Links for Jan. 31 - R.I.P. Nam June Paik

by lawrence


Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture

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Cutting the Bull on New Year’s Day

by Dajuin

The Chinese New Year means little to me except that, for a few days in the entire year, most of the bullshit in life suddenly and miraculously vanish. That, to me, is enough reason to celebrate. It is celebration.

Speaking of BS, I must recommend a book that I just discovered: “On Bullshit,” by Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. And you can watch video snippets of an interview with the author on the PU Press site.

But why bring this up here? Because I think there is much to think about, in light of Professor Frankfurt’s “from the ground up” analysis, regarding the amount of BS in new music and sound art today. How do we deal with this topic in an analytical fashion?

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Links for Jan. 30

by lawrence
  • Uneasy Listening (Varèse conducted by Zappa, LA Times)
  • Ian LIN’s blog - finally (in Chinese)
  • Robert Fripp’s definition of “good works”: “We should not expect good work to be acknowledged; and where it is, we should not expect it to be welcomed. Rather, the strength of a creative impulse is measured by the strength of opposition it meets.”(via Scobleizer)

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CNE online now

by lawrence

As promised.

Right now we have part of the artists bio, live news, label list, links, some of the texts about Chinese new music, about and contact page up. We’ve also had the CSA webzine (so far Chinese only) as part of CNE.

We are going to do it in the Web 2.0 fashion: release in beta phase and adjust/improve later on.

If you are one of the listed artists, feel free to report to us - either in English or in Chinese - at ear at chinesenewear.com about errors and updates of your bio. You can also leave a comment at GNO or post to our forum. Some might argue that in the true spirit of Web 2.0 we should have made the bio section into a Wiki, so that every artist will be able to edit/update themselves. The reason of adopting the old-fashioned, Web 1.0 way is to maintain the consistency regarding text format and language style and accuracy.

I always see GNO as a precursor of CNE, now since CNE is running, it will take back part of GNO’s jurisdiction. From now on, all the live concert/event news will go to the “Live” section of CNE. Some of the longer writings of GNO will be backed up and restored on CNE too.

We hope that you’ll enjoy this new ear as Michael does!

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Counting down for the CNE main site

by lawrence

As someone grew up in one of the major cities of mainland China, I can assure you that the Spring Festival (Chinese new year according to the lunar calendar) is getting less significant every year. The world is flat and the mood and ritualism of the festival have been “flattened” into the average days, as a result, holidays and festivals are diluted. It’s the eve of Spring Festival, after the dinner at my parent’s house I went back home for 2 reasons:

1. To escape the collective madness of CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala. (Have no idea what it is? Never mind, you don’t want to know.)

2. Get some work done and make sure that the Chinese New Ear main site can be online tomorrow. Yes, that’s right, you’ll be able to see the notoriously-delayed site within 20 hours.

Oops! Can’t forget that: Gung Hei Fat Choi! Happy Dog’s Year!!!!


Text: Lawrence | Pic: CHU Yang | Model: Michael

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Links for Jan. 27

by lawrence

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Vive la Guitar Noise! - Li Jianhong & Zafka

by lawrence

Some latest updates from the Chinese new music scene:

LI Jianhong wrote on his blog about his coming release with the Japanese laptop musician Marqido, who already has pretty much exposure in mainland China. The album is composed of 3 tracks, with Li and Marqido each soloed for 15 mins and played as duo for another 25. Both musicians use their regular gear: guitar for Li, Powerbook for Marqido.

Li Jianhong (guitar) with Marqido (Powerbook) on stage
Li Jianhong (guitar) with Marqido (Powerbook) on stage at 31 Bar, Hangzhou

On the other hand, the release of Li’s next solo album (he already has 3 on the discography) A Cosmos in Every Grain of Sand (working title, original Chinese: 一沙一世界) and his grindcore group D!O!D!O!D! (Li + drummer HUANG Jin)’s new albums Live in Nanjing will have to be postponed due to the lack of fund. D!O!D!O!D!’s collaboration with Ronez and Torturing Nurse has also been pending since the rehearsal room they’ve been using has expired.

Some news from the south: former Prague guitarist ZHANG Anding, who’s doing sound art under the alias of Zafka, is considering launching a guitar noise side project. Below is my translation of his blog post here.

Noticing my electronic guitar sleeping at the corner of my room when in frustration over the last weekend, picking it up, turning my little Fender speakers on, and improvised for 20 mins - no effect pedals involved but pure guitar noise from the feedback of speakers. That 20 mins really exhausted me physically. Hardware noise is indeed more direct and physical than laptop/software-based sound art, there are no rehearsals, the body, when moving along your gears, becomes one with your mind. This feels really great, and it’s a feeling that I haven’t had for long.

