SY3 (pronounced “sigh”) is a new project from LA-based artists Kelly Guan, Alex Ho, and Phil Cho. Their debut EP 梦游 Sleepwalker is a dreamy collection of downtempo-pop songs inspired by Cantopop and Hong Kong New Wave cinema. The trio started working on music together in 2023, finding form and purpose, in part, through their shared experiences growing up as Chinese-Americans in Southern California. Afternoons spent wandering the San Gabriel Valley, watching Chinese-language films together, and trading favorites from artists like Dou Wei, Tat Ming Pair, and Zhou Xun brought them closer as friends, and helped shape the nostalgia-laced sounds on their upcoming EP.

“Growing up in different immigrant generations, we each had our own experience with Chinese music. I remember my mother kicking off karaoke sessions at house parties with her passionate renditions of classic Faye Wong ballads. Alex’s dad often played ’80s Cantopop in the car, and once took him to an Aaron Kwok concert in Hollywood. Kelly continued listening to the mainstream C-Pop CD’s (from artists like Twins and Yuki Hsu) that she brought when she moved to America in the early ’00s. Over the years, those songs would become more distant and detached from the American cultural landscapes we were growing into, but the melodies have never faded.”

While working on this project together, they found that re-connecting with Chinese music on their own terms has also had a strange way of shaping memory. Below, their playlist for FAR-NEAR includes a few tracks by contemporary artists from the diaspora that they connect with, but mostly centers around songs recorded in the ’90s and ’00s during a time when many Chinese artists were influenced by the Western sounds that they grew up with: like alternative rock, trip-hop, R&B, and downtempo pop.

“These songs — filled with electronics, drum machine beats, and electrified guitars — sound somehow more familiar than the traditional ballads of our parents’ generations. They come to us now almost as lost or refracted memories, bringing us closer to a world once separated from us as Chinese-Americans.”

SY3’s Playlist: