First anniversary of Helmut Schäfer’s death

by lawrence

Randy H.Y. Yau has assembled a set of nice photos on his Flickr page. This one by Joe Colley is my favourite.

Helmut Schaefer & Zbigniew Karkowski by Joe Colley

Randy captioned it as such:

‘Last picture taken of Helmut together with Zbigniew at his home in Graz, Austria. Helmut’s unique energy is captured in his expression here. Joe gave me this photo at the end of 2006 saying, “here’s a picture of your two favorite guys.” It’s been on my refrigerator since.’




[Event] China Incidental

by lawrence

China Incidental: Production Consumption Interpretation

Artists: Yan Jun 颜峻, Zhong Minjie 钟敏杰, Lin Zhiying 林志英, Hitlike (Zhang Liming 张立明).

Royal Festival Hall London, 18th - 28th April
Curated by Matthias Kispert

A slice of contemporary China that is not seen but heard, presented through the work of some of China’s leading experimental artists, including Yan Jun (Beijing), Zhong Minjie (Guangzhou), Lin Zhiying (Shenzhen) and Hitlike (Harbin). Commissioned by CHINA NOW, the UK’s largest ever festival of Chinese culture.

For eleven days, the Foyer of the Royal Festival Hall will be infused with real-world sounds from China. The recordings create a fluctuating, unpredictable mix that changes with the time of day, causing a shift in localities between the grand concert hall and the world of everyday life on a different continent.

The three themes, production, consumption and interpretation, are a reference to the changes that are currently affecting all layers of Chinese society. With the rapid increase in production and private enterprise, the emerging consumer culture and the availability of spare time to spend as one wishes, comes a continuous need for communication, interpretation and re-evaluation of people’s everyday living realities.

(CHINA NOW, the UK’s largest ever festival of Chinese culture, is a six-month nationwide celebration of over 1000 Chinese events including exhibitions, performances and activities spanning Chinese film, cuisine, comics, art, literature, music, design, science, technology, business, education and sport across the UK. Visit www.chinanow.org.uk/events for full details of all events.)




RESO show tomorrow

by Ben

Quick blurb to let everyone know about a show going down tomorrow night in Shanghai called RESO: Reconstruct the Experimental Soundscape of Ourselves. It’s being organized by Mai Mai 卖卖 from the noise rock band Musclesnog (with whom Torturing Nurse’s Junky sat in on vocals and guitar last weekend at Live Bar). Mai Mai will be debuting his solo side-project, Asthma Writers Union, and also a duo project, Porn Moon Twins. Also on the bill is Dominik 多多, a British sound artist who was last in town about two years ago and played a NOIShanghai gig at that time. I’ll also be performing a set of vocal improvisation and Max/MSP futzing, inspired by this brief, impromptu collaboration with Yan Jun 颜峻 at the last NOIShanghai show in January.

Date: Saturday, April 12, 7:30 pm
Venue: Mecooon (aka Downstream Garage) 下河迷仓
Address: Long Cao Road, lane 200, number 100, building 3 (next to the former Yu Yin Tang).
龙漕路200弄100号3楼（育音堂原址隔壁）
Cover charge: 20 RMB (includes free CD for first 50 audience members)




Li Jianhong’s Japan Diaries, Day Eight

by Ben

December 16, 2007
Today’s concert was arranged by Super Sonic China, which Little Snow manages, and it’s also my last show in Japan. The venue is New World cocoroom. When we arrived I discovered it’s a coffee shop that’s part of a big, multi-storey entertainment complex.

The show started with a VJ performance organized by Super Sonic China. Little Snow and Iida presented a film montage of the Chinese Model Operas, which was interesting. [The Model Operas or Yang Ban Xi 样板戏 were the dozen or so revolutionary works that were permitted to be performed during the Cultural Revolution, exemplifying revolutionary ideals. If I’m not mistaken, Torturing Nurse incorporated an LP recording of one of them, The White-Haired Girl, into a recent performance. -Ben] Tanaka had originally been scheduled to perform, but in the end he wasn’t feeling well, so he had to pull out. Afterwards was 10, and the timing and emotions of their performance were just right. Marqido made a recording, as he does every time they perform. Then came my solo set. After two days of rest, my hands were much better, so today’s performance was calm and level-headed. Listening to the recording after the show, it sounded quite good.

I thought to myself, this is a contradiction. In a situation where I remain relatively sober and level-headed while performing, my hands will be fine and not cramp up; however, if I throw myself into it in total oblivion, problems will surely emerge after ten minutes. In terms of musicality, for sure it’s clearer when I’m cool-headed; but on the other hand, it won’t be as emotionally intense as when I throw myself into it in total oblivion. So, how to strike a balance between level-headedness and intense emotion remains a problem that I need to deal with.

Last was an improvised collaboration with 10: Marqido on computer, itta vocalizing, and me on guitar. It probably lasted about thirty-five minutes. It sounded awesome, a really great collaborative performance! Maybe we’ll put out a CD together.

There was a Japanese guy who had come from out of town just for this show, and afterwards he was very excited. He came over to tell me that he was told about this show by the PSF label, so he rushed back just to attend. He also bought my CD before leaving. I was surprised that quite a few Chinese people had come to the show, especially an old friend from Beijing who’s already been doing business in Osaka for many years. Previously he only went to extreme metal shows; this was his first time checking out something new, and surprisingly, he really liked it. There were also a few Chinese students studying here: a pretty young girl from Shanghai and a handsome young fellow from Shandong.

In addition, I sold 10,000 yen worth of CD’s. Altogether at three shows I sold 30,000 yen worth of CD’s (about 2000 RMB), notwithstanding the fact that I forgot to bring my CD’s to the BEARS show to sell.




Download Your ARCHIVAL VINYL

by Dajuin

On Chinese New Year’s Day, 2/7/2008, Post-Concrete started a brand-new line of releases of sound art, experimental electronic, laptop Max/MSP/Jitter/SuperCollider, algorithmic piano, noise, not-in-the-field recordings, live bootlegs, etc., featuring mostly artists in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. This line is net-only and all releases are offered in the lossless FLAC format (i.e., CD quality sound and can be burned to CDs). All for immediate download at zero cost.

