bod [包家巷] is Nicholas Zhu's classical music project based in Los Angeles.

In a previous release on Pastel Voids, Orchestra of the Frozen State [冰国乐队], Zhu stated that:

包家巷 (bāojiāxiàng) is the street that my family lives on.

It is a homonym to a system of community enforcement, of looking out for one another.

To me in writing it looks like “to hold the home alley.”

My mother always told me that there’s nothing more important than what others think of you.

I never asked her if she knew about this similarity.

The work is composed with field recordings, live piano, MIDI guzheng, and an array of samples ranging from machinery to sci-fi sound design.

Zhu uses these in compositional models resembling Liszt's "symphonic poems," an alternative mode of composition that is meant to both utilize the traditional logic of Western music while opening its forms to a continuity without movements.

Soliloquy of the Distant Home [远家独白] is, as all bod [包家巷] releases have been and will be, written as a English title with an interpreted variant bracketed in Chinese. Zhu has noted that this distinction is central to the "untranslatable illegibility of the cycle of traumatic experience and its subsequent abusive outcomes."

This work was made in the summer and fall of 2017 in N Zhu's bedroom in Los Angeles, thus contemporaneous with the release of Piano Compositions [钢琴组成] on ZOOM LENS earlier this season.