Fringe by the Sea: Wavelength - Drexler

North Berwick Lodge 9/8/26

Adrian Leung, alias performer Drexler, composes ambient, textured music of the contemporary classical school. It's often commissioned for, or paired with, film or radio. Hence his being invited to appear at FBTS as part of their satellite film festival, ‘Wavelength’.

Leung was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia, to immigrant parents from Hong Kong. He’s now based in far-off Edinburgh. When he learned that his father’s cancer had returned, he made immense efforts to support him over the phone, but as the disease worsened, conversing began to exhaust his father. So instead, Leung began sending him his music – tunes sketched out for him on piano, messages of love which didn’t demand an immediate response.

Leung has put together sixteen of these pieces to form an album, ‘Olympia-5’. And for visual accompaniment, collaborated with a range of filmmaker friends; a different creator for each video. These shorts touched on his and others’ family life: fathers, boyhood homes, travel, past sickness, distance, much distance, and the sea.

Leung introduced the project and the tracks to us. While clearly moved when describing his and his father’s journeys, he projected the same calm and confidence that comes through in his music. Onstage a smart black upright piano stood by him, and he performed the music for some of the films live, turning this screening into a grander event. It was good to be able to connect the musician – and his way of being – to the flow of notes through the headphones.

The insertions of live music brought variety to the show, as did the personalities and styles of the different filmmakers. Some films were visuals and music only, some with background peeps and rumbles, one with written text, some overlaid by conversation, quiet commentary or poetry. An especially powerful one had the music alongside nothing but the steady, relentless suck and puff, strangely serene, of a hospital lung machine.

One of my favourites, ‘Prague’ by Hannah Papacek Harper, begins with the camera panning briefly down a father’s old woollen sleeve to his hand as he reads, and then over and down lofty city buildings, through distant traffic sounds to a spacious empty interior. Meanwhile we hear a prose poem where she admits to having a restless spirit and imagines instead being a tall building where it is others who busy themselves going in and out of her. The piano supports this gently, tiptoeing, ambling, hovering. It can be tricky to disentangle from the action and the images, which is of course a good thing in a film.

While some moments referenced happy times, many of the images, both auditory and visual, evoked a sense of journey, of passage, of serenity and rest. To me it showed his father’s return to the bosom of earth and sea as sad but ultimately accepted. Worthy of honour through whatever expressive skills you possess; Leung possesses them in spades.