FM3 on FM3

by lawrence

Below is Fm3’s Christiaan Virant’s comment to my previous post “Fm3’s BM Chess Playing’ Video”. I’m posting it here because a). not all of you read comments; b). it’s always helpful to read the artist’s own account of his/her works - although it ain’t necessarily the definite reading.

What you see in the video is called “Buddha Boxing” or 佛打架. It is a “sound art game” we devised as a way of introducing audiences to the FM3 buddha machine. We played this “game” in Berlin, Brussels and Amsterdam in October and November of 2005. And then after a short match, we invite the audience to play the game and we just watch. Needless to say, the audience usually comes up with much more interesting ways of using the buddha machine than we could have ever imagined. And thats the beauty of the release. it is an “open source” music product that each person uses differently.

Next year, there will be two different albums release by different artists using the buddha machine in their own music. ill keep you updated as the release dates come closer…

The next “Buddha Boxing” set will be in Feb 2006 in Shanghai at the Duolun MoMA.




R.I.P. Derek Bailey (1930 - 2005)

by lawrence

Derek Bailey died in London on 2005’s Christmas Eve on natural causes, he was 75. (UPDATE: according to an email from Martin Davidson to Eric of Just for a Day, Mr. Bailey died from motor neuron disease.)

Here’s a concert of him playing with The Ruins (Tatsuya Yoshida + Sasaki Hisashi) in 1997, available in FLAC format on Bit Torrent. (registration required)

UPDATE: From Avant Music News:

A three-hour tribute to the late Derek Bailey from WFMU is posted for download.




ESWN Culture blog featuring Lawrence

by lawrence

I just started writing ESWN Culture together with Roland Soong, the man behind the stalwart EastSouthWestNorth. For me, ESWN Culture is an outlet for Chinese cultural topics other than sound art/experimental music/new media art. For instance, when I wrote about The 1st Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism here (post 1, 2), I confined the topic to “sound art on the Biennale”. Of course there are much more to discuss about the exhibition since it’s mostly about architecture (sound art is really marginal content), this is typically good material for ESWN Culture. While GNO will remain cutting-edge, ESWN Culture doesn’t reject anything mainstream.




Top Floor Circus

by lawrence

Top Floor Circus（顶楼马戏团）will play in Shenzhen and Guangzhou this weekend.

Dec 30 (Friday): Base Bar (Shangbu) in Shenzhen
Dec 31 (Saturday): Bunker Bar in Guangzhou

This is part of the 2006 New Year’s Rock Festival, click here for detailed Chinese info.

More on Top Floor Circus later.




Fm3 “BM chess playing” video

by lawrence

I’ve just shared this (in) famous video with YouTube, an online video sharing service (similar to Flickr for still photos). It allows maximum 100MB video files. This is the Chinese computer music duo FM3 performing at De Appel Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam in Nov 05, 2005 with their hugely successful Buddha Machine. A must-see.




English version of Ikeezumi’s review upped

by lawrence

So, as promised earlier, I’ve uploaded the English version of Hideo Ikeezumi’s review of Li Jianhong’s Talk Freely Before the Beginning to the original post.

Now the only problem is: to what extent is the English version still the same text as the original Japanese version?




“Fuck art to its climax.”

by lawrence

(Correction Appended)

I just accidentally found this hilarious post (in Chinese) that I wish to share with you as a present for the Midwinter Festival. The date of the post reads October 04, the title is “Fuck art to its climax”, in the first paragraph the author demonstrates his/her sense of ironic humor by commenting on a ballet directed by ZHANG Yimou - one of the biggest filmmaker of China. From the 2nd paragraph on (in translation):

Half-week ago, during a weekend, I went to another performance, a 70-year-old man named Terry Riley - who is presumably very niubi (see footnote 1) and avant-garde - presented the aged works that brought him his fame. There were also some other New Age, Left Field & Acid bands - apparently more niubi and avant-garde - making tribute to him with the cover version of his music. The senior himself, with beard long enough to touch his belly, wearing a small hat, made a tribute to Middle Eastern music by singing an odd, off-key tune from the Middle East. But the most niubi group was left for the last minute, it’s a quartet from Japan, with shoulder-length hair and skinny faces, they were all in soft and loose pajamas, their eyes shined with hallucinative ray of light - all reminded me of the Wushisan-taken (see footnote 2) homosexuals in the Wei/Jin Dynasty of ancient China. Ten mins before they took the stage, earplugs were distributed to the audience; ten mins after they took the stage, all the audience who forgot to take the pills ran out of the house.

