Track By Track: Stella Z (Fig)

1 – Silent Forest, Moonlit Ficus:

Season: Early autumn, just before the dark days come.

Inspiration: Meeting trees in Epping Forest in autumn. Truly magical moments.

Setting: The moment you press the first fig seed into damp soil, waiting.

2 – Inward, Outward, Flourish:

Season: Spring, 26 degrees, the kind of day you forget to check the time.

Inspiration: The fig is a peculiar existence. It blooms inwardly, understated and unseen. Like the kind of person I could be friends with. 🙂

Setting: When you’ve lost yourself, and you need a moment to reconnect with your inner self and strength.

3 –Treefrog, Postman and Bell

Season: A breezy summer afternoon.

Inspiration: After watching hours of fig documentaries, I learned it’s one of the oldest plants still feeding the world. A host, a home, a mother. This track is a forest dwellers gathering—a gentle procession—paying tribute to the fig tree.

Setting: Cuddling with your furry buddies.

4 – Moracae Family

Season: Could be any.

Inspiration: My mum who introduced this weird and wonderful plant to my life. For me, the fig tree was the big, generous presence in our old home, feeding my family and neighbours every summer. When we moved to an apartment, we thought we had lost the fig tree. But my mum took a cutting and planted it at our new place. To our surprise, a small fig tree started growing again, as if it had never left.

Setting: After reading My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman.

5 –Fruitless Oddities

Season: Spring when sudden hail drop after lunch time.

Inspiration: The title came from the fact that in Chinese, fig is called 无花果—“No Flower Fruit.” But we’re actually eating the flower itself. To capture the simple surface with intricate depth, like many beautiful things, I was mostly inspired by interviews from Belgium choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in a Tate video: “The main element is repetitive patterns, very small figures which are repeated over and over again. And then through acceleration and deceleration, start to shift so you get different relationships in time till they are again together ”

Setting: When you need to see wonder in ordinary things again.

6 – Last Flight Of The Wasp

Season: Spring with night winds.

Inspiration: The Side B of the album, the darker mysterious side of the fig—where life and death intertwine. Ever since I read Ben Craig’s Love the Fig published in The New Yorker on August 10, 2016, I’ve been fascinated by this ancient relationship, where wasps live, die, and decompose within the fig’s embrace. The first flight of the wasp is also the last flight.

Setting: While watching Marlene Dumas’s painting.

7 – Mission Purple

Season: Winter, deep and dark

Inspiration: A tiny wasp’s mission to pollinate a fig is a percussive image in my mind. This track became my own parallel mission. I used to be afraid of drums—now they speak first. I’ve found an organic way to play them, and they don’t intimidate me anymore.

Setting: On a mountain and you’re moving steadily upward

8 – The Departing

Season: Late winter, when you shake the cold off.

Inspiration: Conrad Schnitzler’s Slow Motion album. Phenomenal!

Setting: The last night in your old place.

9 – Self-Portrait As A Fig

Season: Early Summer – when the sun arrives early, and stays longer.

Inspiration: This one was written based and evolved from a live set I did in Abrupt Festival in Brussels in winter 2024. It also carries thunder storm sounds from a hot summer day in China—my pocket-sized homesickness.

Setting: When you see your first baby fig.

You can purchase Stella Z (Fig) on cassette (comes with a packet of fig seeds) or the digital album via the Music To Watch Seeds Grow By Bandcamp here.