It reminded me of the years from the end of 1998 to 2000, when The Spring of Prague was rehearsing on the 2nd floor of Heidegger Cafe at the back gate of the school. We always played continuously for 4 - 5 hours, it’s all long-lasting guitar noise, can’t stop till exhausted, and went for drink and dinner afterwards - usually at the noodle restaurant besides the cafe, eating hot and spicy noodle. We were deeply influenced by Sonic Youth at that time, especially their early albums like Sonic Death and Confusion is Sex. The guitarist Xie and I also have particular taste for atonal music of contemporary composers, we are really psychos. Before I joined the band, Xie and the drummer Dai have improvised non-stop for more than 70 mins in the basement, it’s a pity that the tape has long been lost.

Later, when we were performing, we always played one long improv piece, with no preconception of its duration. The climax part was all noise and we won’t stop until exhausted. We tried everything: inserting a drum stick between the strings of guitar, using a lighter to scrub the strings or scrub the guitar against loudspeakers and drums, custom-tuning the guitar, screaming endlessly, following Jimmy to use fuzz effects……during the show at Shanghai University of Foreign Languages at the end of 1999, Xie used at least 6 single effect pedals, lying his domestic-made “Bailing” electronic guitar on the ground, tramping both the poor instrument and the pedals. The result was the strongest noise wall I’ve ever heard. I, on the other hand, used no effects at all, only the acoustic voice of my guitar. The lead singer was hitting a triangle while murmuring gibberish, the drummer played a huge variety of percussion, the bassist was sitting on floor, looping single notes. This was a magical gathering with no premeditation, the improvisation lasted for at least 20 mins. The funny thing was, some audience started fighting off stage when we had played half way through.

We were indeed young back then, a couple of years later, The Spring of Prague became Prague, the so-called experimental noise in the early years and the swinging nervousness deep down at the bottom of our hearts evolved into the complexity of post-rock. Hehe.

Guitar noise has returned to haunt me now, the 2 noise tracks resulted from the improv last weekend are just a beginning. I would like to launch a side-project which will be different from my sound art practice, it will not be confined to guitar noise, but hardware noise in general.

This will be another genuine Zafka.

Cover art of Zafka's 12 Hours: Sound Actions for Your Secret Lover
Cover of Zafka’s 12 Hours: Sound Actions for Your Secret Lover. Designed by CHEN Gang.

Zafka is the name to follow, I still remember how Justin Zhong expressed his astonishment about one year ago, when he had passed some audio softwares to Zafka, who knew virtually nothing about sound art back then: “Jee, I gave this guy a couple of softwares, and he gave me a sound art album!” Always a quick learner, Zafka (whose real job is an editor of 21st Century Business Herald - one of the most venerable business paper in the nation) has made a nice shift from his instrument-improvise background to software-based sonic explorer. His solo album 12 Hours - Sound Actions for Your Secret Lover is out now and you’ll see a review here very soon (I promise). In the meantime, you can either email him at anding.zhang at gmail.com to buy it or go to his podcast page to download some of his music for free.

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Google.CN: A Preliminary Test

by Dajuin

The biggest news today is of course the launch of the custom-made, localized version of Google for Mainland China: Google.CN. (VOA, LA Times, NY Times.)

A search for 脱汉 (De-Han, or De-Sinification) resulted in 3,880 finds on Google.CN, and 3,980 finds on Google.com. (BTW, our own discussions on this topic - which happens to be highly critical of the movement - on the ForeTaste Cafe forum is ranked number 4 on Google.com and number 7 on Google.CN.) The Chinese local version’s first obvious omission is a link to www.tibetalk.com. No big deal here. It seems that the authorities have yet to sense the power of this oddball coinage.

A search for /ffaaa//*/lllunn/@//ggo@nnng//*/ (I’m adding random letters and symbols here for obvious reasons) using Chinese characters resulted in 864,000 finds on Google.CN and 2,820,000 finds on Google.com. What is interesting and amazing is that ALL of these 864,000 finds on Google.CN are linked to official propaganda articles denouncing the movement.

Now, I have neither the time nor interest in doing further test searches, as we all pretty much get the picture. One thing I cannot figure out, though, is: did they have a super intelligent and elaborate software algorithm to decide on the contents of these 2.8 million articles - whether a text is “for” or “against” the theme, or, did they hire an army to do the filtering by brute force?

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Links for Jan. 25

by lawrence

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ADMIN: RSS feed updated

by lawrence

There were some problems with the FeedBurner feed of the new GNO, if you have subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gnoneu before, please delete it and subscribe to the following feed instead:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalNoiseOnline

The original feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/gnoneu) is dead.

