphone,” he says. “That’s it.”) But if and when these recordings will be released remains a mystery. 

Before we part, we walk around the bleary, rain-soaked South London streets, taking amateur portraits. Throughout, Yang is flippant and throwaway, irreverent and carefree, happy to lean into any kooky, hackneyed pose I suggest. However heavy his work appears, however conflicted his soul, on the surface at least, Jonathan Yang is still showing the world a mask.