As with the ever-expanding galaxy and celestial plane, the knowledge that I have regarding astrology is hilariously limited. When I got the chance to speak with Toronto musician Victoria Cheong over Zoom about her debut album Real Time, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to map these uncharted cosmic territories with someone who has actually spent time researching it.
From what I now understand — and what Cheong told me with a patient, heavy sigh — the most recent UFO revelations and looming threat of the moon entering it’s “wobbly phase” have zero connection to our astrological charts. But the more time she has spent researching how the alignment of celestial objects may affect our actions during the pandemic, the more she has been able to understand herself and gain some sort of centering “calm” to her daily life.
“It’s more about where we’re at in our human journey,” she said. “That these sorts of things are being acknowledged as true, but yet still mysterious and unknown, is so wild. Basically, we’re being told, ‘Yes, UFOs are real and we don’t know what they are.’ That is more the archetypal language of astrology. Our experience is we’re having these weird and foreign things confirmed as real, but still remaining in this mysterious realm. That’s the language of astrology. That’s kind of the way that astrology is perceived.”
Speaking with Cheong and listening to the music contained on Real Time, you get the sense that she approaches most things in her life with a sense of curiosity. Over the years, she has carved out a rewarding career in music with a number of electronic solo releases, remixes for artists like New Fries and LAL, and backup vocals for Jennifer Castle and downtown NYC post punk legend CHANDRA.
She has established herself as a key collaborator and with the intimate and textured world she creates on her own as New Chance, she knows exactly how to make the smallest whispers echo loudly and with gusto.
Throughout the album — and especially on the standout track “Two Pictures” — Cheong sets an alluring tone, with lush electronics, soothing vocal harmonies, and poetic narratives that explore our daily journeys through time, geography and space. But also, just as importantly, within ourselves. I ask Cheong if she has felt her relationship with “travel” has changed as she has grown older.
“I think there’s the travel of the imagination, which really is such a childhood thing,” she explained. “That’s the time when you’re really encouraged and allowed to use your imagination. And in many ways, I think many of us imagine our futures and we imagine our hopes and dreams as a form of imagination. That is a form of travel.”
You get a sense that you are travelling back to a different era when listening to Real Time. The music harkens back to the early ‘90s, when alternative rock and club culture were colliding and dominating both MTV and contemporary rock radio.
This era was important to Cheong in her musical awakening. It was a time where a shaggy, scruffy-haired slacker like Beck could ascend to the top of the charts rapping poetic non-sequiturs over junkyard beats. “You could be totally embraced as a wacky outsider and I don’t necessarily think that’s true anymore,” laughed Cheong.
You can hear traces of this time on the album like the minimalist beats of early trip-hop artists like Tricky and Björk’s landmark first solo release Debut, an album that Cheong confesses still inspires and intrigues her to this day. “It’s still an amazing record,” said Cheong. “It totally holds up, obviously. Even though it’s so different from where she’s gone as an artist.”
Most of the songs on Real Time were written before the pandemic. But when it came to actually capturing everything on record, that took some wrangling as the world became more closed off than ever. Luckily, Cheong had a great partner in crime throughout the project in producer Lisa Conway, better known for her electronic project L CON. Sending files back and forth as she completed new tracks, Conway gave input until they crossed the finish line.
“I would record one song at a time and send them to her one at a time, with a number of weeks in between each song,” said Cheong of the experience. “She would mix and we would have notes and go back and forth via email. In that interim, I would record the next song and send them to her whenever they were ready because we didn’t have any kind of deadline or anything like that. We just took the time that it took. We both had enough availability during the pandemic to just work on it. And so it ended up taking about nine months.”
With so much time spent aiding other artists as a collaborator, Cheong felt herself approaching certain moments on the record as a “character” to bring in an element of surprise. After all, New Chance is a true solo project.
“It’s funny when you’re a solo artist and you’re making a record on your own and you’re playing different parts. You do end up embodying different kinds of characters,” Cheong said. “That definitely happened with the vocals because there’s so many vocal layers and they’re all me. I wanted diversity in the voices and to have different kinds of textures of voice and different kinds of expression, which when you work with other singers, you kind of get that more easily and more naturally.”
As of right now, Cheong is still in the headspace she was in during the recording of Real Time. But she is slowly starting to think of what the New Chance live show will look like when she is ready to perform. “I would like to have a band of singers,” said Cheong, “Then it becomes a question of who can sing with me and who has the time and where will I get the money and then probably rearranging songs to center around the vocalists and to allow for live performance.
“That’s the part that feels daunting,” she added. “It’s like getting a group together and figuring it out. But I like the idea of getting together with singers and just singing because that’s something that’s been not allowed for this whole time.”