mary sue and the Clementi Sound Appreciation Club - Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword

This is what you get when an emcee/producer is fed on a diet of abstract hip-hop, Southeast Asian samples, and Taoist folklore. Together with the Clementi Sound Appreciation Club (a five-piece band of up-and-coming musicians schooled in jazz from the local scene in Singapore), Mary Sue melts samples with live instrumentation on ‘Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword.’

At the core of the album is the tale of a time-traveling oracle, struggling to find meaning in the modern world; where ancient wisdom feels fragile, and truth is ever-shifting. A reinterpretation of idioms shapes its journey, where spiritual pursuits feel performative, and where the weight of the past clashes with an uncertain future. The music mirrors this tension: phrases of Gamelan music dissolve into smoky brass, spectral melodies unravel over off-kilter drums, and time bends through layered textures. ‘Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword’ is both a reckoning and a dream, where echoes of the past find new life in the chaos of now.

A porcelain shield shatters on impact; a paper sword folds before it cuts. It’s about the constant, fragile push-and-pull between aesthetics and money, tradition and progress, meaning and spectacle. “Like the oracle, we’re all stuck in a world where spiritual longing gets tangled up with consumerism, where authenticity is blurred by performance, and where finding real meaning feels shakier than ever,” rapper and producer Mary Sue explains. “’Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword’ lives in that field of tension. The album drifts between beauty and collapse, truth and illusion, and past and present, without ever landing on solid ground.”

“I remember hearing ‘Amazing Grace’ at my grandfather’s Taoist funeral. It was a designated moment, a way for Christian family members to grieve without feeling like they were transgressing. We didn’t have many in our family, just an uncle and aunt. We stood with them as the hymn played.

If you know Singaporean families, or maybe just a lot of Asian households; you know that care is often reserved. Grief, too. It peeks out in silence, in small gestures, not grand displays. For most of that three-day funeral, the only sounds were incense smoke and soft sniffles. But when ‘Amazing Grace’ came on, something cracked open. I remember a sudden wave of uncontrolled crying. Me included.

I’m not Christian. I don’t come from a Western background. But somehow, that moment felt more familiar than the rest. The rituals rooted in my culture never stirred much and sometimes provoked a cultural cringe I hadn’t unpacked; maybe something tied to Singapore’s colonial past and the wave of Westernization that was pushed for the sake of the country’s economic survival and the subsequent attempts by institutions to categorise and frame it in a way that fit agendas.

In 2023, we toured China and made the album ‘Voice Memos from a Winter in China.’ A South African listener messaged me about “Expired Toffee.” The song is fully in Chinese, and Kenzo (our guitarist) made that song inspired by old 60s records his mom used to listen to. The listener said it felt deeply familiar. That sparked a deeper dive into traditional music from Asia and Africa, and I began hearing connections, distant siblings in sound.

I made ‘Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword’ with the members of Clementi Sound Appreciation Club, the most talented people I’ve ever worked with. Some came from jazz and Western musical training, yet this project pushed us to move beyond what was comfortable or even what they might have naturally enjoyed making. But we also weren’t replicating traditional music. We were diverging from what we knew, chasing a feeling that felt close yet uncomfortable. The tension between our instincts became part of the sound itself. It was awkward, uncertain, but there was real magic in the vulnerability it took to unlearn.

It’s two sounds colliding. It’s conflict. It’s longing. Searching for some lost roots that might still live in the cracks that separate us.

In the end, I don’t know that I fully reached the vision I set, in a way it’s a project most detached from my personal voice as I wrote from the perspective of a character. But on the other hand, this is also the project that I have felt the deepest care and responsibility for since I started making music.

Only towards the end of the album process, I realised the feeling I’ve had hearing ‘Amazing Grace’ at my grandfather’s funeral, played with suona, flutes, and Taoist drums, might have been the intangible sense that was guiding this record.

The sound of ‘Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword’ is about sitting with that feeling. Letting the tension between worlds be felt. Finding meaning in the clash—and maybe a refuge in between.”

—Mary Sue

Production & Writing:
Mary Sue
Clementi Sound Appreciation Club

Vocals: Mary Sue
Bass: Russell Seow
Drums: Farizi Noorfauzi
Guitar: Kenzo Nagari
Keyboard: Daniel Alex Chia
Saxophone: Bryan De Rozario

Recording: PK Records
Mixing: Ian Lee
Mastering: Keith ‘K-Kruz’ Kreuser

Cover Art: Liyong Wong
Center Label: Wenwei

Released by Rucksack Records x La Munai Records
rucksackrecords.bandcamp.com
www.instagram.com/rucksack_records

lamunairecords.bandcamp.com
www.instagram.com/lamunairecords

Mary Sue and the Clementi Sound Appreciation Club
www.instagram.com/sweetmarysue
www.instagram.com/clementisoundappreciationclub