Soft Fascination - Cece Zhang + Alan Lecheng Chao

About

How do we protect our attention in a world designed to scatter it? The answer isn't rigid silence, but rather the intentional curation of our auditory environment. This Friday afternoon at Silence Please, Cece and Alan present a jazz-concrète-ambient session designed as a functional environment for the working mind. Utilizing the concept of soft fascination, where the brain is effortlessly engaged by aesthetically rich, non-threatening stimuli, the ambient duo blends fluid ethnic modal frameworks with avant-garde jazz and the organic friction of sound collages. The result is a landscape of soft focus: an equilibrium where selective attention meets spatial awareness. Whether you are bringing your work or simply bringing yourself, this session offers a supportive acoustic ecology to help calibrate your nervous system and re-center your day. Cece Zhang 张天晓, composer, producer, sound artist specializing in left-field electronics, dark ambient, music concrete, and psychologically engaged activism/dreamwork. Growing up playing classical piano while absorbing influences from Asian sacred music rituals, she’s a seasoned improviser on keys, synth, and voice, and prefers complex modalities with no clear tonal center, inspired by the ambiguity and myths of her dreamscapes since little. Alan Lecheng Chao 晁乐成 is a music producer, multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer specializing in spatial audio. Working under the title Sovietaxi, and also as a part of the duo 羽片 Slice Feathers, his speciality is working with singer-songwriters to express their emotions. His solo projects are more emphasized on electronic ambient music that reflects tranquility, emotional tensions in East Asian culture. Inspired by the "Deep Listening" philosophy of Pauline Oliveros, this collaborative project of Cece and Alan integrates long-form hypnotic electro-acoustic music with intervention on long-term health and wellbeing. The artists curate a ritualistic, participatory environment designed to transport listeners into altered states of consciousness. Rather than offering an instant solution, the experience utilizes immersive soundscapes to foster mindful awareness and create the conditions necessary for nervous system regulation. Through a live blend of composition and improvisation, the performance moves beyond a simple concert to become a communal space for ecstatic resonance and deep connection.