Drexler’s ‘Olympia-5’ is a heartfelt dedication to his father during his relapse with lymphoma. As a way of saying “I’m here for you,” Adrian Leung took to the art he knew best – music – as a way of comfort.

Stream: ‘Olympia-5’ – Drexler

Where hope meets grief, and perfection becomes for nought, Drexler (the artist moniker of composer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Leung) embraces music for what it should’ve always been about: Uninhibited expression.

Leung’s new album, Olympia-5, first began as a series of piano recordings he created to send to his father, who had – at the time – just relapsed with lymphoma.

Olympia-5 - Drexler — Olympia-5 – Drexler

Beginning with improvisation, the album was recorded live, allowing the spaces between to breathe in its own time. Interwoven with ambient electronics, Leung’s distinctive sound becomes elevated to a cinematic quality of its own genre – perhaps a nod to his background in film and composition. Olympia-5 presents a melange of the very best of Leung, creating his most affective and personal work to date.

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering Drexler’s new album Olympia-5, a compilation on grief, reckoning, and hope. 16 tracks long, the album is a series of improvised piano recordings; a meditation on care in different forms. Olympia-5 is certainly a gift to us, but one that began within the private realm of Leung’s life. These pieces began as recordings Leung would send to his father during his hospitalisation, a way of saying “I’m here for you” instead of asking about the state of his health.

What perhaps adds another layer of resonance, is the dynamics at play between an Asian father and son.

Where feelings are mostly kept hidden and rendered just below the surface, Leung’s record sits as a powerful reminder that there will always be more than one way to show love. Olympia-5 is full of memories personal to Leung, reminiscent of his childhood, building on each other like the many versions of himself that have culminated into the person he is today.

The Hong Kong/Australian artist currently finds his roots in Scotland, and this record stands all the more significant against this backdrop of shifting homes, fragmented memories, and strands of being. Drawing from that intersectional states of belonging and existing, Leung looks to his father’s childhood as well as his own, and reflects on how fatherhood ebbs and flows over the course of life – one he takes to his own life, where he now has a family of his own.

Listening to Olympia-5 all the way through, it was like I could feel Leung’s inner thoughts working through each strand of melancholia, grief, hope, and reflection – watching in real time as he untangled each feeling before weaving them back together. Album opener and title track “Olympia-5” was named after the clinical trial Leung’s father underwent during his relapse. The softness in its performance lets grief sit within and in between the lines, allowing its waves to wash over you with each bar.

Tracks like “Dare You,” “Saturdays,” “Giorgio,” and “Kirrikee” contain threads of Leung’s childhood. Thematically, these ring with its contrast in the highs and lows, resonating for its ability to build on itself. Layer upon layer arrive and settle, like the overflux of emotions that come rushing slowly, that scatter, then all at once. Contrasting between spacious and fleeting, it also inhabits the space of being a son, as if memories and who he was as a youth come flooding back to the present moment – allowing him to inhabit that identity of who he is now, but also every version of him that came before.

“Prague” presents a pinnacle of the relationship between father and son, one where the roles of care were suddenly reversed. Named after the holiday they took when Leung had this realisation, the track arrives with that hopeful sadness – as if sunlight streaks through the leaves as the wind blows, dabbling on concrete pavements – much like hope that finds its way to the surface, but only sometimes.

Some of Drexler’s most poignant moments arrive on “Model House,” “Brothers,” and “Quarry Bay,” which reflect on his father’s own life through the places he grew up in and the life he had in Hong Kong before moving to Australia. “Quarry Bay” is especially heartbreaking: The final chapter of Olympia-5 was named after the area Leung’s father grew up in, and in the background, a phone call can be heard of the doctor’s report in present day.

Each piece tracks a memory that Leung relived through this process of grief, care, and identity.

Sparkling, spacious, while never compromising on its depth, Olympia-5 arrives to sit with you in the moments you might not know what to make of yet. It stops you in its tracks, demanding you to listen deeper and untangle what lies just underneath the surface.

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