Sigh.

I used to think that being a writer is great, because you masturbate with your words and mental-masturbate with your readers, now I know that’s nothing compared to being an artist: you sodomize art and rape the audience, and rebellion is strictly prohibited. In the whole universe, there are probably only two other businesses of their match: mainstream media and politics.

What a blessing!

What is hilarious to me is the author’s description of the performance, which was obviously a feast for “psychedelicists”. I would be surprised if “the quartet from Japan” is not Acid Mother Temple (or related).

Footnotes: 1. “niubi” (literally “cow’s cunt”) is the mandarin slang for “cool”, “fantastic”， kind of similar to the Hip-Hop slang “dope”. 2. Wushisan（五石散）is presumably ancient China’s equivalent of LSD.

(Yitzchak Dumiel contributed to this post.)




Correction

by lawrence

Tinnitus Radio is NOT streaming the LIVE RECORDINGS of 2pi Festival 2005, as I stated in this previous post. What it’s streaming is the festival participants’ other individual works. Sorry for my misreading, and thanks to Wolfenstein for pointing this out.




Waterland Kwanyin #28

by lawrence

Haven’t been tracking Waterland Kwanyin for a while, next Tuesday’s show will feature two of the earliest sonic explorers in China - TIAN Peng (of Supermarket) and WANG Fan. The curator Yan Jun certainly knows how to make the most out of a developing scene: the 3 acts of WK #28 are the result of mixing and matching back and forth.

1. NASA (Tian Peng + his poet friend)
2. Wang Fan
3. Tian Peng + Wang Fan

When: 9:30 pm, Dec 27
Where: “2 Kolegas” bar（“两个好朋友”酒吧）, Qi Che Dian Ying Yuan (”Driver’s Cinema”), 1.5 km east of Yansha mall, Beijing.
Inquiry: +86.10.8196 4820, +86.135 5227 6845 (mobile)
Entrance: Free.

# Waterland Kwanyin is a weekly sound art event curated by critic/musician YAN Jun in Beijing.




Li Jianhong reviewed by Ikeezumi

by lawrence

Hideo IKEEZUMI（生悦住 英夫）, the owner of PSF label and the publisher of the new music quarterly G-Modern, has written a review of LI Jianhong’s debut solo album Talk Freely Before the Beginning in the latest issue (vol. 25). If you read Japanese, here is it for you.

Talk Freely Before the Beginning and other releases of Li are distributed by Volcanic Tongue in Europe.

UPDATE: Wolfenstein, a sound artist in Taipei, kindly provided us with the Chinese translation of the review. I’ll make it into English tonight.

去年，有人從上海帶來大量中國樂手的ＣＤ、ＣＤ‐Ｒ。我聽著他說明一張張大概聽過，絕大多數都是用電腦作的電子流行樂、techno、rap、半調子的噪音音樂，後面還有一些跟日本流行樂差不多的東西。當我覺得中國的音樂狀況也還不過如此而準備放棄時，在最後幾張ＣＤ‐Ｒ中聽見這張，十分驚訝。整張充滿 psychedelic 之感，若說是 PSF 旗下的發行也不會讓人意外。整體來說表現出灰野敬二的濃厚影響，但我被其真摯的聲響所打動，便訂購了十張。我放給店裡的常客聽，得到的好評似有漸漸傳開，一下子就賣完了，必須再加訂，這樣的評價超乎我預想之外。嗯，也可能是因為對所謂中國前衛藝術、上海（中國）新音樂的動向有興趣的人很多吧。這位李劍鴻還有參加一個叫第二層皮的團體，也有發行ＣＤ－Ｒ。我不知道他是不是團長，這團體雖然未趨完全但表現極佳，雖然團員的感性參差不齊使音樂不甚統一，但就是奇妙地讓人覺得哪裡很有趣。打擊樂器的聲響有點韓國的感覺，也有可稱為 psychedelic shaman rock 的曲子，跟顯得老套的曲子的落差也莫名地有趣。

