Catching Up with Wilchai

Stephanie Chow, also known as Wilchai, is a Columbia College sophomore jazz guitarist and music producer. She recently dropped her first single “Deluge” on March 5, an RnB, slow ballad about memory and identity, featuring Barnard freshman Unathi Machyo on vocals. 

She and I got to chat about how she first got into music, the experience of creating her own work from idea to fruition, and how the pandemic has affected her creative process. 

How it all Started 

When I asked Stephanie about her earliest encounters with music and instruments, she told me the first time she picked up an instrument she almost broke it. As a three-year-old, she would watch her older brother play the violin and she wanted to do everything he did, and since her parents didn’t want her to break an expensive, real instrument, they got her a plastic one. At four years old, she started taking piano lessons. After her brother introduced her to the video game Guitar Hero, Stephanie was hooked and picked up a real guitar, and 15 years later, she’s the talented jazz guitarist she is today.

She had been playing guitar and piano for a few years when in 4th grade, she took a mini-course on song-writing offered by the parents of her elementary school. “From there, I started writing random lyrics, kind of using songwriting as my personal diary.” Around the same time, she started her first band and wanted to have originals for them to play, and she says “part of it was that I was trying to take ownership of the music I was performing.”

Her love of music production followed shortly after: “I had lyrics, I could play along with my guitar or piano or my band. But it all really came together with the MacBook at my middle school. It was the coolest, craziest, high-tech, jetson sh*t ever, so I spent all of the recess tinkering with GarageBand, playing with the loops and stuff, and I realized I had access to the whole huge palette of sounds, that couldn’t get from just piano, guitar, drums, bass. I started combining my writing with all these loops I found on GarbageBand and got a mini keyboard to play any instrument electronically.” 

Genre Influences Wilchai’s Production 

Although Stephanie produces primarily RnB tracks, she draws influence from her jazz guitar studies. “When I played guitar I played rock and blues, and from the blues, the jazz naturally followed; all those genres are primarily Black-American music. RnB fell into that lineage as well, since there is so much crossover between RnB, jazz, soul, and rock.” She credits part of her draw to RnB was the production aspect, “the electronics, the 808 and 606 kits, all the things I was interested in production wise lent itself to making RnB tracks. Like if I had produced rock, I wouldn’t have had as much freedom with instrumentation and the electronic side of production which I really love.” RnB was the genre that Stephanie felt like she could best utilize her love for the electronic slide of production as well as incorporate her jazz and blues background.

Wilchai’s Creative Inspiration and Her Newest Release “Deluge”

Stephanie believes that music is inherently social. Her inspiration for songwriting comes from personal experience, particularly experiences with other people in her life. As a jazz musician, she draws from jazz’s dialogic nature. She explains the collaborative aspect of creating jazz:
“You solo, then someone else solos, and you converse. As a rhythm player, you are always playing behind someone, supporting them, listening to them. You’re always involved in other people’s expression.” Her songwriting centers around other people and her reflections on those interpersonal relationships.

Wilchai’s new release “Deluge” dropped earlier this month. The slow, ethereal ballad explores her introspections on memory, its role in her relationships with other people, and how it reflects on herself. Stephane tells us that was inspired by an article she read about memory. Stephanie sums its ideas up for us: 

“Whenever you access a memory, you forget some of it, and your brain compensates for that loss by papering over the part you forgot with some sort of approximation. It’s this eventual patchwork memory and glossing over of your experience that bugged me. It got me wondering whether anything I remember about myself or others was really real or true. And with quarantine –and the beginning of college in the rearview of my life– I find myself often going back to my childhood and preteen memories, wondering about how my perception of myself has changed and whether those perceptions are even accurate.” 

When she first started making the song, she thought it was going to be purely introspective but as she continued to work on the piece, she realized, her current and past selves are heavily influenced by the context of people she surrounded herself with. One person that Stephanie thought a lot about while making this track was her grandmother, who had just passed away. Stephanie tells us: “The last time I saw her was when I was seven because she lived in Hong Kong. I found myself returning to memories of her, my experiences with her, and who I was at the time— seven year old of Steph—how much of my memory is really mine, and how much of it came from what my parents have told me? How much of it is lost or altered over time because of how many times I’ve accessed those memories.” She struggles with the idea that you can’t completely trust your memory, but at the same time, she has settled with the fact that our memories make up who we are, that they serve to help us contextualize our lives. “Even if our mental reconstruction of what happened isn’t perfect, our memories are still true to us and the people we are today.”

The Pandemic’s Effect 

“Deluge” is Wilchai’s first release on her own; she has collaborated with other artists like Kakie, Luis Villanueva, and Jackie Marchal, but this is the first work on which she has taken creative leadership on. Even with her spearheading the project, collaboration played a huge role in the production. She recounts how the pandemic has made collaboration harder, being unable to see and meet other creatives in person, but it has also pushed her to be more proactive about reaching out to other people. Stephanie originally reached out to her singer Unathi through Instagram after hearing her sing in Columbia Nonsequitur, an acapella group on campus. Stephanie tells us how she discovered Unathi and how their collaboration worked during the pandemic: “Unathi had posted a video where she was singing a jazz standard and she sounded awesome, so I hit her up, and asked her if she wanted to work on something. The music stuff is a way to connect people and that’s definitely harder these days, but I was lucky to run into her in this way.”

The pandemic has also affected the resources Stephanie and other college musicians have access to. Studio space is limited and are often small spaces that can pose a health hazard when recording with other people indoors. “Last semester I had access to WKCR studios and CU Records’ studios and I’d be able to borrow mics and stuff from friends, but now you have to be really scrappy with figuring out logistics and everything. Most of “Deluge” was recorded in my bedroom, and Unathi recorded on a random microphone she found in her dad’s basement. Both of our computers are breaking. There were a lot of obstacles but that showed me how much I really wanted this project. Despite the hang-ups, I still pushed for the vision I had in mind, and it was worth it.”

Photo credits: Lucy Blumenfield (IG @lucyblumenfield)