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!




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