eArts roundup, pt. II

by Ben

I’ve been meaning to fill in a quick summary of the rest of the festival (the parts I was able to attend, at least). Sorry to leave you hanging!

I think by far the most common response to this year’s eArts Festival, voiced by performers, curators, and audience members alike, was to curse the disorganization of it all. While it was certainly an improvement over last year’s festival, which I didn’t even know was going on until it was over, getting information about what was going on where and when was much harder than it should have been. There was no clear, central guide; the website was late to come on-line, slow, and hard to navigate (quite an obvious problem for an organization dedicated to cutting edge digital technology); and texts were poorly and erratically translated (despite offers of free assistance from native English speakers).

The biggest problem was in the scheduling, though; it does a disservice to absolutely everyone to book so many simultaneous events. All of the performances were crammed into the first week of the festival, with locations ranging from the Science and Technology Museum in Pudong to Xujiahui Park in Puxi. I anguished over how to schedule my own concert-going, ever worried about missing something brilliant. My biggest regrets were Carl Stone’s first performance on night two of Streaming Objects, Dead J’s set in Xujiahui, and the whole of B6 and Yang Lei’s Feng Shui Omniscience (which sounded very cool, and the more I read about it after the fact, the worse I felt). I couldn’t even catch most of the installations in Xujiahui, since they were on display at the same time as the concerts. There was just no way to be in all those places at once.

But at least they hired top-notch folks to select the actual art, the festival’s saving grace. In the end, most of what I heard was of high quality, and even if it wasn’t, it represented an interesting or otherwise underrepresented voice in new media. So, yes, it was a good and needed festival, and I enjoyed what I was able to catch, but there’s clearly lots of room for improvement.

My performance schedule during this hectic week oscillated between Yao Dajuin’s Streaming Objects three-night opening concert at the Zhangjiabang Riverfront, just behind the Science and Technology Museum in Pudong, and ArtHub’s Final Cut series in Xujiahui Park (organized by Davide Quadrio and Defne Ayas).

October 19
Patience for the Man 忍而为人

I believe this piece was formed at the instigation of Alizia Borsari (also known for a widely circulated photograph of me belly-slamming Final Cuts co-organizer Davide Quadrio that I cannot in good conscience endorse). It was billed as a “work in progress,” and it pretty much lived up to its billing. Mainly, it was short, lasting barely half an hour, to the annoyance of the packed crowd, who had been erroneously informed that the show would last for 2 hours.

I’m pretty lousy at describing choreography, but here goes. There were two female dancers, Nunu and Ling Xi, at times very sculptural and solid and making sharp and brusque gestures, and at other times playacting, which may have been a way of establishing some kind of dichotomy between fact and metaphor, real life and artifice. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. The two images that stick with me is when one girl was crawling on her knees, and the other girl picked a fight by pushing her over, and then later one of the girls scampered across the stage, acting like a dog. See some pics.

Behind them Aaajiao was doing real-time 3D graphics using Processing, rear-projected on four big panels, and B6 was accompanying with music on his laptop. Aaajiao’s side of things was fairly straightforward Processing stuff, swirls of particles, similar to what you see in Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video (shot without cameras, generating data that you can edit and recompile yourself in Processing). B6’s set was a bit rougher than what I’m accustomed to hearing from him, or maybe it was the soundsystem (which was partially replaced when Yu Yin Tang’s Zhang Hai Sheng 张海生 was called in as last minute audio insurance just before the Christian Marclay show 2 days later), but still a good, supporting set.

When I asked B6 after the show how he was doing lately, he replied, “busy,” which was a bit of an understatement. In addition to this performance, he had put together the Feng Shui Omniscience portion of the eArts Festival, together with Yang Lei 杨磊 over in Pudong, while simulateously preparing for the launch of his new Modern Sky CD Post Haze (a very fine collection of minimal techno) and subsequent China tour.

Anyway, as I said, the show was short, so afterwards I rushed over to Pudong, hoping I might still catch Carl Stone’s performance at Streaming Objects, but it turns out I missed the first three sets.

I didn’t know the first act, Skoltz_Kolgen from Montreal, but I had dinner with them afterwards, and they are quite charming and erudite, and I wish I could have caught their set.

