Journey to the West

Journey to the West is the soundtrack to the stage musical Monkey: Journey to the West and is composed by English musician Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame) with the UK Chinese Ensemble. The soundtrack is based upon the musical, but is not a direct recording of it. The album was released as a download, CD, and double vinyl LP in the United Kingdom on 18 August 2008 by XL Recordings. In the United States, the album was released a day later as a download, while a CD was released on 23 September 2008. Background Damon Albarn made a point in an interview with Gorillaz-Unofficial that the Monkey project was supposed to be "Gorillaz, really. But we can't call it that for legal reasons". Speaking of his decision to compose music for an opera, Albarn noted that, "This is composition, not songwriting, of course, I was apprehensive at first. But people who come from my normal discipline don't tend to go far enough. We want to bring more flavour to people's lives. And demystify opera to a degree, destroy its elitist angle. Then for people who do like opera, open them up to new forms of music, too. We want to bring a big cornerstone of Chinese culture and present it to the West. If we can do that, then we've succeeded." Chen Shi-Zheng, the man responsible for creating and conceiving the stage adaptation of Monkey: Journey to the West, explained that he "was looking for someone young and smart to work with. I didn't want to give Damon or Jamie too specific a brief because what was important in this project was that it was their sensibility we wanted. What Damon and I did agree on straightaway was that we didn't want pastiche Chinese music and on the last trip we made he found something he could latch on to." Chen took Albarn and Hewlett to China up to five times, Hewlett claimed that "we spent three years working on the opera, we totally immersed ourselves in Chinese culture." 18 months after starting work on the project, Albarn produced his first piece called "Heavenly Peach Banquet" which was a take on the style of music performed by female C-pop acts. Talking about the piece, Chen said that "I find it very humorous, Hong Kong pop is so pretty and naïve. This is Damon pretending to be naïve and you are laughing at him. Messy is a bad word, but he took a melody, messed it around and put noises into it, twisted and processed the sound so that none of it is as it seems."