elintseeker is the solo project of Fuzz Lee from Singapore. With composition, textural sound design, silence, improvised movements of guitar, sound processing, light glitch electronics, found sound and field recordings, he articulates or expresses his feelings about daily life into musical form. He has released albums on various labels and independently since 2011, the most recent being Geography Of The Heart (PLOP/Nature Bliss) in 2015. After a long hiatus, he returns with a new album titled Life Without Dreams. With this release, he ventures into the many faces of pop music, looking inwards for musical highlights he is fond of from eras past that shaped both his life and musical journey in the period between childhood and adolescence.
Over the course of a humid and erratic monsoon week in the month of March, we spoke to Fuzz about endeavors and rituals of his music-making process, dreams of endlessness in music, his expansive influences and guilty pleasures. On behalf of Fuzz, we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that purchased copies of his albums at our store.
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The Analog Vault: Fuzz, glad you are able to do this interview. You must be thinking, is anybody going to read this? Well that's the point, we could just lift the title from the movie about Bob Dylan, 'A Complete Unknown'? I hope you don't take offence, but you get the drift.
Fuzz Lee: Hi Daniel, thank you for reaching out to me for this interview. I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek reference to 'A Complete Unknown', and I must confess I'm genuinely surprised by your invitation. I've done interviews for overseas magazines and things since 2012 but you are the first person from Singapore to interview me as elintseeker after all these years, and it's a big honour for me, especially as it's for The Analog Vault!
TAV: We're sticking to our guns about digging deeper beyond the confines of what's out there in music. So here we are.
Fuzz: Always a good thing, that. It's more fun too, stumbling upon something magical by accident and still being able to apply that good old-fashioned approach of choosing an album purely by its cover. You wouldn't want to take whatever's thrown in your face wholesale as well.
TAV: So what's a regular day like in this wretched weather look like for you? And where were you doing prior to me hijacking your me-time?
Fuzz: At the time of this reply, it's actually the start of a projected three day monsoon, so it's raining all day. I work in a library so my day consists of poring over books and archival material. Old books that are falling apart require repairing, and new books or archival items require cataloguing, sticking of labels and security tags. I look after the collection, that's my job. After work, some exercise, a light dinner and then probably an hour of music work (followed by an hour of Zelda on the Switch). I like to work in an 'agricultural' way in recent years, adding something small every day and seeing it grow over time, until completion. Prior to this I was thinking about Taipei, and how long it has been since I last visited. I was also thinking about the photography of Ng Hui Hsien. I would like to use her work on one of my albums in the future if possible.
TAV: Yes, the weather has absolutely hit hard the last three days. By the way, I've seen her work now that you've mentioned and I feel it fits into your narrative perfectly.
Fuzz: I love her aesthetic and her work is so good, especially the Being With Water series. When I stumbled upon it online some time ago, I just kept looking at it for days. I left it on display on my computer and all these musical ideas started coming to me. It makes me want to go back to how I made my first album (By The Sea), by sticking all the photos I took of the stretch of beach from East Coast to Changi on my wall, and then recording what I heard in my head without thinking too much.
TAV: For the interest of our listeners, could you tell us more about yourself?
Fuzz: I'm from Singapore and started getting involved in bands in the mid-90s, initially as a drummer and then as a guitarist. In the late 90s, I developed an interest in electronic music and eventually felt most comfortable making atmospheric music, which came naturally to me. From 2005 onwards, I made ambient music with a trio called Life Without Dreams. Three years later, drummer/percussionist Shark Fung (aka Awk Wah) of the improv duo Engineered Beautiful Blood and I were invited by Zai Kuning, a pioneering Singaporean experimental artist and musician, to form an improvised music unit called Amino Acid Orchestra, which I was active in up to 2012. While participating in AAO, I started to get tired of working in a performing unit and began making my own music as elintseeker (around 2009), and never looked back. I also recorded an album as Faures, with Germany's Rene Margraff (aka Pillowdiver) and Canada's Samuel Landry (aka Le Berger). In between all these projects, I occasionally get asked to make music for art installations and video works, and perform live versions of them during art events.
TAV: You have to hit all the different disciplines, so in a way it's like growing pains for you to go through your personal music trajectory? Because it requires that rigour to dive into something that's does not become a regimental process for you?
Fuzz: There were a lot of personal and musical "growing pains" indeed, from a combination of throwing myself willy-nilly into all these different genres and challenging myself as a guitar player (a non-technical one at that) in non-guitar bands, performing groups, and art projects. I was really bored of guitar music but couldn't play any other instruments and was subjected to some really difficult musical or performing concepts that were outside my comfort zone in some of these projects, but eventually, I knew where I wanted to be after all that. I would say the 3-4 years in Amino Acid Orchestra made me sure of what I am and how I wanted to proceed. I became certain of my foundations. It was like going to university really.
TAV: What's it like going solo? I can't help having Frank Sinatra's I Did It My Way as a soundbyte right now.