Then Masayuki Akamatsu 赤松正行’s iPhone Snowflakes got another chance. The story I heard was that some official in attendance on opening night (there were a bunch) had had enough and wanted to leave, but he quite reasonably thought it might be rude to leave in the middle of a piece. So he ordered the piece stopped, allowing time for a more respectable exit. Crazy, but it exemplifies my impression the whole festival’s priorities; to have a big, flashy, expensive spectacle, with little regard for the messy art. Anyway, I went out to lunch with Masayuki Akamatsu, along with Carl Stone, Wang Changcun, and two other guys the next day, and he showed me some other iPhones aps he had done; having graduated from large-scale computer systems, he’s taken to the iPhone as an art medium in a big way, and I think he’s right on the money.

And I missed Carl Stone, who was third up, but I took solace in the fact that he’d be playing again the following night.

When I arrived some slow moving, moody music, and subdued color field visuals were washing over the river. The piece must have just started, since it wasn’t until 20 minutes or more later that I was able to identify the work as being by Ulf Langheinrich. Very subtle, but I dug it.

Then last up was the Hangzhou wonder duo of noise guitarist Li Jianghong 李剑鸿 and laptopist (and Mr. Li’s paramour, if I’m not mistaken) Vavabond. Mr. Li cut a striking figure dressed in black, wailing with his axe like a siren out across the water, enveloped in mist from the fog machine, warmed by the glow of stage lights.

October 20
This night, I was all Streaming Objects’s. First up, 8GG’s set struck me as rough and loose, a bit of a disappointment. There were real time sounds and images, a long stretch of scenery going by outside of a car window, with faces floating above. The last section had white dots in a black background, seemingly dynamically spawned, but bouncing around in very predictable trajectories, evoking Pong in a not altogether favorable comparison, with some noisy blips for impact sounds.

It was Brian O’Reilly who really got the party started. I was stunned by the images he had going, stark, also black and white, but complex and biomorphic, frosty landscapes swallowed up in a ball of undulating brainwaves, unlike anything I’d seen before; it was seriously viscerally thrilling. After the show he slipped me a CD/DVD collaboration he did with granular synthesis pioneer and Computer Music Tutorial author Curtis Roads entitled Point Line Cloud, on which he provided visualizations for several of Mr. Roads’s electronic works. Previously I had mentioned that I’ve been working with granular synthesis, and he said something like, “Oh, you don’t need to tell me about granular synthesis!” Little did I realize he was a close collaborator of the guy who literally wrote the book (Microsound, 2001, MIT Press)! He even revealed that he was the friend who mentioned to Mr. Roads, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you need a visa to visit China,” a few days before Mr. Roads’s cancelled appearance at the 2006 MusicAcoustica Festival in Beijing.

Anyway, next on the bill I finally got to see Carl Stone, and he was awesome, mixing in some pre-prepared elements (pianos and things) with material he sampled in realtime from multi-instrumentalist Wu Wei 吴巍, performing on sheng and erhu and occasionally vocalizing. Fantastic balance of space, variety, color, density…awesome.

Last up was Frank Bretschneider, who returned to the idea of simple shapes in black and white, but wow, what a symphony of forms he unleashed from such humble materials! I think he even topped Ryoichi Kurokawa in terms of audiovisual synchronization, very tight, very minimal, but everything impeccably placed and proportioned, a prime example of how two media conspiring together can coalesce into something greater than can be achieved via one medium alone. The girl sitting next to me thought it was too long, and perhaps it was a bit long for a concert setting on a cool autumn night, but I was kept rapt in the mere contemplation of what it must be like to experience his work in a club! A triumphant culmination to Streaming Objects’s three nights of concerts.

I think in general, once the opening night jitters were over with, things went a lot more smoothly at the Zhangjiabang riverfront. (Although that poor, floating video cube in the river made an appearance each night, each time getting a little farther until pow, flatline, blue screen of death. I was really rooting for the little fella. Maybe next year!) In all, a very fresh and necessary sequence of performances.

October 21
Q2008

Feng Mengbo 冯梦波 seems to be the most famous Chinese artist working in “game art” (which always strikes me, as a longtime game developer myself, as a rather presumptuous category, like saying “film art” or “photograph art,” but I won’t go into that here), and having heard that he primarily uses a modified Quake 3 engine as his artistic medium, his set was more or less what I expected. He had modded the game, replacing the typical beefy combatants with nude girls wielding cell phones instead of guns and shooting roses instead of bullets. And that was about it. He ran around the level performing what might be generously described as a kind of virtual improvisatory choreography.