Five titles have been released in three days (with more in the works):

AV001 Wang Changcun - KUNCHONG
AV002 Xie Zhongqi - KUROJAWAN
AV003 Jiang Liwei - EXPERIENCES
AV004 Yao Dajuin - DREAM REVERBERATIONS (singles)
AV005 Wolfenstein - LIVE AT NANHAI 2007

ARCHIVAL VINYL: http://www.post-concrete.com/vinyl/




NOIShanghai 2nd Anniversary show this Saturday

by Ben

NOIShanghai XIII will take place this Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008, 2:30 pm, at Live Bar in Shanghai, 721 Kunming Rd., near Tongbei Rd., way up in Yangpu District.

The program includes Torturing Nurse, Wang Changcun, and Runar Magnusson from Iceland, now living in Denmark. Runar was also in China a year ago and played some gigs with Dickson Dee in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Looks like they’re playing again in Shenzhen tomorrow.

Thirteen concerts organized in two years (see list) is not a bad track record!




Li Jianhong’s Japan Diaries, Day Seven

by Ben

December 15, 2006
We got out of bed at noon to go have lunch with Little Snow. Today she wanted to invite us to eat an Osaka specialty, okonomiyaki, at a little place called Cherry Blossoms. This dish is a little bit like teppanyaki; looks, smells, taste—got them all.

Afterwards, Little Snow took us to nearby Kobe to check out a famous street for second-hand goods. This market sprang up under one of Kobe’s light rail lines. It must stretch past several stations, certainly more than a kilometer in length. We entered from 7th St. and went straight in, successively passing 6th St., 5th St….I can’t remember clearly. I liked the part where we started our stroll, which had mostly old stuff like second-hand clothes, digital equipment, antiques, musical instruments, toys, albums, furniture, adult videotapes, a lot of adult manga, used books, and all sorts of other stuff, good quality at a cheap price. The shop owners were mostly middle-aged and elderly people. The things we saw the most of were shoes: old and new, leather and cloth, they had it all, since Kobe is the center of Japan’s shoe production. There was one store that specialized in second-hand Converse shoes; inside and out, the place was crammed full of Converse shoes of every size and shape, style and color. They were distinguished by their place of manufacture: Made in USA, Made in China…. The American ones were naturally more expensive, the Chinese ones were naturally much cheaper, and there were also shoes produced elsewhere at varying prices.

It really was a feast for the eyes, especially all of the toys and figurines, including lots of Japanese cartoon characters, all kinds of toy monsters, and small-sized Japanese antiques—really easy to “waste” time on. In the end, Marqido and itta bought several toy instruments, and my harvest was a pile of monsters to take back. The only one whose name I knew was Godzilla. Little Snow told me several of the other models were also famous Japanese monsters. I was wondering if some might be from Kairyu Daikessen 怪龙大决战 (Battle of the Dragons, 1966), but I couldn’t remember for sure.

As we continued pressing forward, the items on sale got newer. 1st St. and 2nd St. were basically a young person’s world, the majority of the products being fashionable clothes. Nothing there to really turn my head.

When we were done shopping, Little Snow went back, while Marqido, itta, and I continued strolling around Kobe until we were ready for dinner.

When we got back to Osaka, Iida and some of our new friends were all having dinner at his place. His parents had made several dishes, of which one dried, pickled radish dish was especially good, and I ate quite a bit. The Japanese word for “radish” is “daikon” (literally “big root” in Chinese)…such an exciting name! It kept reminding me of the virile male genital organ.




Stockhausen and Videogames

by Ben

I already had Karlheinz Stockhausen on my mind prior to his death last month. For probably a good twelve years now I’ve had my eye out for a recording of Gesang der Jünglinge, which I think was originally issued on Deutsche Grammophon back in the 60’s, but for a long time was out of print. In the early 90’s Stockhausen regained the rights to his early works and started releasing them on his own imprint (before Radiohead or even Prince!), but as I recall it was originally only available on an expensive three-disc set that had to be specially ordered from Germany, a pricy proposition. Twice I came close to finding it: once at Tower Records in Shibuya, Tokyo, and again last summer at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles; both stores had almost the complete set of Stockhausen-Verlag recordings, but no Gesang der Jünglinge.

I mentioned this fact in passing maybe two or three times to my girlfriend, who happened to grow up just down the road from Stockhausen in the suburbs of Cologne, and she astounded me with the gift of this long-sought recording for my birthday last October. So it was gratifying to be already engaged in his music when I got news of his death, to avoid feeling that little twinge of regret at not having paid enough attention to someone’s work while that person is still alive, the way I did with Ligeti.

Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), which portrays the Old Testament story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, was as spectacular as I remembered it, all the more amazing considering that it was realized in 1956. I guess it’s generally considered to be the first composition (or at least first significant composition) to mix pure, electronically generated sound with musique concrète, in this case, a recording of a boy singing a Psalm (evidently an apocryphal addition to the book of Daniel) from the Catholic mass in German. It’s backed with Kontakte plus three early studies for electronic sound. The package contains a thick booklet of Stockhausen’s voluminous notes, numerous excerpts from the detailed scores, and more charts and tables than you can shake a stick at. Indicative of the painstaking attention to detail is a photograph depicting a reenactment of an elaborate, home-rigged tape splicing technique he developed, so that he could perform his more tedious tasks at home and make the most of his precious studio time.

It’s also been fascinating to get reacquainted with Kontakte. This piece from 1960 exists in two versions; I already have a recording of the version for tape with piano and percussion (on the Wergo label), but this CD features the version for tape alone. The work has 16 sections (Struktur), several of which are further subdivided, and unlike the Wergo recording, each section of the piece is indexed as a separate track. For a work of this scale (thirty-five and a half minutes), this indexing underlines the fine attention to every minute detail of the piece. As an example, and in the spirit of evangelism, I hope that Stockhausen-Verlag will not begrudge my posting the gorgeous “Struktur XV” in its entirety. No event passed too quickly to escape Stockhausen’s scrutiny; he is in complete command of these 43.8 seconds.