Fuzz: More like Tame Impala's 'Solitude is Bliss' actually! I enjoy the complete control and freedom. After years of being in groups with members who are stragglers or just in it for laughs (with no intentions of releasing anything), it's a joy to work on music without anyone impeding your progress, disagreeing with the choice of notes or dictating the musical direction. I also enjoy thinking about the artwork and 'worldbuilding' of the albums. The downside is that there's no one to tell me if a recorded take is bad or good, as psychologically, I always find everything that I do sounds bad for some reason. I can end up recording a hundred takes of a 5 second guitar line, for example, and would think that every take sounds bad (but in actuality it all sounds exactly the same). I do miss the on the spot collaborative aspect as well, with ideas being thrown around very quickly. It's ironic that I released more works on my own compared to my time in all those groups. I highly recommend it to anyone who is feeling tired of dealing with stragglers or band members who are abrasive, go solo!
TAV: I can't help but think since this is a broad question, as we’re not getting any younger. So do you think in the grand scheme of things, you've set out to achieve certain milestones in your personal music trajectory?
Fuzz: During the Covid lockdown, something changed in me and I started to think that being a loyal servant to the stylistic routine of the genre I am usually associated with would be a hindrance to my personal growth. I'm not an artist or anything but I do feel that personally, art and music, like opinions that comes with age, means growth and change, and the music should change with us as well. I would like to go beyond the borders of what I usually do, and my latest album, Life Without Dreams, is the start of it. Who knows what's going to happen next? A soundtrack to a film would be great actually. I even thought of doing a black metal album. Let's find out over time.
↗ Life Without Dreams (2024) Deluxe 12" lathe-cut edition. Individually cut in real time by hand on transparent lime green and dark blue polycarbonate discs with special mechanical engraving on reverse side. | Illiustration: Kohta Tomita / Album layout and design: Adriano Esteves / Engraving: Lauren Winton at Bladud Flies
TAV: Could you walk us through your thought process of building an album from the ground up now that you mentioned Life Without Dreams made you change your approach?
Fuzz: The genesis is the same as always, things just come to out of nowhere from a moment in my life and I just try to realise it sonically, like trying to remember a dream and putting it down on paper. Different places or different situations lead to different types of feelings, chords or structures. It's just that now I try to stay true to the initial idea and don't translate them into 'ambient' by default anymore, because I feel it's utterly limiting. Music without genre constraints is my approach going forward, while still having a certain aesthetic or sound that is recognisable. However, the atmospheric, the dreamy and ambient, will always be a major part of my musical DNA. It's strange but what I hear in my head is not ambient at all, but it just turned out that way when I work on them.
↗ Live performance of The Viscous Sea with Ong Kian Peng. Singapore Biennale 2022
↗ Still from The Viscous Sea with Ong Kian Peng. Singapore Biennale 2022
TAV: Gerwalk Modes, By The Sea and Shadows Of Buildings EP are complete polar opposites in terms of direction. What kind of undertaking was that like for you?
(Trivia for our readers: By The Sea was mastered by Ricks Ang of Kitchen! Ricks mastered the 2012 version while the reissue mastering was by The Bricoleur)
↗ L-R: By The Sea (2012), Gerwalk Modes (2017), Shadows Of Buildings EP (2025)
Fuzz: By The Sea and Gerwalk Modes were easy albums to make, Shadows was a difficult one, and all three releases were reactions to specific moments in my life, resulting in three very different sounding releases.
By The Sea was created as a musical escape from Amino Acid Orchestra, an improvised music project I was part of. It’s also a love letter to my favourite part of Singapore, East Coast beach. Recorded with a simple setup, the album was an exercise in guitar texturing and layering. I aimed to capture the feeling of gazing at the ocean in musical form. Something gentle, calming, and reflective. During that time, Chas Smith's Nakadai and Thomas Köner's Nuuk served as my musical guiding posts, and I wanted to offer my own (flawed) take on what they were doing.
Gerwalk Modes was an album made (or salvaged) from several hours of unused rehearsal recordings. In 2016, I was commissioned to perform an improvised live set for the artist Joo Choon Lin, but she didn’t provide any material until closer to the performance date. As practice, and to hone my skills in advance, I did a simple setup in my living room and improvised to the anime 'Macross', using it as visual inspiration. Over the course of several weeks, I watched the entire franchise, recording every session. I completely forgot about these recordings until I stumbled upon them a year later and thought I might be able to use them for something. The end result? My own soundtrack to the Macross anime.
Shadows of Buildings EP is an expansion, or continuation, of Life Without Dreams (LWD). It's all the darker songs that didn’t quite fit the overall theme and 'feeling' of LWD, compiled into one release, and I worked on them while mixing the main album.The approach was similar, expanding the initial ambient versions into structured 'band music' form, but looser and more expressive this time round. When Piana, the singer I collaborated with, mentioned the term 'ambient rock' in passing during one of our email exchanges, it stuck in my mind. Eventually, I embraced the term and set it as the tone for the Shadows EP. I decided to play the guitar more conventionally for the songs as well, revisiting my indie band roots and tried my best in raising the musicianship in every department. It was a challenge, as I hadn’t played like this in years. It's good to go back to the basics sometimes.