He pulled one kind of cheap trick, which is to turn off screen refreshing; this requires nothing more than the flip of one Boolean variable. It works like this: think of a computer game as a software film projector that calculates each image and flashes it on the screen at a steady rate; then imagine that each new image doesn’t erase the first, but is simply superimposed on top, leaving trippy trails behind moving objects, obscuring the sense of virtual space, a shortcut to achieving a very dense visual composition in a hurry.

A key concern for game artists ought to be interactivity, the primary characteristic that differentiates games from other media. But here there was only a stultifyingly simple nod in interactivity’s vague direction. Audience members were invited to come up one at a time and click a mouse on a table that did I don’t even remember what to the image on the screen. There was no engagement, no transformation, just the equivalent of opening the refrigerator door and watching the light come on, serving no purpose other than to prove that, yes, it’s all happening in real-time.

Talk among the spectators was that this represented an unprecedented level of erotic permissiveness for officially approved art on the mainland. Mr. Feng manipulated his digital girls to tumble perpendicular to the screen, affrording the audience a clear view of all the polygons shaded to look as if the sun don’t shine on them. Particularly titillated were the group of older ladies who faithfully attended Final Cut every night, as the temporary stage in Xujiahui Park displaced their usual evening ballroom dancing practice.

October 22
Christian Marclay’s Screen Play

I plan to make my participation in this performance the subject of a longer post on my own new blog soon, so I won’t go into it here. Stay tuned!

And that was it for eArts 2008 performances!

BTW, you can read Carl Stone’s own account in two parts on New Music Box.

As I mentioned above, I just started my own blog, less than a month old, and I expect to post most of my ruminations from there from now on, so I’ll be less active on GNO. But many thanks to Lawrence Li and Yao Dajuin for inviting me to participate in GNO and providing feedback and guidance along the way! (Also note that Lawrence has an additional blog keeping him busy these days; see what he’s up to over at the Shao Foundation.)




eArts Performance Guide Update!

by Ben

OK, big apology to everyone; while the Final Cut portion of eArts as described below seems sound (kicking off tonight with a vengeance as Aaajiao and B6 present their “Patience for the Man”), the “Streaming Objects” schedule I posted was pretty far off, but has now been updated. Also, I didn’t realize you need an invitation to get in to “Streaming Objects,” and I’m not quite sure how you’re supposed to aquire one.

Last night’s show seemed fraught with more than its fair share of technical problems. Sound cut out a few times during Sulumi’s set (which expanded beyond 8-bit to encompass his whole career, including some early chestnuts; perhaps he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “that 8-bit guy,” and it’s good to see him stretching out). The collaborative piece Ferry (attributed to Zeng Duo, Yi Lian, Feng Chen, Cao Shu, Zhang Ruyu, Lu Yang, Guo Huilan, and Li Wen) culminated with the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death splayed across a huge digital cube floating in the Zhangjiabang River, mirrored on five massive screens in the background. Laetitia Sonami’s set was a bit of a snore (not sure if that was a technical or aesthetic issue), a bit of a let down after years of hearing about her pioneering work; ideas were brought in and dropped, some particularly ugly sounds went on for way too long, and other chunks seemed canned, leaving me skeptical about how much was actually being controlled in real-time, though for a few delicate minutes in the middle I was quite transfixed. And in general, transitions between sets were awkward, with bumper music (which veered disappointingly towards the pop) ending early, leaving long, dark silences, while title slides with dense descriptions whizzed by too fast to parse.

But three pieces more than compensated for these mishaps; Wang Changcun’s algorithmic piano improvisations (moved to Saturday from Sunday) were captivating, rendered acoustically on a Yamaha Disclavier. A piece involving speech synthesis from internet chat (I’m guessing that was 2510, but maybe it was 4×4x4) was similarly fresh in its careful exploration of a limited range of sounds. And Ryoichi Kurokawa’s Parallel Head was a sublime and masterful final flourish for the evening, an extremely satisfying symbiosis of sound and image.

Anyway, pushing the boundaries of technology inevitably leads to technical snafus from time to time, and if some experiments come off less successfully than others, I am willing to accept this as the price of progress! Looking forward to more experiences like this throughout the festival.




Ben’s eArts 2008 performance guide

by Ben

Since people seem to be wondering what’s up with live performances at this year’s eArts Festival, I’ve taken the liberty of posting the information as best I can parse it here, along with my colorfully biased commentary. Note: all shows start at 7:30. And they’re all free (although the “Streaming Objects” shows seem to require invitations)!

If you’re only going to check out two events, first go to Pudong on Sunday, Oct. 19, to see laptop elder statesman Carl Stone and Wang Changcun’s real-time algorithmic music for acoustic piano [Whoops, Wang Changcun got scooted to Oct. 18]. Then on Wednesday, Oct. 22, come see me and Yan Jun 颜峻 and Bruce Gremo and Elliott Sharp and Top Floor Circus 顶楼的马戏团 perform Christian Marclay’s Screen Play in Xujiahui Park.

But if you want to dig deeper (and there’s lots more cool stuff), read on…

Final Cut, Xujiahui
First let me blatantly plug the part of the show I’m personally involved with, “Final Cut,” going down in Xujiahui Park. This part of the show was organized by the indefatiguable Defne Ayas and Davide Quadrio, of ArtHub, and in addition to the five nights of live shows below, they’re running wild with videos and installations, even taking over Xujiahui’s huge digital displays for artistic ends; check out the ArtHub site for details. The “Final Cut” performances are happening on a specially constructed stage in Xujiahui park.

Saturday, Oct. 18, 40+4 screening
Ok, not a live performance, but a screening of ArtHub’s 40+4 interview project, in which artists answer fundamental questions about their art and practice.

Sunday, Oct. 19, Patience for the Man
A “live performance within a musicscape,” featuring live performances by B6 and Aaajiao, with dancers, on a stage created by the architect duo Wang Zhenfei and Wang Luming.

Monday, Oct. 20, Dead J + Chen Xiongwei
Dead J’s a minimalist electronic musician from Beijing with two ablums out on Modern Sky, and these days I understand he performs in a spacesuit. He’s also a pal and a good guy, and you can listen to his stuff on NeoCha! I don’t know Chen Xiongwei, but he’s going to be doing live video stuff.

Tuesday, Oct. 21, Feng Mengbo’s 冯梦波 Q2008
I don’t know this guy’s work first hand, but he’s got a reputation as the leading practitioner of game art in China, which seems to stem largely from a Quake mod that incorporated the image of Mao Zedong. Personally, coming from 12 years in the game industry, and knowing just how easy it is to make a Quake mod (games are designed to let you do this, for community building), I’m bringing a healthy dose of skepticism to this show, but I’ll definitely be there.

Wednesday, Oct. 22, Christian Marclay’s Screen Play
This should be a very cool show, and not just because I’m performing in it. Christian Marclay is one of the truest definitions of “sound artist” around, active in the downtown New York experimental music scene since the early 80’s, whose work plays with sound and suggestions of sound and objects associated with sound in consistently delightful ways. Screen Play is a ~25 min. video score that cuts together old black and white film footage with a computer graphic overlay of simple, abstract shapes in bright colors. The score is “to be interpreted by a small group of musicians,” and at this show 3 groups of musicians will take a crack, in succession: me, veteran Beijing-based sound artist Yan Jun, and Beijing-based American musician Bruce Gremo (playing his custom digital flute, the Cilia); Marclay’s pal the guitarist Elliott Sharp, over from NY for the occassion, performing with Wang Li Chuan 王力川 and Wu Na 巫娜; and Shanghai’s beloved punk ensemble Top Floor Circus.

“Streaming Objects,” Breath, Pudong
This is the official opening gala for eArts 2008, taking place in Pudong at the Zhangjiabang riverfront over the course of three nights, behind the Science and Technology Center. There’s a huge stage going up, and from the renderings I was sent, it looks like it’s going to be quite a spectacle. “Streaming Objects” is being put together by Yao Dajuin 姚大钧, composer and longtime advocate for new media in the Chinese diaspora, the man behind the Chinese New Ear web site and the Post-Concrete record label (which you doubtless know already, if you’re reading this on GNO).