有段時間，唱片公司想炒作中國搖滾，與幾個有名的音樂雜誌硬是作了特輯，然後與香港的女性流行樂擺在一起賣，但所有的樂手都沒有超越西洋音樂的複製，如今已經差不多都被人遺忘了。雖然我期盼今後也會看到李劍鴻的報導，但如今有太多連灰野敬二的本質都不了解的音樂編輯與寫手，這大概很難吧。

如今，在中國急劇發展的都市「上海」，酷似以往的東京，有各式各樣骯髒的慾望襲捲著，而在如此特別的地方也必然會產生否定其邪惡 vibration 的對極運動（音樂）。他們必然是少數派，無法馬上對多數勢力產生影響，但確實這些運動會不休止地進行下去。在東京，有高柳、阿部、吉澤、灰野等與以下的世代，這些寫不盡的優秀樂手活動迄今。他們堅決地拒絕隨波逐流，各自追求獨自的音樂。我希望以李劍鴻為中心，關注今後上海的音樂動向。(文／生悦住 英夫；翻译／Wolfenstein.)

UPDATE: English version.

Last year, someone brought me a lot of CDs & CDRs of Chinese musicians from Shanghai. I played them one by one as he explained to me the background, most are simply electronica, techno, rap, premature noise music made with computers, some are even hardly different from J-Pop. Disappointed at the predictability of Chinese music scene as presented by these recordings, I encountered with this surprising item in the last few CDRs. The whole album is very psychedelic, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a PSF release. Generally speaking, the music shows heavy influence of Haino Keiji, but I was touched by the sincerity within the sound and ordered for 10 copies. Later I played the album to my regular customers, their positive feedback were quickly spread, and it sold out immediately. This kind of response was beyond my expectation, hmmm…, maybe it’s because there are a lot of people interested in the so-called Chinese avant-garde and Shanghai (Chinese) new music.

This musician Li Jianhong is also a member of a group called “Second Skin”, who also had CDR releases. I’m not sure if he’s the leading man, the group is fantastic despite not really cohesive. The musician’s sensibilities vary, so that the music lacks a kind of consistency, still, it’s very interesting to listen to for some unknown, magical reasons. The percussion part sounds a little Korean, some tracks can be labelled “psychedelic shaman rock”, which are particularly interesting when compared to some cliched tracks in the same release.

Once there were some record companies who wanted to hype up Chinese Rock music, they got some music magazines doing special features about it, and then placed Chinese Rock albums along with Hong Kong girlish pop music in the CD stores. But none of those Chinese musicians successfully avoided being derivative from their western colleagues, as a result, they’re almost completely forgotten by the audience. I’d love to see more coverage about Li Jianhong, but nowadays there are too many editors and writers who don’t even understand what Haino Keiji is about, let alone Li.

In today’s China, the fast-sprawling metropolitan Shanghai bears huge resemblance of Tokyo in the past: a city infiltrated by a huge variety of unholy desire. It’s no surprise that such a special place would generate a counter-movement (music) that acts against its evil vibration. They’re bound to be minority, incapable of making an impact on the dominating majority immediately, nevertheless, such a movement will continue to go on. In Tokyo, there are Takayanagi (Masayuki), Abe (Kaoru), Yoshizawa (Moto), Haino (Keiji) and the younger generation, to track these musicians’ career in detail (many of them are still active in the scene today) is beyond a writer’s capability. They never follow the trend but pursuit their own personal music. I hope my interest in Li Jianhong can lead to a door for me to keep track of Shanghai’s new music development in the future. (Original text by Hideo Ikeezumi, translated to Chinese by Wolfenstein. This English version was translated from the Chinese version by Lawrence Li.)




2pi Festival 05 recordings

by lawrence

Tinnitus of “Tinnitus Radio” is streaming some live recording works of the artists that played on 2pi Festival 2005 here.

However, none of my regular browsers on Mac (Flock, Firefox, Safari) is able to play them.

Previously about 2pi Festival 2005 on GNO:

Brief intro (GNO exclusive!)

Photo collection: 1, 2




Taking over the West Lake (sound/performance art)

by lawrence

(UPDATE: Dajuin Yao has sent in his own translation of the text, here is the official webpage of this work - with a lot of photos.)

