Do you know what salt water tastes like with rice?
Welcome to - Hotel Saltwater
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"Hotel Saltwater" is the first romance drama series produced by PTS Taigi TV Station in Taiwan. It is co-directed by directors Wen-Tang Cheng and Zhi-Ru Lin. This drama is based on the youth of Zhen-Yao Dai, the pioneer of the peasant movement. The content describes the main character Lí Bûn-khim's pursuit of democracy and freedom through action, and the unforgettable love story and the brotherhood between close friends intertwined to form the revolutionary youth of Taiwan in the 1970s.
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The original music of "Hotel Saltwater" was composed by Pei-Chin Lee. She scored for eight episodes and selected 21 songs from more than 150 cues for the original soundtrack album.
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We invited many outstanding musicians to collaborate in the music production. The two orchestrators are Ann Lee, who has won many awards in foreign composition competitions, and Korean emerging composer Jinny Lee. The string chamber is from the Budapest Art Orchestra in Hungary. R&B singer Yi-Heng Chen, electric guitarist VITZ(I Mean Us), acoustic guitarist Ray Fan, accordionist Chieh Huang(Shui Hou Gu Shi), cellist Tzu-Yi, and clarinetist Joanne Huang also participated in the recording.
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The Japanese ballad was composed by Ting-Yu Ling, who lives in Japan and cares about the Japanese influences during the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan. She created a parallel and intertextual song background for the story and wrote about the life of a young woman in the 1970s. The helplessness and loneliness of hard work. Pei's ninety-year-old grandfather sang for this song. He has loved singing Japanese ballads for many years, which brings the story into that era.
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The mixing engineer Shao-Ting Sun, who is active in Taiwan and New York, mixed the string recording sections and some of the recorded instruments, and the mastering was done by Spanish mixing engineer Pablo Schuller.
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The physical album of the soundtrack is presented in cassette tapes, showing the vibe of the era in the series. In the cassette design, the black and white butterflies of the main actor and actress on the A and B side are translucent, and the other butterfly can be seen through the light, symbolizing that the two of them are still missing each other despite being separated, and also symbolizes the important image of freedom in the story. The poster on the front of the packaging is designed by Gelresai Chen, the famous award-winning designer in Taiwan.
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It will premiere globally on the Taiwanese Public Television Service TV Station at 8 pm on March 3, 2024(Sun.), and will also be on Netflix at 9 pm on the same day. Hope you can enjoy the series with the youth, struggle, and romance of the 1970s.