Saturday, Oct. 18
Sun Dawei 孙大崴 (Beijing), aka Sulumi, proprietor of the revered Shanshui record label, performing 8-bit/chiptune music on a pair of modified GameBoys (see this article
I wrote on the subject a while back)
2510
Wang Changcun 王长存 (Harbin, now living in Hangzhou), real-time algorithmic compositions for acoustic piano, rendered on a Yamaha Disklavier; he is to eArts was Lang Lang was to the opening ceremony of the Olympics
Laetitia Sonami (France), “A Historical Moment on a Line Between A and B;” Sonami has developed a custom “Lady’s Glove” that she uses as a performance interface, a pioneer in the field
4×4x4
Masayuki Akamatsu 赤松正行 (Japan), Snowflakes, seems to consist of folks jamming on stage with an iPhone app he wrote
Ferry
Ryoichi Kurokawa 黑川良一 (Japan), Parallel Head, integration of real-time computer graphics with music

Sunday, Oct. 19
Skoltz_Kolgen (Canada), ASKAA
Masayuki Akamatsu 赤松正行 (Japan), Snowflakes, reprised from previous evening
Carl Stone (USA and Tokyo), “L’Os a Moelle,” from his great new album “Al Noor;” Carl is on my top ten list of favorite musicians ever; his album “Mom’s” is a desert island disc for me
Ulf Langheinrich (Australia)
Li Jianhong 李剑鸿 and VAVABOND (Hangzhou), Cosmic Sexy Junk; I just translated a big chunk of noise guitarist Li Jianhong’s blog on this very site, which should provide ample introduction to his oeuvre.

[Note: Autechre, originally scheduled to close this evening’s performance, has cancelled.
Also, it looks like Shen Ligong’s 沈立功 Second Life thing and Wu Baohui 吴珏辉 have also been cut.]

Monday, Oct. 20
8GG (China), The Air Being Broken, very curious to find out more about this outfit, who I know primarily for inclusion in a VJ book I picked up in Tokyo last February (also represented in B6 and Yang Lei’s adjacent installation)
Brian O’Reilly (Santa Barbara, USA), Weather Mechanics; a former associate of Xenakis, Eliane Radigue, and Naut Humon (Asphodel)
Wu Wei 吴巍 and Carl Stone (USA), Shanghai Rhythm; Carl Stone takes the stage again to collaborate with sheng virtuoso Wu Wei
Frank Bretschneider (USA), Rhythm

Around the corner from the big riverfront gala performances is an “outdoor interdisciplinary performance” put together by B6 and Yang Lei 杨磊. I don’t know a lot of details about this, but it seems to be more about immersive installations than specific live performances. I’m sure it will be worth checking out. Yang Lei was one of the organizers of the very successful Notch Festival at the beginning of this month, and he’s got close ties to the Nordic music scene, so expect solid Nordic representation.

Ancillary Shows
One of my favorite bands, 10, has the misfortune of landing in Shanghai on Oct. 18, the same night that things are getting going in Xujiahui and Pudong for eArts. 10 is the duo of Marqido (laptop, from Japan) and itta (vocals and toys, from Korea), and they just released a CD called Nomad on Wangba records. I attended their CD release party in Beijing last week, and now they’re touring China in support of the album. So if you can’t decide between Streaming Objects and Final Cut on Oct 18 and don’t want to slight either party, head up to Live Bar and be assured a great seat.

Also, while the Christian Marclay show moves up to Beijing’s D-22 on the 24th, with Bruce and Elliott reprising their roles with a new roster of sidemen, stay tuned for Yan Jun performing at NOIShanghai 20 with Torturing Nurse, here in Shanghai on the Oct 25, Live Bar, 2:30pm, as usual.

In Closing
This information is based on my research for a That’s Shanghai article I wrote over a month ago, so some details may have changed since then. I welcome all corrections.

The biggest change, of course, is that Autechre has cancelled; it seems they were demanding someone to open their beer and wine for them in their rider. That’s pretty stupid prima dona stuff; they should be advised that outside a small circle of hardcore music geeks, everyone to whom I gushed, “…and Autechre is coming!” responded with a blank, “Who?”

Another cancellation, or postponement, happened a while ago, but you may have seen in early press info that there was supposed to be some big digital opera thing at the Shanghai Grand Theater, with Tan Dun among the participants; last official word I heard was that it’s been pushed back to December.

It’s really too bad that, even though the festival is about a month long, all the performances are front-loaded to happen during the first weekend, which means lots of unfortunate overlaps. The only rationale I can think of is to have the ability to brag later on about the size of the festival and all the simultaneous events all over the city. But it really does a disservice to the artists and organizers (and Defne and Dajuin have each put together an amazing line-up that could stand on its own as an independent festival) as well as the adventuresome public who would like to absorb as much of this new media bounty as they possibly can.

