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.




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