It’s far too late to blog about this but I’m doing it anyway, since it’s unbelievably under-exposed. On Dec 1, sound artist Dajuin Yao, who’s now teaching computer music at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, got an unique idea realized. Here’s the introduction written by Yao:

Taking over the West Lake: One Minute of New Order

a sound performance work

Dajuin Yao (China Sound Unit)

(Created for the sound installation exhibition - SOUND IMAGINATION, 2005.12.9 - 12.16, New Media Art Department, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China)

Time: 22:00 - 22:01, December 1, 2005
Location: Around the West Lake, Hangzhou, China
Documentation: Jiang Zhuyun
Equipment: XXHZ1 custom-made sound interception device, Marantz PDM660 digital recorder, TOA weather-proof loudspeaker network.

“What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.” – Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music.

” …Pollution damages the senses by which the living being, from animal to man, recognizes its territory, its habitat: sight, smell, hearing… Pollution prevents listening.” – Roland Barthes, “Listening.”

The aural conditions of public space invariably bespeak the invisible ideological structure of a society. Even the low-key, relaxed, and tender beauty of the West Lake conceals a certain unseen and unnecessary imposition – in certain areas around the lake, large networks of inconspicuous PA loudspeakers continuously broadcast “mellow” traditional music (such as traditional Chinese guqin and ensemble music) to the massive amount of visitors. This cultural beauty imposed unnaturally on top of the scenic beauty is in fact a form of uncalled-for public harassment.

In this sound action piece, the artist, taking advantage of the existing outdoor loudspeaker network system around the West Lake and its central amplification control system, intercepted the broadcast sound source and replaced the existing mood music with high-volume noise art recordings by local Hangzhou sound artists. The loud broadcast lasted 60 seconds in duration.

In that one minute, forward-reaching antennae of the local Hangzhou culture became one with the public landscape; and in that brief moment, the West Lake sounded a certain new order for the future.




GNO Referrers

by lawrence

My referrer page told me that someone had Googled for “Sounding Beijing“, 2006 and ended up in GNO. Wow! Who said there will be Sounding BJ in 06? Or was Google being used as a detector of future? ^_^

And welcome, Wire readers, thanks to the plug in the magazine’s “Go to:” section, everyday I see a couple of hits from this page.

UPDATE: I just took a look at the Go To section in which Louise Gray describes GNO as “a roundup of all experimental Asian music”. Thanks Gray, but this is really a flattering overstatement since GNO covers only Chinese new music at present. However, I do plan to extend the antenna of GNO to other under-exposed regions in the future. Any volunteers?




21floor debut (review #1, by Totemz)

by lawrence

Totemz blogged about Saturday night’s performance of 21floor here, below is my translation:

#1 Michael Brynntrup (Berlin), video work

The bossa nova classic Girl from Ipanema in karaoke version (i.e.: voice was taken off), oh my - among the 10-odd versions I’ve listened to, this must be the most “minimal” & astounding one. Accompanying the song is the video of two naked guys washing the car of a foxy lady, dedicatedly polishing the windows and doors. I didn’t get it, is it only kuso or what?

#2 Thom CHIN (Guangzhou), video work

Rainy day, a view of passengers on an overpass. The camera stays still all along, so do most of the images on screen. The only moving objects are the passengers and their umbrellas - creating a kind of density variation, the murky video on the TV set placed on grass & the occasional train in the background.

#3 Justin ZHONG Minjie (Guangzhou), sound performance

This is the richest and most varied performance I’ve ever heard from Justin Zhong. With his regular rumbling noise at work, Zhong mixed into them a breath of humanity this time: a heavy dose of human voice recordings from daily life were used, especially those associated with phone conversation - various kinds of people, different volume, diversified accents.

#4. Zafka (Guangzhou), sound performance

Is it another version of Rain Rain Rain?

Zafka’s background in Rock music explains his control of rhythm and structure. Nevertheless, compared to the live concert, I do prefer the tracks titled I, II, III, IV on his Podcast page (these are probably the tracks contained in that stack of to-be-sold CDs last night).

#5. LIN Zhiying (Shenzhen), sound performance

Sorry, I didn’t finish, I was kind of sick and the smoke in the venue does nothing to improve my condition. Judging from the first ten mins, I didn’t hear anything particularly exciting, it’s like a stream of fountain recordings.