TAV: I was playing By The Sea earlier this afternoon, back to back with Glassforms from Bruce Brubaker & Max Cooper. A customer in the store asked, "Is this a soundtrack?" Well, damn right it is – not literally but a soundtrack about the fleeting moments in life. The customer responded with glee and remarked "Damn! That's it..."
↗ By The Sea (2022, 10th Anniversary Edition) Transparent 12” Lathe Cut. Hand signed and numbered limited edition of 40 | Design and layout: Adriano Esteves / Artwork by Charmaine Oon / Artwork photography: Clarence Aw
TAV: That's quite a journey you've embarked on. I recall our previous conversation about our favourite book from Brian Eno's 'A Year with Swollen Appendices'. Did that inspire you as well?
Fuzz: Not for the recent works, but definitely at various moments throughout my life. I'm not a believer but I see that book as a kind of holy book for me. You can start from any page and it would still be an interesting read. I pick it up once in a while. His way of thinking is amazing, about art, music, architecture, politics, you name it. I rarely use it these days, but his Oblique Strategies was a fantastic problem solver back in the day when I was unable to move forward with something. A classic of his is "When in doubt, tidy up", which is fantastic for when you're stuck. You start to move your hands and doing so frees up your mind but in a daydreaming kind of way. The point is not to clean, but to come into contact with the things in your immediate vicinity, put them in an order where there is a sort of clarity and to hopefully notice something. Something that will point the way forward. He reminds you that we're living in art on a daily basis. Every day, people who don't call themselves artists are colour coordinating their clothes, arranging and picking specific furnishings for their home, going to a record store to find new music and things like that. We make creative choices everyday.
TAV: Speaking of fleeting moments, the visual language across the your album sleeves is consistent tonally. I'm thinking like you can put it in a narrative context, but it still reflects on who and where we are. Closer to how an audience is enjoying the slight escapism of how it’s made up, maybe? Alright, I'm overthinking!
Fuzz: Overthinking on this subject matter is fun, I enjoy it. It's not intentional, but each cover could indeed feel like a snapshot of a moment, contributing to a larger emotional or thematic arc. Releases by the Touch label or the band Red House Painters does this for me. By the way, I am exactly the type of audience you described! I like to wonder about what's going on in people's homes when I'm in another country and the same applies when I see a beautiful album cover or painting. I like album covers that gives off or suggests a certain feeling, and when you hear it, it's an exact match musically. Since childhood I've been naturally drawn towards album covers that have a surreal or dreamy look, and unfortunately also, covers that have a certain 'beach holiday' vibe. A good example would be Chris Rea's On The Beach and more embarassingly, the 1985 Air Supply album with the windsurfing photo. The love for it never went away obviously as six of my albums have a picture or illustration of water bodies on them.
TAV: So what's your guilty pleasure(s) in your music selection, pray tell!
Fuzz: I stopped thinking about guilty pleasures for a long time now because like George Michael, I listen without prejudice! I listen to everything really. Right off my head (if this was the old me), what would be considered 'guilty pleasures' right now would be XG's Awe mini-album, the Tyla's debut album from last year and that Troye Sivan track 'Rush'. I've also been re-listening to Nu Shooz's Poolside a lot recently (that tacky, slightly off-key voice-like synth line from 'I Can't Wait' has that lethal combination of being cringeworthy, utterly memorable and addictive at the same time).
TAV: So do you think you have anything to say to aspiring musicians out there? Or you'd rather hold your peace?
Fuzz: Ha! I'm probably not the kind of person aspiring musicians should look to for hopeful advice, because I'm not one! Maybe not for aspiring musicians but for people who dive into music making as a way to fill the hole in their heart or their life. I have to explain myself here first. I have a day job and I enjoy my work. I can't imagine a life without doing music but I don't want to be surrounded by or be thinking about music 24/7. I need space away from it, in order to love and be continually looking forward to making it. For some of us, music is lifeblood, it's an existence (I think Bowie said this) but I would never want it to be my job.
So, if you're like me, I would say this: immerse yourself in the creative process without worrying if people will like your output, place self-expression above popularity and external validation or pandering to a specific crowd. If it's a lifelong passion project, don't be afraid to evolve and produce different kinds of work over time rather than being confined to a specific genre or style, even if it means potentially alienating some of your listeners. If you are satisfied with your final product, anything else is a bonus. Don't let positive or negative reviews create lingering ghosts in your head, or even better, don't read them. Most importantly, enjoy yourself and forget the world for a few hours. For a less complex reasoning, Steve Albini does better to break it down.
TAV: Fuzz, it's been an absolute pleasure and thank you for taking the time. All the best in making the elusive black metal album.
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Fuzz has compiled a City Life Balearic playlist for us, tune in.
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