Hanging around with Karkowski in Shenzhen

by lawrence

“Uncanny” is the word that Mr. Mark Cousins - a professor of architecture at the famous AA School of Architecture, London - used to describe Shenzhen when he was here about a month ago for The 1st Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. It must also be the word that flashed across Zbigniew Karkowski’s mind yesterday when he saw in the Shenzhen metro station the poster of the Saturday concert of him and LI Chin-sung (Dickson Dee).

“We are Rolling Stones, man!” he amused with a couldn’t-care-less tone.

Underground experimental artists are often flattered by the mainstream media exposure they get in Mainland China. A two-page feature of Haino Keiji was published on Southern Metropolis Daily three years ago when he played in Guangzhou with Yoshida Tatsuya; Shanghai-based oddball rock group Top Floor Circus (aka Attic Circus) was once cover-storied by one of the top youth culture magazine City Pictorial; Sounding Beijing 2003, whose line-up is made up of mainly then-obscure names, was covered extensively by the likes of Southern Metropolis Daily, The Beijing News, Southern Weekend, Modern Weekly, etc. And Karkowski is no exception, he has been treated at least twice with full-page feature on SMD, as well as various other publications. With his Saturday concert included as part of the government-sponsored Biennale, that exposure is amplified to the maximum.

I went to the press conference the day before yesterday to say hi to ZK, who seems to be taking an increasingly minimal approach to interview-taking. When a typically clueless journalist asked him questions in line with “what is experimental music?”, ZK replied with “I don’t know what is it and I don’t know why I do it I don’t know myself blah blah blah”. What rescued the conference from being a total bore was a funny anecdote disclosed by the chief of the Urban Planning Bureau that hosts the biennale: one of the exhibited items, a 9-hour video piece by Beijing artist AI Weiwei (whose father is the prestigeous poet AI Qing), cannot be shown because the organizer failed again and again in opening the huuuuuuuuuge video file on their computer!

After the press conference, ZK, Dickson and ZenLu went to my apartment for copies of LIN Zhiying’s second album Er. When ZK saw my piano, he walked towards it and began to play the few opening notes from J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variation. Being a big fan of Glenn Gould, I was immediately strucked and went over to play several more bars before inserting the 1981 version of Gould’s interpretation of the megawork into the CD player. “This music is highly mathematical.” ZK commented while we sat there listening to the variations that follow the aria.

Later we went to a Starbucks in my neighborhood and talked about girls in Shenzhen, Japanese culture, global politics - in a word, anything but music. However, I did manage to persuade ZK to play something other than his usual one-man software improv noise. It started when he described one of his recent projects, in which two laptops are used, with one running an Max/MSP patch that “runs on its own” and the other one controlled by him. The two patches - both written by Peter Castine - are identical except that one is totally automated and the other one has some adjustable parameters for real-time controlling during live performance. How this set-up would effect the sound is to be heard the day after tomorrow.

PS: finally got a copy of Revenge of Ying and Yang, thanks Dickson.


Cover designed by Hei Lee @ Altscape.

Related: ZK’s 2006 China tour dates

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