Footnotes:

1. Brynntrup’s work projected is called “IPANEMA lip-synch”
2. Zafka used to be the lead guitarist of the Shanghai-based post-rock band The Prague.




ADMIN: 1-click RSS subscription buttons added

by lawrence

In the right column you’ll see 4 new icons, those chicklets enable you to easily add Global Noise Online to your favorite RSS Readers. Right now there are links to Bloglines, Feedburner, Google Reader & My Yahoo!, all you need to do is to click once on them and follow the instruction.

Among the above 4 readers, my personal favorite is Bloglines, although its frame structure is kind of out-fashioned. It also occurs to me that people interested in sound art are not necessarily tech-savvy, to the point that many don’t even know what an RSS Reader is. If that is the case with you, I strongly recommend that you click on the Bloglines link and have a taste of it. RSS Reader is like your postbox, I’m pretty sure that once you have a postbox, you wouldn’t want to call all the magazines that you’ve subscribed to check if they have new issues out. It’s pretty much the same with RSS Reader: it’s just a “soft” postbox that saves you the trouble of ploughing through all the blogs and news sites in your bookmark.




Karkowski and China

by lawrence

(This post is now completed, 11:18 am, Dec 18)

I can’t remember if this is the 4th or 5th time of Zbigniew Karkowski’s China trips. The news is that he’ll probably play a gig or two in Guangzhou again in February. Dickson Dee (LI Chin-sung) is trying to arrange him a few concerts in Guangzhou and possibly Shenzhen too. But I would be glad to see him on one of 21floor’s future performances.

The first time Karkowski came to Guangzhou was in 2002, I got him played in a local yuppie jazz bar as well as lectured in Xinghai Conservatory (the major conservatory in South China). The concert faded in my memory but the 2 lectures are still fresh and alive. You certainly don’t need to be reminded of how conservative and shut-off the music-majored students are. Karkowski talked a bit about his personal career, his way of work, and some basic of digital sound processing (opened up an email I sent to him with Soundhack and did some modulation, etc.). If you happen to have the book Substantial #01 published by CCA Kitakyushu, read the transcript of Karkowski’s workshop there, it’s quite similar to what he did in Guangzhou in Xinghai.

In November, 2003, Karkowski played in Sounding Beijing, curated and sponsored by Dajuin Yao, it’s the first-ever large-scale experimental festival in mainland China. I half-jokingly suggested to ZK that, since you had released an album with Helmut Schaefer (also a participant of the festival), why don’t you improvise with him on stage. And so they did. As a witness of how Schaefer’s Powerbook fell to the ground from the 1.5-meter desk owing to his famous intense body gesture, I decided at that moment not to make such an unwise suggestion in the future. (The Powerbook still works, according to Schaefer.)

Karkowski’s 2004 concert in Solo Bar, Guangzhou is the best one I’ve heard from him. His Powerbook G3 was out-of-order then so he used my iBook G3 instead, some of the materials he used are from the much-delayed upcoming CD+DVD release on Asphodel, and the main DSP tool was simply a Hyperprism plug-in. The structured, dense, visceral “physical vibration” coming out of this simple setup reiterated Karkowski’s highly-developed craftsmanship as a sound artist.

The concert of ZK in the Theatre of Guangdong Modern Dance Company a few months ago is the one that reminded me the number of loudspeakers burnt by this man. It triggered the strongest and longest tinnitus I’ve ever experienced. He used a SuperCollider 2 patch (yes, he’s still on Powerbook G3, OS Classic) written by SC guru Alberto de Campo, and some Max/MSP patches. The PA system (Mackie full-range and subs) must be one of the best he’d ever had in China (the other is the EAW system on Sounding Beijing 2003).

It’s obvious that Chinese audience’s enthusiasm towards Karkowski has shrank due to his over-exposure here, however, local sound artists are still very interested to observe the way a veteran experimental musician deals with sound. Personally I like his stuff, not because it’s avant-garde (it’s not), not because it’s thought-provoking (though it occasionally is), the reason that I still love to catch his concert is simply their unpredictability - you’ll end up with either a strong or lame concert, but that’s what it should be in the first place: the tension between your expectation and the result is part of the definition of “experimental”.

[The Polish version of this article can be read here]

Add this post to del.icio.us




times.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS.