CNE temporarily down

by lawrence

Due to a system restore failure at the server end, www.chinesenewear.com were redirected undesirably to another website this morning, which resulted in the outage of all our blogs. The problem is fixed, sorry for any inconvenience.




(Restored post) New theme of GNO

by lawrence

It’s time for a change, RSS subscribers please go to the home base and take a look at the new theme of GNO. It’s the Hiperminimalist theme designed by Borja Fernandez, which I also use for the Maldives Punkfan blog. Expect a lot of tuning in the next few days.




Ronez’s new album on Harshnoise

by lawrence

Ronez (ZHOU Pei) has a new release out on Harshnoise, it’s a CDR sold for $8.00, titled Ni Hao! I’m Deaf And It’s Okay.

I wonder who did the cover design, which bears a strong resemblance to Torturing Nurse’s Haishang Nurse. (UPDATE: I’m a jerk, apparently this is the unified cover design of Harshnoise, as you can see from the buying link below.)

Go buy “Ni Hao” here.




Xu / Livingston Installation terminated, Justin Zhong in London

by lawrence

Weird thing is, every time I stopped updating for a few days, my subscribers number would go up a little bit (as shown in the small pink logo in the sidebar). I must be so narccisic to follow it every minute during the regular-updated period.

The news today is that the first large-scale sound installation in the public space of mainland China has been officiallly terminated. This work by renowned New York-based Chinese artist XU Bing and musician / sound designer Hugh Livingston was documented in the very days of GNO (see this and this), it was designed to function as a kind of sonic game, where people are surrounded by soundscape as a manipulated result of the sounds produced by their unintentional action and picked up by the hidden microphones. The installation was supposed to be built in a residential community in the suburbia of Guangzhou (whose future residents would possibly be able to wander around an unusual art museum designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA and being built now), and yes, the original commissioner / funder is but the real estate developer, namely Times Group, themselves. Why they pulled the plug is something I don’t want to waste your time reading about, as someone who was involved in the project, I can assure you that it’s another classic example of what you would call “a Chinese thing”. What a pity, it could have been a cool work, at least technically.

-

Justin Zhong is in London right now working on a project with the multimedia group D-Fuse, whose members travelled to several Chinese cities collecting audio / video materials for their performance in the UK. Zhong’s being invited is somewhat like an exchange program, he’ll be doing field-recording there for two weeks (started last week) and play a gig or two if possible. If you are interested in having him performs in the next week, feel free to drop him a line at stumble50 [at] hotmail [dot] com.




Ulf Langheinrich Taipei lecture recording

by lawrence

From Recorderz:

(in translation)

Recording of the Taipei lecture of Granular Synthesis‘ Ulf Langheinrich: part I, part II.

He fired off a lot of pithy criticism towards the academic publishing mechanism of new music, the “gamification” of the current interactive art world and the technique-over-content tendency. Highly recommended for anyone who has worked up to plunge into the world of Max/MSP.

The lecture took place on June 24 in MoCA Taipei, it’s part of the program of Granular Synthesis’ exhibition, which lasts till September. See the official site of the exhibition here. Please note that the above commentary about the lecture is from Rio (LEE Yehlin), the translator of the official Chinese version of the Max/MSP/Jitter tutorial.




GNO Top 10 - LIN Zhiying

by lawrence

LIN Zhiying is a sound artist based in Guangzhou / Shenzhen. So far he has released two solo albums and a collaboration phonography album with Justin Zhong. He’s a part of 21floor, a Guangzhou-based open collective of multimedia artists.

Lin’s entry at Chinese New Ear is here.

LIN ZHIYING’S FAVOURITE ALBUMS

# Eric La Casa - Secousses Panoramiques / The Stone of the Threshold

# Unknown Artists - Indian Soundscapes

# Tetsuo FURUDATE 古馆彻夫 - Live (bootleg, place & date unknown)

# Merzbow - Music for Bondage Performance vol. 2

# Helmut Schaefer - Isolated Irritation

# David Darling - Cycles

# Yellow Magic Orchestra - Public Pressure

# Zeitkratzer / John Duncan - Fresh

# Kazutoki UMEZU 梅津和时 － Eclecticism

# Cheer Chan 陈绮贞 － 还是会寂寞 / Groupies 吉他手 / 华丽的冒险

(GNO Top 10 series invites Chinese sound artists/experimental musicians to list music/albums that are either their personal favorites or have crucial influence on them as artists. By doing this, we try to present the Chinese aural art scene in the context of the global music ecology.)




WFMU played LI Jianhong’s Drama Script

by lawrence

In his comment, Christiaan Virant of FM3 mentioned the recent airing of Hangzhou noisician LI Jianhong’s album Drama Script on New York’s WFMU. A link to the WFMU blog post by Brian Turner was provided.

As my knowledge goes, this is Li’s second exposure on the legendary radio station. The first one is documented by GNO in this post dated Jan 18, 2006.

However, Brian Turner mistook Post-Concrete as a Hong Kong label in the post, and he also seems to be unaware of the fact that the label is run by Dajuin Yao himself.

A few years back Hong Kong-based Post Concrete Records issued a snapshot of the scene called China: The Sonic Avant-Garde, as well as amazing music from Dajuin Yao……

Virant also left comment to Turner’s post, stating that:

Li truly is one of the top musicians in china! and hardest working as well, churning out what seems like dozens of disks every month.

