from THE WIRE (JAN 2004)

SOUNDING BEIJING 2003
THE LOFT SPACE
BEIJING, CHINA

By STEVE BARKER

Beijing is a place where the face of Fidel Castro adorns the cover of Hello magazine, where there are more McDonalds than in New York City and where a thousand bed hospital was built in just eight days. Everything is possible, but very little makes sense. Sounding Beijing 2003, the city's first international electronic music festival, was the concept of Berkeley based sound and web artist Dajuin Yao. Two hard years in the planning, with handfuls of sponsorship rejections from the eructating multinationals whose brands increasingly deface the cityscape, the event was only possible due to Yao's determined vision, the deal worked out with the Loft for the performance space and the artists subsidising their own costs.

Cynics wondered if anybody would actually show up for an experimental music/noise festival spread over four evenings at a cost of eighty kuai (about ten $10) per night and a one-sixty package for the whole shebang? But this risk was managed well as on the bill for the first night were Ken Fields, an American professor at the local conservatoire, and his wife Yu Hongmei, a virtuoso of the erhu (a two-stringed Chinese fiddle best-known for playing melancholic tunes) who together brought both poor students and wealthy hangers-on to populate the floor and balcony respectively. The night opened with a competent run through of uninspired laptop licks lost in a grainy mix from Beijing's Sun Dawei aka Sulumi aka Panda Twin. But things looked up as Zhou Pei aka Ronez took the stage. Not that his presence was commanding. With his scally-style shell suit and specs constantly sliding down his nose he looked every bit the trainee accountant from Guilin on his day off. But this was different, Ronez, a serial-killer movie superfan attacks and abuses his mixer, cans and his self-built lunchbox effect noise-generator provoking a rush stagewards for snaps. His latest album on Beijing's Subjam label, "Try It On For Size," has a free condom stuffed in the jewel box. His next album is "Annoying". Despite blanding out and playing far too long for the rest of his set, the impression is already imprinted °V the boy is an stone-killer electro-nerd star. Ken and Hongmei are given a rapturous reception, the music is Readers Digest travelogue backing track and the live erhu, though undoubtedly skilful, still defies my critical analysis and by my ears cannot be distinguished from the sound of blind beggar-boys playing under the third ring road's underpasses. A welcome exorcism comes in the form of Austrian Helmut Schaefer whose presence has been a buzzing coiled spring since arriving at the gig. The term laptop musician conjures up images of static concentration. Schaefer defies the stereotype, his performance is all physical as he viciously assaults his computer and mixing desk, launching wave upon wave of noise becoming remorselessly rhythmic in piece lasting less than fifteen minutes. The only words must be "totally rockin", an audience normally cowed by protocol erupts.

Night two opens with the Shanghai duo Dustbox (Ding Dawen and Lou Nanli aka B6). The crowd has thinned out a little, the rumour is a bunch have asked for money back °V they must have assumed electronic equated to techno °V but the set is strictly IDM-lite with an Apple shining in the dark next to a dull PC. But then the real value of international input becomes dramatically apparent with the appearance of the San Francisco based French artist Letaetia Sonami and her sonic glove sewn with pads triggering both sound and light. This time it's not the photographers but the crowd that gather around the stage in anticipation of something special and they are not disappointed. In three pieces that combine sound and silence, light and shadow, movement and speech Sonami goes beyond mere drama. After her appearance the Beijing based duo fm3 go home to rethink their performance strategy for the next night. Randy Yau takes the relationship between noise and movement to more brutal levels as he forces a screaming dialogue between his microphone and the bank of amps with few a gasps for air. Guangzhou's Zhong Minjie gets the award for most stylish presentation as his heavily bespectacled face remains unmoved in a fully forty minute plus set worshipping in the church of Merzbow, dense impenetrable multi-layered filigrees of noise with the occasional vague promise of cracks and fissures that never materialise.

Night three and the beast that is Beijing shows its true colours as the Loft's available space is cut in half by the letting of floorspace to a commercial monitor exhibition. Wang Changchun, from North East China, followed by Shanghai's Ding Dawen aka cy, open the evening both in equally earnest fashion with a competent sets that are the most genteel of the festival. But then B6, freed of Dustbox, starts to build an impressively structured set, beats emerge in what becomes the most entertaining performance of the festival. In a surreal twist electro-messiah Jean-Michel Jarre materialises in the audience and I find myself sitting next to Isabelle Adjani! Jarre is in China preparing for a concert in China next year and looking for a support act. The first international musician to perform here back in 1981 Jarre donated a Korg MS-20 analogue modular synth to a local college, returning two years later he found the model lovingly reproduced with Chinese characteristics. Serendipitous in the extreme, Jarre falls for B6. Organiser Dajuin Yao finishes the night with a set supported by one half of Beijing's top digital video animation team 8GG, introduced by manipulated voice samples and moving on to fluttering noise - but it's clear that Yao's mind is on the festival as a whole.

The final night is soothed in by fm3 (Sichuan's Zhang Jian and long-term China Nebraskan exile Christiaan Virant) introducing a much needed sense of space and contemplation with "Zenhead", made up from a series of isolated notes sampled from plucked string that decays and dissolves stretched in time. The following piece takes captured ambience from Zhang's recent Tibet trip as a base and is equally meditative in style. Letaetia Sonami claims she's going back to the States to rethink her set with more space! Another Beijing act Wang Fan introduces his set with chiming hand bells and, employing only 16 track Roland harddisk recorder and prepared CDs, proceeds to deliver an accomplished and inspiring set that could have taken its place proudly at any festival in the world. Meanwhile, Karkowski has been stalking the perimeter of the venue, with a scowl interrupted only by cigarettes. Can the big behavioural build-up by the Brando of the laptop possibly be followed by a transcendent set? Well, no. It's all over in just short of fifteen minutes and the baffled audience don't know even it. Luckily for the big K Helmut Schaefer joins him for an encore, he violently reanimates the place ending up shoving his laptop off the table, crashing fully five feet onto the floor. But the music and Helmut keep on rocking as the on-desk mixer takes control. And then it's all over. With most of the Chinese artists performing here for the first time in public, Beijing needed this show both to take it forward and also look back on. Although Malcolm McClaren was here recently to sign all-girl rockband the Wild Strawberries, the future is really in labels like Warp, Rephlex and their offspring signing-up Ronez and the others. It's going to happen sometime. More next year, maybe.