Canadian-born musician Ellen Joyce Loo (卢凯彤) was an effervescent rainbow, stubbornly emerging from a stormy Hong Kong sky, stopped short by an abrupt sunset. From longing and loneliness, to heartbreak and rage, her songs are well-suited for reflective hours at a café and walking home in the rain.
As a teen, Loo swept the Hong Kong music scene with her angst and optimism in the early 2000s, as co-founder of the popular Contopop duo at17 with Eman Lam. But Loo’s introspective voice and melancholy personality shone through when she embarked on a solo career and began singing in Mandarin, with 2010’s EP “Summer Of Love.”
Her handful of live albums and three studio records showed a star in love with minor keys and a bright future. Loo displayed unrestrained creativity in 2014’s transient guitar album “如梦幻泡影” (Like a Pipe Dream). She attained her most “perfect” and expansive sound in 2016’s “你的完美有点难懂并不代表世界不能包容” (Your Perfection is a Little Hard to Understand But Doesn’t Mean the World is Unforgiving) — an unpredictable mix of acoustic guitar melodies, rock-and-roll riffs, piano ballads and electronica frenzy.
Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 2013, Loo wrote songs that reflected a fragile soul in a hurting world, where she found few answers. On Aug. 5, 2018, Loo tragically fell from her Hong Kong apartment at the age of 32, leaving behind the musical memoirs of a life beautifully broken.
#
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://jordonious.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/in-memorium-remembering-ellen-loo/