#robbieselin

If you find Inch Chua sitting outside of a Swedish-styled coffee shop in Los Angeles, she might be wearing neon yellow button earrings and grey gym clothes, eagerly talking specs on her cell for this-or-that or something else and squinting sans sunglasses into the 3 p.m. sun interrupted only occasionally by the flanks of idling buses advertising action films about stalwart superheroes in spandex.

If you’re stuck in traffic on the Ten, you might see her the next day too. She’ll be the frustrated-looking Singaporean twenty-something in a small silver car; rushing for soundcheck and cursing loudly into a fold-down mirror while applying primary-colored war paint to her cheeks like a cheerleader might rouge before junior prom. 

And this is odd, you think – she looks like the girl I saw drinking a mango-banana smoothie yesterday… the one with the button earrings.

And you’re right and wrong, because, yes, it is odd… But, no, it’s not the same person. There are multiple Inch Chua’s, they just happen to share a name, an appreciation for mangoes, and a Toyota Yaris named “Duke.”

“This is what happens when you let your left brain and your right brain fight for your attention,” she said, pointing at herself. “The moment I say I’m absolutely balanced, I feel immediately unbalanced... It’s like trying to find a central point by bouncing between poles”

Before she split into two people, Inch was a third person who, were she a minor character in a prequel to this introduction, might be credited as “girl raised by esteemed theatre family in Singapore.” 

Her character would be family-centric and brought up by a strong single mom on great helpings of art, performance and clam-rich char kway teow. She’d eventually find form after following a boy to an underground concert where she twisted-off into a fourth person that came to absorb music like some kind of hypothetical sponge that absorbs sound and formed a band online (the girl, not the sponge), and started to synthesize her appreciation for acts like Finch, Copeland and Juliana Theory into her own expressive art that eventually chased a fifth version of Inch from art school where she briefly entertained the idea of being an texturally-driven abstract painter.

“I got tired of the industry of fine art… and I got into a depression,” she said, partially attributing the blue period to reading too much Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. “Eventually music saved my life. Everything else, life or painting, it just seemed bleak and pointless. But music - that wasn’t.”

After Inch version 6.0 built its chops with Allura, it underwent a bemusing Jekyll and Hyde split, became V.7.0, picked up the guitar for the first time, went solo and watched as her inner-Hyde kicked inner- Jekyll’s ass and wrestled his diary away from him, using it to write schizophrenically-autobiographical songs that dragged him kicking and screaming into a full-fledge music career. 

After 3 albums, Hyde woke up in the United States in 2012 with smudged paint on his face and a Pan Am shoulder bag containing a California State Driver’s License that read, “Inch Chua 8.5,” and the masters to a frenetic and sonically complex new record about boys called Bumfuzzle (the record, not the boys).

“I wrote 20 songs to start and every one is about a guy I know… I wanted to be able to make something with a theme, and that’s it for the 10 songs that made the record.” She stopped to write down, “Dr. Bumfuzzle B-Sides,” which she thinks would be “a cool name for a dog” and continued “And that’s where the name comes from. It reflects the textural sound of the songs, but it’s also a word that means ‘to confuse or fluster,’ … and that’s exactly how I feel about guys most of the time… all of the time.”

And this, she says, makes “Bumfuzzle” her most honest record to date; an album as honest as eight versions of a single person can make.

So, if you get off of a passing bus and sit down with her when she finishes her smoothie, or accidentally rear-end Duke and speak with Inch on the roadside after accessing damage and exchanging insurance information, she’d tell you the same; tell you how bumfuzzling it feels to be Inch Chua, but also how art makes it all make sense, or something like that… and, maybe you’re a court reporter, so you keep a transcript of the conversation and it reads like this: 

You: Wait, so you’re telling me there are really 8-and-a-half versions of Inch Chua? 

Inch Chua 9.0: Yes, in a way… There’s the me that produced the record and the me that wrote it, and all the theatrical versions of me that get into character and let loose while playing it live.

You: Well that must make for a lively show.

Inch Chua 9.0: Lively, yes, but harmonious too… We all usually come together to form something cohesive… It’s almost a metaphor for the music and the approach… It’s like looking at a telescope under a microscope, or, you know - kinda like the robots in Voltron or a piece of a jigsaw puzzle - only instead of forming a giant robot and a scene of a red covered bridge, respectively, they form one giant hybrid thing that, for some reason, looks and sounds like Gwen Stefani singing along to “Karma Police” in an idling Delorean electrified by a live power line downed in a tempest.

You: That sounds pretty rad.

Inch 9.0: Thanks. It’s just what’s in my heart. It’s all about expressing it honestly. Without  that, without art, we’re just carbon and hydrogen with cool accessories. 

You: Well said…

Inch 9.0: Thanks.

You: You want to go get a drink?

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