Even on the rhetorical level, this is too distant from truth. The hardest-working man in the scene can’t be anyone else but Yan Jun, any objection? And Li has released three album in almost three years, that’s quite different from “dozens of disks every month” right?

Related:

# PSF’s Hideo Ikeezumi reviews Li’s album (in Japanese, Chinese and English)
# Li’s Selected Works 2001 - 2005 (net release, free download)




Torturing Nurse / OO / Wang Changcun on YouTube

by lawrence

(via Junky’s blog)

You can now watch four videos of Torturing Nurse on YouTube, two of them featuring OO (Two Noughts) and WANG Changcun, who just had his debut album out on Sub Rosa.




Zhang Xiaozhou on Dickson Dee’s soccer-themed sound work

by lawrence

A column title struck me when I was flipping through today’s Southern Metropolis Daily, also known as the most outspoken newspaper in mainland China. It’s in the opinion page of their special feature about the ‘06 World Cup, and here it goes: “Sound art in the World Cup”.

It can’t be from anyone else but ZHANG Xiaozhou 张晓舟, a veteran media worker and the columnist who built up his reputation by “writing soccer review in the style of Rock review”. So he’s on errand in Germany covering the game and took his chance to visit the soccer-themed sound art exhibition called Audio:Elf at Museum für Angewandte Kunst, in which Hong Kong-based Dickson Dee (LI Chin-sung) is a participant. It’s Zhang’s reputation as a much-loved (and hated) columnist that makes SMD willing to publish anything he pens: as it turned out, few of his writings for the sports pages are about sports at all.

In the article about Audio:Elf, Zhang offers the following description of Dickson’s piece:

(in translation)

A lot of works involve field-recording from the pitch or the sound of TV / Radio narrators as sound materials. Li uses the voice of mandarin and cantonese commentator! (Liu Jianhong could go and sue him.) He has taken two alternative source materials: an essay by Zhang Xiaozhou (the title of which - a tad bitter given the current circumstance - is called “I don’t mind Brazil being the champion every time.”), and the photos of Yang Chen, Xie Hui and Shao Jiayi (Li misses the “yi” in “Shao Jiao (sic) Yi” in the intro text though) - three Chinese soccer players who has played in Germany in succession. Li transforms the text and the pics into sound with software.

Same old tricks. Theoretically of course everything can be used as source material of sound art. In reality, some artists use materials, some exploit them. Don’t take me wrong, Dickson is NOT one of the latter - he’s not sophisticated enough to do that - but inevitably falls into the “user” category. This is a blessing indeed, as Li’s music is much more enjoyable and much less annoying than those of some of the “exploiter-type” sound artists out there.

Related: Zhang Xiaozhou’s blog (in Chinese).




Waterland Kwanyin #55

by lawrence

When: 21:30, July 4 (Tuesday)
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)
Free Entrance.

Artists:

1. Fannullone
2. EL YAng (YANG Jie)

Go to Yan Jun’s blog for artists’ bios.

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




Furudate displays his love for western literary classic again

by lawrence

Learnt from Dickson Dee’s blog that Tetsuo Furudate has a new work finished called “The Turn of the Screw”. I think this “literary classic + noise + theatre” approach could be replicated by LI Jianhong, who, among all the Chinese experimentalists, maintains the best balance of literary and musical sensibilities (IMHO). And he loves literary classics! His email address contains “Monky King”, he’s good at irritating the rest of the table with an overdose of Chinese spiritual tales (he even has a dedicated blog for this!), he’s obsessed with Zen Buddism and has once blogged about (link in Chinese) his newly purchased Chinese Zen classic Five Lamps Merged in the Source (Wu Deng Hui Yuan).

In this PDF about The Turn of the Screw, Furudate puts Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Ingmar Bergman and Benjamin Britton, among others, on the thanks list. Is this another example of the name-dropping sin? Listen to the piece here and make your own judgement.

PS: I sincerely hope that in the future, no Henry James fans ends up at this post while doing their research online. ^_^




How to read Yan Jun between the lines

by lawrence

From Yan Jun’s blog:

(in translation)

ZHANG Jian sold another 15 Buddha Machines, but the overall number sold in mainland China has yet to hit 200. No surprise, since a lot of Chinese people lacks genuine interest towards anything. In an era with little passion, even entertainment is taken lightheartedly.

Read:

Zhang Jian sold yet another 15 Buddha Machines, the overall number sold in mainland China is about to hit 200. No surprise, since a lot of Chinese artsy people lack genuine criteria towards anything. In an era with endless openness, even the Emperor’s Clothes is taken wholeheartedly.

Here’s Yan’s original blog post (in Chinese), don’t ask me for context, that paragraph is its own context.

Related: Search GNO for “Buddha Machine”.




New kids on the block: ZenBoBo

by lawrence

(via Dickson Dee’s Weblog)

There will be a gig at NiLiHo Gallery, Foshan tonight, featuring ZenBoBo 郑伯伯, the new trio of Shenzhen-based ZenLu, Abai and Sunflower. From their MySpace page:

somewhat remarkably, the youthful trio ZenBoBo trio has an uncanny ability to sound like an a vernacular type, not a MANDARIN type. it established in April of 2006 by a punk-had been “Bai”, a low-key music-lovers “Sunflower” and bandsman Luzheng, in order to explore many kinds of possibility that the sound is in this commercial city of Shenzhen. they are not Blowing. Like Tumble Weed, they have a distinct style. they cherish ancient music but modern. they Combine fashion and origin together. their live bulid meditation of ZEN, make one deep in thought.




times.
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