Debbie Ding: interview

Tell me about your Kitchun Sesshuns project. How and when did you compile it?
About a year ago, but it took more than a year for me to compile everything. It was in 2008 and I was living in London in this great house in Stoke Newington, with a great kitchen, where I and my six housemates – I lived in a house full of musicians – always hung out. We spent a lot of time waiting for stuff to cook because there was only one stove. Some of them made drawings and I put them into Flash, because that's what I do by day – I'm a Flash designer. The kitchen was full of strange, really old stuff – there were dead plants in there and a library full of books, and an accumulation of everything useful in the house. I was on a working holiday as a bilingual copywriter.

Is there a story behind the main site?
The domain I got, www.wwgou.org, is actually because I once had a band called Wang Wang Gou. I went to Chinese camp in primary school where everyone spoke Chinese, and one of the groups I was in was called 'Wang Wang Gou' (barking dog in Chinese).

Doing anything music-related here?
Not so much, I haven't done any music things here. I draw my own maps of Singapore, as part of my map project. I draw maps of fictional dreams for my other site that I always work on, Dream Syntax.

Any music experiments planned for the future?
I'm trying to build a site called Psychogeography, that's basically a field guide of Singapore with sounds, and it'll tie back to my interest in spaces. It'll be based on walks I've done, epic walks around places – and documenting it.

What do you think of the local music scene?
I find a lot of us try to find influences from outside rather than trying to find them inside. I find that a lot of local music sounds like it's coming from somewhere else. I don't know what a 'Singaporean sound' is either, but local bands don't necessarily sound Singaporean to me. I guess that's just my opinion. I consider a few – like Humpback Oak – really old-school, and to me, they have a sound that is sort of Singaporean-y, but when people have, say, a punk or metal band, or do dubstep, these things are imported sounds…then again I don't know how they'd sound more Singaporean.

We have a bit of an indie surplus here.
I went through a no-indie music phase but now I'm a bit more tolerant. It's weird. I find that a lot of us who like obscure music intuitively shy away from anything popular-sounding and find it normal to listen to something 'extreme' or far out. Then again, the whole aim of listening to music is to find your own pleasure, so it's hard to share that with someone else.

Check out Kitchun Sesshuns at www.wwgou.org/kitchun.