Alternatively, you might want to subscribe to our original feed, as oppose to the above feed, which is provided by FeedBurner. The content of the two feeds are exactly the same.

We are deeply sorry for the trouble.

(A tip to tell if you have subscribed to the right feed: if you’re getting “sound.tech.media.china” as tagline, you have subscribed to the dead feed. The correct tagline is “sound.tech.media.future”. All the buttons in the “subscription” menu in the sidebar have been updated.)




Links for Jan. 24

by Dajuin
  • Female Chinese composer DU Wei (Must see, and “litsen” (sic) to the music samples. More on this topic - and more examples - later)
  • Farmer’s Mountain Spring Water (American viewers might be shocked by the similarity between this popular Chinese brand of spring water and a certain U.S. brand - from logo palette down to website design. As far as I know, the two businesses are totally unrelated.)
  • A similar case study can be found here (in Chinese, but the pictures say it all)

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Introducing Dajuin Yao - GNO’s new blogger!

by lawrence

So you’ve learnt about the big news now and were redirected from the old Global Noise Online (now Global Noise Offline). But we have more exciting news for you: Dajuin Yao has joined GNO and will become a co-blogger with me.

For those who don’t know, here is bio of Dajuin:

For three decades, sound artist Dajuin Yao has devoted himself to the theory & praxis of “listening.” Embracing a “post-Concrete” asethetics towards sound, Yao stands against the dominant approaches in reality-based sound art which either tries to “musicalize” concrete sounds or focuses on documentary-oriented soundscapes. Taking it to the extreme, he also challenges the “composed” tradition of academic musique concrete by emerging himself in the so-called “humanistic listening”, “cultural listening” and “inter-cultural listening.”

Recently, Yao’s compositions distinguish themselves by their non-expressive nature, and focus on what he calls “passive improvisation” & “algorithmic improvisation.” Yao’s approach towards objet sonore comes in accordance with the aesthetics of Wang Changling, famous poet of the Tang Dynasty, whose view on man’s relationship with external objects advocates “hitting it with your heart.” Dajuin is also interested in the epiphanic moments during which the sound object & the listener, or the auteur & the listener, become a unified “one”, or, on certain occasions, exchange their roles.

Since 1997, Yao has called on various young artists in China to establish China Sound Unit, a free-form collective devoted to the study of different modes of listening. China Sound Unit also works on the listening/thinking/collecting/re-shuffling/
analysing/preserving /de-composing and re-contextualization of sound objects in various cities of China.

In recent years, Yao has also devoted himself to the acceleration of the intercommunication of avant-garde music scenes among different countries and cultures.

In addition to all that, Dajuin is the presenter and curator of Sounding Beijing 2003 - the first large-scale experimental music festival in China, and the host of an online radio program (actually proto-Podcast) ForeTaste Radio. He also runs the sound art record label Post-Concrete. Dajuin has just taught a sound art installation course at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China, and is currently responsible for establishing the Computer Music Studios and planning the computer music & sound art programs at the Center for Art and Technology, Taipei National University of the Arts.

Dajuin’s writings about music/sound art (in Chinese), as well as his web art pieces, can be found here.

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Links for Jan. 23

by lawrence

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Quiet Lounge……

by lawrence

This is the weirdest thing I’ve encountered today.

When combing through my RSS feeds, I came across a post on Free Albums Galore titled “Red Unit - several albums”, I paid special attention to it because the attached pic features a revolutionary woodcut drawing and four Chinese characters - 红色少女 (literally “Red Girl”), under which there are two English words - RED UNIT.

Because Free Albums Galore is hosted on a BSP which has been blocked in mainland China, I’ll quote a few words from the post:

Red Unit out of the Quiet Lounge netlabel is like that. The artists reside in Shanghai, China and produces dense Industrial Dance music. What sets Red Unit apart from other techno groups is that they used the music and sounds of China’s political past for their base.

That’s already enough to activate my curiosity, so I clicked on the label’s link and found a couple of strange things:

1. The characters on the frontpage are written in simplified Chinese, while the ones in the logo at the top of this page are in traditional Chinese.

2. There are some Japanese scattering around the site, such as the Creative Commons claim.

3. A quirky mixture of various Chinese elements can be found in the site, to name but a few: “Red”, “Maoism”, “Yam Cha”, “Shanghai”, “Commune”.

I don’t have much clue about the label but judging from their link page, it must have something to do with the Beijing breakcore/digital hardcore scene, as a few brand names of the scene (iLoop, Reconfiguration Records) were listed. Since Quiet Lounge is an online label, all the music can be downloaded for free, but it’s too late now so I’ll leave that for tomorrow. In the meantime, any information about the label is appreciated.

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Links for Jan. 22

by lawrence


Links for Jan. 21

by lawrence

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