I don’t know much about his recent work, though I’ve been boning up a bit lately. Around the time I first encountered Gesang der Jünglinge in 1993 or 1994, I asked a professor what Stockhausen was up to these days, and he replied something like, “He used to write such great music, but now he’s just trying to talk to aliens!” In one of Stockhausen’s obituaries, I read that he actually started off as a fairly devout Catholic (like his professor Messiaen, illuminating his choice of subject matter for Gesang der Jünglinge), who seems to have gradually developed his own unique strain of cosmic mysticism, as suggested by this prayer posted on his website.

The only recent work I know is the Helikopter-Quartett from 1993, which I consider a fascinating, audacious, curiously flawed, but ultimately inspiring piece. Like most of his music from 1977 until 2003, it figures into his gargantuan, 29-hour opera cycle Licht (Helikopter-Quartett is the third scene from Mittwoch). It’s a string quartet that also requires four helicopters, a huge audio-visual relay system, and a stadium in which to perform it. Helicopters have a complex sound with multiple components (I know, because part of my job is putting helicopter sounds into videogames), and it’s interesting to think of using this sound for musical purposes. But parts of the score require the musicians to count out numbers in German, which seems oddly superfluous, like they suddenly stumbled into a George Crumb piece.

Nonetheless, especially in the early days of my career, when I was doing a lot of work-for-hire music, and my creative impulses would occasionally clash with the producers’ commercial instincts, I used to listen to Helikopter-Quartett as the ultimate statement of artistic confidence and integrity. He doesn’t doubt for an instant that the quality of his music deserves anything less than these ridiculous logistics. And every aspect of the spectacle is spelled out in the score, including the post-performance discussion; Stockhausen composes everything. The kicker is that after the premiere and all the expense and negotiation and coordination it entailed, he had the audacity to revise the work, which necessitated a new recording!

But ultimately more relevant to my work in the non-linear medium of videogames is Stockhausen’s investigation of form.

In 1956, he wrote the mobile-like Klavierstück XI, which is structurally similar to some Earle Brown’s pieces. I checked out the score for this piece at the University of Washington music library a few years ago. It comes rolled up in a big tube, with a little stand that you unfold and to which you affix the printed score before placing it on the piano (not that I attempted to play it; it’s way, way beyond my capabilities). It was in the rare books section, so the librarian gave me white gloves to wear while handling the score. Several short phrases are spaced about the page, and the pianist may move from phrase to phrase arbitrarily. When any phrase is played for a third time, the piece is over. The most unique application of this mobile structure is that the end of each phrase dictates the manner in which the subsequent phrase, whichever it may be, should be played, so that the same material may be subjected to real-time variations.

This mobile-like structure is handy enough, but even more useful is Stockhausen’s notion of “moment form,” which permeates every element of the music, not just a few branching forks in the road. He elaborates on this idea in the liner notes to my earlier Wergo recording of Kontakte (comments reproduced from a 1961 interview):

During the last years, there have been forms composed in music which are far removed from the form of the dramatic finale; they lead up to no climax, nor do they have prepared, and thus expected, climaxes, nor the usual introductory, intensifying, transitional, and cadential stages which are related to the curve of development in a whole work; they are…forms in which at any moment one may expect a maximum or a minimum, and in which one is unable to predict with certainty the direction from any given point.

The idea is that the music can exist in stasis, not moving towards any dramatic climax, but just doing its own thing indefinitely, until, for whatever reason, it does something else. Kontakte is an accretion of small structures, not a big structure that’s been broken down into smaller subdivisions. The form is additive, which is to say, it’s the opposite of a traditional Western symphony that is divided into movements, sections, phrases, measures, beats, subdivisions of beats, etc., all working towards a big final cadence.

(This is the same revelation Philip Glass had much later when transcribing Indian music for Western musicians, and he points out that most non-Western music also shares this conception of music as being a behavior that can evolve. I’d also point out that many composers have found this type of music well-suited to spiritual expressions like Stockhausen’s, including Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich, not to mention a great number of composers operating way back when church music was the norm, such as Perotin or Allegri.)

You could call it non-teleological (thanks to Bret Battey for introducing me to this word), or non-goal-oriented music. And when music isn’t moving towards a specific goal, it’s free to go anywhere at any time. And that’s an exact prescription for music that must accompany an indeterminate, real-time process, in which the goal may not be forseeable. And that’s one way to describe a videogame.

I’ve often been tempted to make yet another analogy between film and videogames (there have been many), in regard to the influence of classical music on new media. I think you can say that Debussy, for example, is a very cinematic composer. A lot of his transitions sound like camera cuts. He encountered in some capacity this new technology and thought about what it meant for the world of ideas, and it was reflected (innately, and along with lots of other ideas) in his music, at a time when film was still finding its aesthetic legs and real film music basically consisted of borrowed ballet scores.

(Note that this is not the same as talking about how composers of horror film scores have looted the music of the Second Viennese School; while it’s true that audience’s ears have grown to accept sounds that were once considered cacophonous, that’s a different discussion, which is more about content, or what Morton Feldman might call the surface of the music. It’s not about grappling with the fundamental expressive or structural capacities of a new medium.)

In the same way, as the notion of modern computers seeped into the public consciousness, composers in the middle of the last century began to think through the aesthetic ramifications of the new medium, even though, in the majority of cases, they were not actually writing music for computers. John Cage didn’t use a computer to generate his random numbers until the very end of his life, but the idea of this possibility was surely there much earlier. It’s only now that everyone’s got a computer and videogames are truly mass media entertainment that these ideas can be linked back up to the technology that may have sparked them in the first place. This is true of Stockhausen’s moment form. What may once have been considered irrelevant intellectual conjecture is finding increasing application in the consoles of legions of videogame players.

This underscores the necessity of contemporary music; it structures ideas about who we are and the world around us. The media we use influences the way we think, and Klavierstück XI is basically a web page. To pick an arbitrary example, Beethoven’s music, as great as it is, can never fully address the experience of someone living today, because Beethoven never had a cell phone.

Around the time I first encountered Kontakte in the late 90’s, I read a quotation by Stockhausen that I think I’d go so far as to say I’ve adopted as a life principle, though I’ve probably stretched it a bit beyond its original context (which I have now forgotten). He said, as I recall, “In everything, I am trying to integrate more and more.” That’s already a noble enough goal for a piece of music: to think through every aspect of an artwork, accepting no tradition or convention untested, making sure every element has a reason to be there.

But I think this maxim can apply equally to a whole life, relating what one writes to what one eats, one’s grooming habits, how one conducts one’s relationships, etc. This attitude reminds me of how Laurie Anderson says she used to go to other artists’ homes early in her career to see what was in their refrigerators, or how my former composition professor Peter Hamlin used to invite students to his house for his homemade chili. It seems to me the most integrated and satisfying music results from truly living one’s art.

Such a mantra doesn’t seem like such a bad legacy.




Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

by Ben

I’d recommend the British composer Cornelius Cardew to anyone who’s following new music and China. For a long time he was on my list of composers I ought to know more about, but it took moving to Shanghai to provide the necessary impetus to dig in.

I had been curious to read some Confucius, so about two years ago I ordered Ezra Pound’s version of The Great Digest. I also picked up excerpts of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, a gargantuan piece of several hours based on the same work (”The Great Learning” and “The Great Digest” both being renderings of the Chinese “大学 Da Xue”), as well as the piano piece We Sing for the Future! I also started reading his book, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and in light of Stockhausen’s death, this seems as good a time as any to mention it here. In the introduction he rails against the capitalist notion of copyright, so I don’t think he’d object to my posting it.

Cardew was an assistant to Stockhausen from 1956 to 1960, and later an associate of John Cage’s. Cardew converted to communism in the 1970’s, and a significant chunk of the book is devoted to lambasting both of them as bourgeois idealists. Here’s a taste:

The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first, to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” The bourgeois ideologist today can only earn the title “genius” by going to extreme lengths of intellectual corruption and dishonesty, and this is just what Cage and Stockhausen have done. Inevitably, they try and lead their “schools” along the same path. These are ample grounds for attacking them; it is quite wrong to think that such artists with their elite audiences are “not doing anyone any harm.”

There’s all kinds of interesting stuff that makes this book worth reading. He provides a fascinating overview of the history of the Scratch Orchestra, a kind of pick-up avant-garde collective he founded to perform The Great Learning. He also does a thorough self-criticism of his own works, including The Great Learning and Treatise, referencing Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. It’s valuable as a glimpse of how China was perceived in the West in the 1970’s, and it raises all kinds of questions about the role of composer in society, the relationships between composer and performer and audience, the value of abstract intellectual inquiry, allegations of elitism, etc.

The Great Learning may be a flawed piece, but it actually contains a lot of unique solutions to the question of how to coordinate the indeterminate actions of multiple performers, reminding me in some ways of Christian Wolff. And I’m not completely convinced that a big piano piece like We Sing for the Future!, written after Cardew’s avant-garde reformation, is necessarily demonstrably more “useful.” But his comments about how “derivative” pop music “will serve for the ideological subjugation of the working class…through encouraging degenerate tendencies, drugs, mass hypnosis, sentimentality” do bring to mind Howard W. French’s recent article, “The Sound, Not of Music, but of Control.”




Li Jianhong’s Japan Diaries, Days Five and Six

by Ben

So much for my goal of finishing these translations by the end of the year…

Happy New Year!

December 13, 2006
Today’s performance was at the UFO Club, and judging from the name alone, you can tell it’s a psychedelic rock venue. It’s also located in a basement, and the stairway down to the entrance is plastered with posters advertising concerts and recruiting musicians. I was surprised to discover that the boss here is the same guy who runs Show Boat.

We arrived there early, and the club still wasn’t open, so we just left our instruments, suitcases, and laptops at the door along with a note. Then we went to check out a street specializing in second-hand stores. There were second-hand books, albums, clothes, and home furnishings. Itta and Marqido especially dug into any shops that had red clothing, ha ha. They pay great attention to their appearance on stage; if it’s not red, they’re not interested.

There were a lot of interesting old books, including authors such as Shuji Terayama 寺山修司 and Araki Nobuyoshi 荒木经惟. In one used bookstore named Nishimuraya 西村屋, which also sells a great quantity of second-hand videotapes and DVD’s, I also saw books by Daisetsu T. Suzuki 铃木大拙. They weren’t expensive, but considering that I don’t read Japanese, I decided not to buy anything.

At 4:30 in the afternoon we went back to the UFO Club, where Shoji Hano was already sound checking his drums. Today before our duo free improvisation, I was scheduled to do a solo set. He said today he was ready to record, so he hoped that we could get a better balance between our playing volumes this time.

After waiting for all of the performers to finish sound checking, it was just about show time. Hideo Ikeezumi and Munehiro Narita had also come to check out the performance.

The first to perform was a newly formed Tokyo psychedelic punk band named AINOTAMENISHIS 愛のために死す. They had some pretty good songs, reminding me of the Beijing band Mafeisan 麻沸散. But they played a bit long, more than an hour; waiting for them to finish, Shoji Hano ran over to me and said that since they were playing so long, maybe I could curtail my solo performance a bit, if we still wanted to do our duo improvisation. I said no problem.

Next up was 10, and tonight they put on a great show, better than two days ago at Show Boat. But after they were done, my performance was really a disaster. Halfway through my solo set, I had a sudden recurrence of an old malady. My left hand cramped up to the point where I couldn’t hold down the strings, and my right hand couldn’t even hold my guitar pick. I was so emotionally pumped up that I couldn’t even stand steady, and I stumbled on the stage. After I was done, there was no time for a break, since the next set was my duo improvisation with Shoji Hano. My two hands were already completely stiff, and there was no longer any joy in playing, so the concert was very rigid and mechanical, with no chance for anything truly creative or inspired to happen. But Shoji Hano was great, just crazier and crazier; when I was ready to leave the stage, he called me back for more.

As far as I’m concerned, today’s performance was a complete mess. Sitting in the green room after the show, I just wanted to chop off my two hands. I utterly despise this old illness, which has so many times robbed me of the joy of performing. Of course Hideo Ikeezumi was also disappointed, since he was hoping to get a good recording of tonight’s show, but the result was far from ideal.

Afterwards someone came over to greet me. When he introduced himself, I realized it was Shizuo Uchida 内田静男, the bass player in Keiji Haino’s 灰野敬二 Nijiumu 滲有無 project. He also came to hear our performance two days ago at Show Boat. He was the one who designed the artwork for the PSF re-release of the D!O!D!O!D! album. We exchanged contact information, and he gave me a copy of the Shizuo Hasegawa 長谷川静男 CD he did together with Hirotomo Hasegawa 長谷川裕倫. I also gave him a few 2pi CD’s.

Just before we left, Hideo Ikeezumi gave us 5000 yen to go get a late night snack, as well as 10000 yen to pay for our trip to Osaka. What a great boss!

Today was such a tiring day. When we got home, I could only lie paralyzed on the bed. Itta brewed some pomelo honey tea for me to drink. This is a Korean specialty that she had just brought with her a few days ago, and it was extremely tasty. These last few days, this tea has become our best cure for staving off exhaustion. Two cups down the hatch, OK, the day’s work is behind us, and we’re ready for bed. Tomorrow we’re off to Osaka!

December 14, 2006
“Life’s got more twists and turns for the poor [穷人多折腾].” This is a famous saying for Marqido and me. Translated into the best English that the two of us could manage, it means, “Poor is hard, rich is easy.” Maybe it’s not grammatically correct, but if you understand the meaning, that’s enough. I’ve known him for two years, and between the two of us, we don’t know more than fifteen words of English.

“Poor is hard, rich is easy,” was in reference to the fact that the direct bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, which only takes three and a half hours, costs 15000 yen, too much for our budget. In the end, we had to leave at 6:30 in the morning and change trains about seven or eight times, ultimately taking nine hours to reach Osaka.

But all this trouble was worth it. Although all these twists and turns meant that there was no chance for sleep on the train, the journey gave me a taste of some beautiful Japanese scenery, including Mount Fuji, the Pacific Ocean, several small villages nestled at the foot of the mountain, the tidy and tranquil countryside, and the kind of wild fields you’d see in a film by Hayao Miyazaki 宮崎駿. Large statues of Guanyin (a.k.a. Avelokitsvara, the Buddhist goddess of mercy), dotted the hillsides we passed along the way.

We arrived in Osaka in the afternoon around 4 pm and went straight to BEARS bar. This is Osaka’s performing holy ground, opened by the famous guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto 山本 精一. All of the big name noise artists (or any kind of big name artists) who come to Osaka play here as their first choice venue. Tokyo may be Japan’s capital for psychedelic music, but Osaka is the noise music capital. This bar’s also not very big and also located in the basement; I’m realizing that basically all of Japan’s music bars are underground. The sound engineer was a young girl, but very experienced and fast-working, the most deft and precise sound engineer I’ve seen. When I was sound checking, she asked if I wanted more treble or bass, so I replied, “More bass,” and very quickly she had dialed up a satisfying tone. The audio equipment was also quite good; if you want to really crank it up, this wish is easily satisfied.

Before the performance, Little Snow 小雪, the manager of Super Sonic China, arrived. I met her a few years ago in Hangzhou. She is now in Japan acting as an agent and promoter for the Shanshui 山水 record label run by Sun Dawei 孙大威 (a.k.a. Sulumi). She also organized our other Osaka performance. Her Chinese is really good, and the other friends who accompanied her, including Iida 饭田 and Tanaka 田中, also speak Chinese. I was so happy that I could finally use Chinese to communicate with people!

The first act to take the stage tonight was pretty good, Tetsuharu Mashita 増田哲治, performing guitar noise processed with delays, loops, and feedback, very psychedelic, with some ear-splitting high frequencies. After the show, he told me he made effects processors. No wonder his music had such an original tone!

Next up was 10. I’ve already seen them perform many times, but I can always discover some new impression. Japanese artists and musicians all have a very persistent quality. Once they have chosen some mode of expression, they seem compelled to drill down deep to the heart of the matter. Because only then is it your own music, one that is totally unique. 10 also possess this quality, the idea that you’ve got to have something that’s your own; this is what touched me most deeply while I was in Japan. You might say that the proliferation of different forms of creative music in Osaka is the proof.

Next was my performance. I still hadn’t recovered the full use of my hands, so I couldn’t play guitar. Instead I chose to do a hardware noise set of “rubbing box” [a small, custom-made box that generates noise when rubbed] plus effects. The performance turned out alright, since the sound in that room was so good; all of the minute details and variations could be heard clearly. Since I pressed down so hard on the rubbing box, I actually broke off a corner of the table on which I was performing. When Seiichi Yamamoto came over to help me move my equipment off the stage, I apologized to him, but he said it was no big deal, and took a look at my rubbing box while he was at it.

The last performance was by a super prankish band, two guys and one girl, performing on keyboard plus a huge drum, along with Japanese comic dialog, very interesting.

When the concert was over, Seiichi Yamamoto gave us eight thousand yen to get us back to Tokyo, and Little Snow and her friends invited us out for some food. This meal was great; I particularly love those barbecued apricots, so fragrant. While in Osaka, we were staying at Iida’s place, so after eating, we headed back there to sleep. Iida is a very warm-hearted Japanese guy, very sincere. He studied in China for a while, so we were able to chat together quite happily.

Going to Iida’s house was my first time taking a Japanese taxi, since they’re so expensive. Even a short trip makes about 2000 yen just disappear. Marqido jokingly pointed to Iida from the back seat and said “Rich people! Rich people!”

What a great day this was: great scenery, great performances, great food, great friends…itta said today must have been my happiest day in Japan so far, since she was always seeing me smile.




2pi Wrap-up

by Ben

[Continued from December 12 post…]

Chung-Kun Wang 王仲堃 from Taipei had the most impressive apparatus of the festival. After his set, he was hounded by audience members taking pictures and asking for explanations of just what exactly he was doing. I can’t say with any authority how it worked, but his contraption comprised 3 bottles filled with different levels of water connected to hoses that played them as pipes with compressed air. When I, too, snuck up to the stage for a peek after his set, I caught a quick glimpse of a Max patch on his laptop. It was an incredibly subtle performance, and in that space, following such boisterous shows from other acts, I’ve got to say it fell a bit flat, but listening to the recording later on revealed a lot of details I had missed the first time. It’s definitely a unique area of activity; I haven’t heard anyone else perform this kind of computer controlled acoustic sound in China.

More on one or the other of his blogs.

Chung-Kun Wang’s Max-controlled water/sound contraption

The subdued mood was broken when a noisy street party broke out at the back of the room. Justin Padro’s virtuosic snare solos (from New York via Beijing), Li Tieqiao’s 李铁桥 saxophone (from Beijing via Norway), and Sun Mengjin’s 孙孟晋 vocalizations (from Shanghai) created a jubilant atmosphere, and as the musicians riffed off each other, they processed from the back to the front of the room, gathering audience members around them en route, clearly having a good time.

Wang Changcun 王长存 (originally from Haerbin, now living in Shanghai) played very briefly; he evidently also felt that the small sounds from his laptop weren’t being accurately reproduced and curtailed his set. His musical material was striking in its simplicity, nothing but piano samples, focusing attention instead on the algorithmic procedures behind them, the same kind of textures he explores on his brand new CD Déjà visté.

I’m afraid I missed most of Chung-Han Yao’s 姚仲涵 set. I heard later that he only played for eight minutes, since at one point the sound stopped unexpectedly, and he decided not to continue beyond that point. But from the buzz I heard in the background and the crowd of people gathered around the stage, I gather it was something similar to what he does in this clip.

And to my regret and embarassment, I don’t have much illuminating to say about Yan Jun’s 颜峻 set either, as much as I had been looking forward to it. The subtle sounds that he started seemed a continuation of the ambient ideas he recently explored with Zafka and 718 on the recent Music for Shopping Malls CD, one of my favorite new albums. I was lying on the floor, the light was dim, it was getting late, it had been a long day, the soothing sounds started, and the next thing I knew everyone was applauding and the show was over! Next year I’m bringing a thermos of coffee. Anyway, better to get his own account on his web site.

The final act scheduled was the man himself, Li Jianhong 李剑鸿, and although he didn’t bust out the fog machine and lasers like last year, his performance struck me as more nuanced and varied than in the past. His solo guitar performance actually started out quite mellow, with lots of space and contrast, before building up to his more customary, all-enveloping sound, bringing the festival to a rousing finale.

Li Jianhong resting from his labors

Afterwards, like last year, there was a chance for any of the performers who felt led to improvise together as an epilogue. The most interesting bit was at the very end, when it was down to 4 vocalists: Yan Jun’s overtone throat singing grounding the group, while Alice Hui-Sheng Chang created sustained tones as reference points, and itta and Li Zenghui chased each other in bursts.

The event seemed to be quite a success overall. The turnout was good, and the weather was better than last year, with people arriving from all over (lots of folks like me hopped on the new express train from Shanghai to attend) and staying until the bitter end. Afterwards a bunch of artists and hangers-on went out for a tasty meal with beer and conversation flowing past 4am.

Lots of performers and attendees have posted their own (more punctual) synopses on their various blogs and web pages, with pictures, video, and commentary. Here are a few additional links (in addition to those already mentioned):

Lu Tao’s blog：http://ltrichard.blogbus.com/logs/11181276.html
Hong Qile’s blog： http://hongqile.blogbus.com/logs/11114493.html
Anikijo’s blog： http://anikijo.blogcn.com/diary,12204334.shtml
Anikijo’s photo gallery： http://picasaweb.google.com/anikijo/5th2pifestival
Yan Jun： http://www.yanjun.org/blog/2007/11/28/%e4%ba%8c%e7%9a%ae%e5%bd%92%e6%9d%a5/
Junky： http://www.artyouth.org/blog/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=878&blogId=9
Wang Changcun: http://www.post-concrete.com/wangcc/
Chung-Han Yao: http://www.yaolouk.com/
Chung-Kun Wang: http://blog.roodo.com/aquen or http://wangchungkun.blogspot.com
Some of the performers from Taipei were also involved in the Lacking Sound Festival: http://lsf-tw.blogspot.com/
And of course the official 2pi site: http://www.2pi-records.com/festival2007.html

You can listen to the whole show at Sonoan Radio: http://www.sonoan.com/

I’m looking forward to next year!




2pi Images

by Ben

A few pictures and links from the 2pi Festival 2007 in Hangzhou last month, to get us up to speed…

Welcome to Hangzhou, city of mystery…
Hangzhou, as viewed from the Liu He Pagoda

Torturing Nurse performed as a threesome: Jia Die (on the left, in red), Junky (on the table), and Xu Cheng (rightmost blur).
Torturing Nurse captured in mid-flail

Junky operated a contact miced piece of sheet metal.
Junky and sheet metal

Xu Cheng occupied himself with the electronics.
Xu Cheng and electronics

Jia Die vocalized.
Jia Die on the mic

Canadian filmmaker and noise artist Zev Asher filmed the event for an upcoming documentary.
Zev filming Junky

An abstract image flickered on the wall in sync with a pulse generator.
The blue screen of Torturing Nurse

The set concluded with Jia Die and Junky convulsing on the floor.
Jia Die and Junky conclude their set

Walnut Room’s Li Zenghui cycled through the entire family of saxophones.
Walnut Room’s Li Zenghui

Hong Qi Le and Zheng Shi Jia from Fuzhou played the harshest and noisiest set of the festival.
Hong Qi Le and Zheng Shi Jia

Joao Vasco’s set featured sounds and images from field recordings.
Joao Vasco’s real-time video

itta (half of 10) trounced about the room, making herself at home in the crowd,
itta at play

encouraging the audience to sing along with her,
itta gazing at the ceiling

and busying herself with an array of red toys and gadgets.
itta trouncing

The crowd was of a healthy size, mostly young and Chinese, about the same as last year, I’d estimate.
Crowd at 2pi 2007




Got me a Headache

by Ben

Kinda late notice, but Headache is playing tonight at JZ in Shanghai, 10pm, and I can’t wait! I caught these guys about two years ago at Number Five on the Bund, back when that was a place, and they put on a great show.

Headache is put together by the active Hong Kong-based American bassist Peter Scherr (who writes the tunes), and also features Briggan Krauss on sax, Tony Scherr (Peter’s brother) on guitar, and Jim Black on drums.

The big draw for me is Briggan Krauss, who used to play in Wayne Horvitz‘ quartet Pigpen in Seattle. Briggan had already left Seattle for New York by the time I arrived in 1996, but he used to come back frequently for reunion gigs. Last time he was in Shanghai we chatted for a bit, and he gave me two CD’s of his electronic compositions (”Objects” and “Systems”), and they’re quite assured, a pleasant new perspective on someone I had previously known exclusively as a sax player.

I thought the improvised new music scene was the most vital thing going on while I was in Seattle, nurtured by Cornish College of the Arts (which Briggan Krauss attended, and where John Cage invented the prepared piano) and spurred by the infusion of guys like Wayne Horvitz and Bill Frisell, two alumni of John Zorn’s Naked City who moved to Seattle seeking a less frenetic pace of life. Once I heard Bill Frisell sitting in with another of Wayne Horvitz’ quartets, the Hammond B3-led Zony Mash, and when Wayne called a Zorn tune (”Sex Fiend,” included on Zony’s first album Cold Spell), Bill complained, “We’re not in New York anymore, we don’t have to play that shit!”

Briggan Krauss, Tony Scherr, and Jim Black are all active in all kinds of projects, including NY-based Sex Mob, who I saw play once at Seattle’s venerable Crocodile Cafe.

Headache has already played around China a bit, continuing on to Hong Kong, Chongqing, and then Beijing on Christmas, full details on Peter’s website.




2pi 2007 in Review, Part 2

by Ben

[Picking up where the last post left off…]

VAVABOND (aka Wei Wei 韦玮, from Hangzhou, but currently living in Hong Kong), used her laptop to amass huge waves of slow moving, broadband sound. I didn’t get a look at her computer screen, but I’ve read that she uses Max/MSP for a lot of her work. The homogenous, almost meditative result felt like a natural environment, or like staring at the sea…

Though they didn’t match Torturing Nurse’s wild exuberance, the harshest sounds of the day were produced by Hong Qi Le 洪启乐 and Zheng Shi Jia 郑诗佳 from Fuzhou. In fact, the set started off with slowly moving textures that momentarily evoked VAVABOND’s recently completed set, though achieved by very different means: no computers, just some microphones and a tangle of rudimentary analog gear and stomp boxes. Their sustained wooshes were punctuated by occasional broadband bursts, floating over a steady electronic buzz, in case you needed reminding that this was a harsh noise set. Then they suddenly veered into another direction, cranked up the volume, and removed all doubt.

Joao Vasco (from Portugal, currently living in Hong Kong) achieved the day’s most symbiotic amalgamation of video and sound. The opening images were taken from a train moving down the rails, and at other times I found myself gazing at clouds, trees, and a city skyline, sometimes only slightly tinted, at other times distorted and multiplied and repeating into infinity. The sound was calibrated to support, fill in, and play off the images on the screen, so that I thought I heard voices, birds, and trains collaged together with more nondescript noises, filtered, and delayed into a steadily flowing wash of sound.

Unfortunately I spent most of Jimu’s 积木 set stocking up on CD’s over at Lao Yang’s Sugar Jar stand. I really wanted to catch his set, but I was thinking he was performing later in the day, so I allowed myself a breather. By the time I realized my mistake, he was just about finished; I heard later that he curtailed his set, because the sound system wasn’t up to the challenge of representing his delicate sounds. The little bit that I did catch was beautifully sparse and atmospheric, a calm respite halfway through the festival.

(And I picked up all kinds of sweet candy at the Sugar Jar: Intelligent Shanghai Mono University, with some of B6’s earliest work; new releases by Wang Changcun, Torturing Nurse, and Hong Qi Le; a hard to find Pei recording from 2002 on Post-Concrete; and music by two of the groups I’ve been reading about in Li Jianhong’s Japan Diaries: Narita Munehiro plus that Japanese re-issue of D!O!D!O!D!’s Ghost Temple. One of the pleasures of the festival is a chance to browse Lao Yang’s treasure trove of rare music!)

Jimu was followed by 10, comprised of Japan’s Marqido and Korea’s itta. Partners in life as well as music, these two seem remarkably well-suited to each other, and I always delight in their performances. While Marqido remains stationed at his laptop post, producing the sounds of a polished machine operating at maximum efficiency, itta dons scarves and huge, red, heart-shaped sunglasses to amuse herself with an array of bright toys and noisemakers. Then she goes trouncing around the room, shouting and cooing, sitting or lying amongst the audience, and prodding others to join in her strange and vibrant song. Her boisterous theatricality seems the perfect foil to Marqido’s abstract sound forms.




2pi 2007 in Review

by Ben

Better late than never, here’s a quick rundown of this year’s 2pi Festival, which took place in the Cici Gallery 凡人乐野 of Hangzhou’s Loft 49 arts complex.

Like Beijing’s 798 and Shanghai’s Moganshan 50, Loft 49 subsumes a bunch of art galleries and shops fashioned out of former warehouse space, although this year the swath of small shops, restaurants, and massage parlors lining the narrow streat leading to the complex had been reduced to rubble, making this out of the way spot far to the north of Hangzhou’s West Lake even trickier to find.

Things got off to a bit of a late start, as bands were sound-checking up to the last minute. I didn’t realize until it was too late that New York-based artist Kim Cascone’s contribution was a video piece running silently at the front of the room, so I’m afraid I missed it. A lot of artists this year incorporated video in some capacity, so this was actually a good way to kick things off.

First up, following introductory remarks by Li Jianhong 李剑鸿 and Yan Jun 颜峻, was 12 Dog Cycle from Taipei, a collaboration between Alice Hui-Sheng Chang 张惠笙 and Australian Nigel Brown. Their set began with breathy vocalizations from Ms. Chang, and Mr. Brown quickly joined in with a steady, minimalist pulse on accordion (rapid pumping of the bellows with some of the keys taped down); at times I had flashbacks of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Mr. Brown added a shaker to the pulse after a bit, while Ms. Chang’s voice faded in and out. Then the pulse suddenly stopped, and Ms. Chang collapsed into a sequence of coos, squeaks, and shivers, while the unvoiced accordion mingled its breath with hers, and then Mr. Brown started using a laptop to layer sounds in again.

[Note that my coverage will get steadily less detailed as the day progresses…]

Next up was Shanghai’s harshnoise superstars Torturing Nurse, now performing as a threesome: founder Junky, longtime member Xu Cheng 徐程, and new frontwoman Jia Die 蛱蝶. I’ve seen these guys perform a lot around Shanghai, and I’d say this was one of their more balanced performances. Junky was manipulating a contact-miked piece of sheet metal that very directly translated his always effusive gestures into sheets of sound, while Xu Cheng manipulated an array of stomp boxes and gadgets in a rat’s nest of wires, all of which was hooked up to a television display (relayed to the overhead projector) that flickered in proportion to the sounds’ frequency, as Jia Die screamed her heart out. The show ended with her and Junky flailing in a pile on the cement floor, exhausted. Visceral as the sound was, several artists who followed complained that the speakers were roached following their high-velocity set, though it took me a while to determine if it was the speakers or my ears, since I mistakenly left my ear plugs in Shanghai.

Junky has posted some clips from their set.

Following Torturing Nurse was Walnut Room 核桃室 from Beijing, comprising Feng Hao 冯昊 and Li Zenghui 李增辉. Their set started off with some drama when some rarified sound manipulation device with a bell for focusing sound that Feng Hao had brought along with him wasn’t working properly, so he smashed it, while Li Zenghui was testing his microphone by screaming into it. After Torturing Nurse’s aggressive set, I think everyone assumed this as part of the performance, but in fact what followed was a bit more mellow. Li Zenghui went through the entire saxophone family during their set, while Feng Hao coaxed a range of sounds from his guitar by bowing it, accompanied by sounds from his laptop that felt part of the same universe as his solo CD.

Looks like I’m going to have to post this in installments, as I still have more notes and photos and links to sort through, and I suppose that makes it more readable than one monolithic post anyway. More to come soon, and with pictures!




Li Jianhong’s Japan Diaries, Day Four

by Ben

Speaking of Li Jianhong, here’s his account of the fourth day of his Japanese tour last year.

December 12, 2006
I first went to buy a transformer for my Boss ME-50 effects pedal. The electricity used in Japan is 110 Volts, so it’s not the same as in China.

Then I took my equipment and, accompanied by Marqido and itta, set off to find Zbigniew Karkowski. Before I left for Japan, Karkowski sent me a note inviting me to come and make a collaborative CD with him. He lives in Higashi-Nakano 東中野, not too far from Marqido’s place.

Today’s weather wasn’t so great, a nonstop drizzle. When we got to the Higashi-Nakano subway stop, we saw Karkowski waiting for us from far off, wearing a dark overcoat, looking cooler than I had seen him before! I’m very happy to have a chance to meet up with him while I’m in Japan.

His house isn’t very big either, but comfortably furnished. What made me happiest upon entering was something I hadn’t smelled in a long time: cigarette smoke, indicating I was free to smoke here. In a lot of places in Japan smoking is prohibited, so for two days I hadn’t had a proper smoke.

Karkowski grabbed a beer, and he offered us a wide choice of tea. I joined Karkowski in drinking beer, while Marqido and itta drank tea. Since there wasn’t enough recording equipment at Karkowski’s house, we didn’t record that day, so we made a date for the 18th after I returned from Osaka, when he could borrow a friend’s recording booth and we could record something together. So we spent the afternoon just chatting together. After beer, we turned to harder alcohol, so that by the time we left, my face was flushed deep red and I was feeling more than a little tipsy.

Karkowski gave me five of his CD’s, and we listened to a classical work of his that was recently performed in London. It was really great! He combined his laptop with string instruments to imposing effect; I might go so far as to say psychedelic. This was the first time I’d heard one of his classical pieces.

When we returned home the rain had stopped. In the evening, after we’d had a rest, we planned to head to Kichijōji 吉祥寺 to find something to eat and browse for second hand CD’s.

As we were leisurely strolling around, we discovered a shrine standing among the tall buildings, with all sorts of tomb steles made of wood and stone, uncannily peaceful and eerie amid the city’s noise and flashing neon lights. On the door was written “Cloud Cave Mountain Moon Window Temple,” and underneath was a series of inscriptions mentioning “Zen meditation club,” “aikido,” “tea ceremony,” “calligraphy club,” “tai chi,” etc. China also has a Cloud Cave Mountain, a tourist destination. But this place appears to be at least a place to rest and drink tea, if not a meditation center.

We browsed a few musical instrument shops and CD stores. We saw all the latest models of synthesizers, effect pedals, and the like. You’re welcome to play the instruments in the stores, and a lot of new equipment is plugged into speakers especially to allow people browsing in the shops to play. If you’re happy with what you hear and would like to buy an instrument, they’ll get out a brand new one for you, or if you don’t have money and just want to play, that’s also no problem. If you’ve got the time, you could easily spend a whole day in those instrument shops. In a second-hand CD store I uncovered a few soundtrack albums such as Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn, and also some Yoko Ono 小野洋子. Everything was super cheap; each CD cost less than 20 RMB.

On our way back, we saw a few young people performing in the entryway to the Kichijōji subway station. There was traditional rock, Japanese punk, reggae, etc. Even though it was a winter night, the air was filled with the springtime scent of youth. Marqido said there are people performing here every night, so I said, great, let’s come back tomorrow and perform ourselves, so we can earn some tips to fund our trip to Osaka.




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