Anyway, enjoy the festival!

OK, and let me also add, as a final plug, that you have until 5pm on Tuesday, Oct. 21, to check out my ambient sound installation that’s running every day from 9am to 5pm in the 100% Design display at Shanghai International Creative Industry Week, in support of MÜ Furniture designer Jutta Friedrichs’ furniture installation.




Chinese new music on the BBC

by Ben

A very quick note to let everyone know that the BBC is currently streaming a two-part special devoted to Chinese new music on their “Hear and Now” program’s website.

Presenter Robert Worby and producer Philip Tagney were in town in April to poke around, and they met up with Junky of Torturing Nurse, Wang Changcun, B6, and some folks from the EArts festival. They also checked out the first RESO show. From Shanghai they went up to Beijing to meet Yan Jun and others, and were treated to a special performance organized by Eli Marshall and the Beijing New Music Ensemble.

It’s about 1.5 hours long and available for one week only, so set aside some time to check it out!




First anniversary of Helmut Schäfer’s death

by lawrence

Randy H.Y. Yau has assembled a set of nice photos on his Flickr page. This one by Joe Colley is my favourite.

Helmut Schaefer & Zbigniew Karkowski by Joe Colley

Randy captioned it as such:

‘Last picture taken of Helmut together with Zbigniew at his home in Graz, Austria. Helmut’s unique energy is captured in his expression here. Joe gave me this photo at the end of 2006 saying, “here’s a picture of your two favorite guys.” It’s been on my refrigerator since.’




[Event] China Incidental

by lawrence

China Incidental: Production Consumption Interpretation

Artists: Yan Jun 颜峻, Zhong Minjie 钟敏杰, Lin Zhiying 林志英, Hitlike (Zhang Liming 张立明).

Royal Festival Hall London, 18th - 28th April
Curated by Matthias Kispert

A slice of contemporary China that is not seen but heard, presented through the work of some of China’s leading experimental artists, including Yan Jun (Beijing), Zhong Minjie (Guangzhou), Lin Zhiying (Shenzhen) and Hitlike (Harbin). Commissioned by CHINA NOW, the UK’s largest ever festival of Chinese culture.

For eleven days, the Foyer of the Royal Festival Hall will be infused with real-world sounds from China. The recordings create a fluctuating, unpredictable mix that changes with the time of day, causing a shift in localities between the grand concert hall and the world of everyday life on a different continent.

The three themes, production, consumption and interpretation, are a reference to the changes that are currently affecting all layers of Chinese society. With the rapid increase in production and private enterprise, the emerging consumer culture and the availability of spare time to spend as one wishes, comes a continuous need for communication, interpretation and re-evaluation of people’s everyday living realities.

(CHINA NOW, the UK’s largest ever festival of Chinese culture, is a six-month nationwide celebration of over 1000 Chinese events including exhibitions, performances and activities spanning Chinese film, cuisine, comics, art, literature, music, design, science, technology, business, education and sport across the UK. Visit www.chinanow.org.uk/events for full details of all events.)




Download Your ARCHIVAL VINYL

by Dajuin

On Chinese New Year’s Day, 2/7/2008, Post-Concrete started a brand-new line of releases of sound art, experimental electronic, laptop Max/MSP/Jitter/SuperCollider, algorithmic piano, noise, not-in-the-field recordings, live bootlegs, etc., featuring mostly artists in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. This line is net-only and all releases are offered in the lossless FLAC format (i.e., CD quality sound and can be burned to CDs). All for immediate download at zero cost.

Five titles have been released in three days (with more in the works):

AV001 Wang Changcun - KUNCHONG
AV002 Xie Zhongqi - KUROJAWAN
AV003 Jiang Liwei - EXPERIENCES
AV004 Yao Dajuin - DREAM REVERBERATIONS (singles)
AV005 Wolfenstein - LIVE AT NANHAI 2007

ARCHIVAL VINYL: http://www.post-concrete.com/vinyl/




Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

by Ben

I’d recommend the British composer Cornelius Cardew to anyone who’s following new music and China. For a long time he was on my list of composers I ought to know more about, but it took moving to Shanghai to provide the necessary impetus to dig in.

I had been curious to read some Confucius, so about two years ago I ordered Ezra Pound’s version of The Great Digest. I also picked up excerpts of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, a gargantuan piece of several hours based on the same work (”The Great Learning” and “The Great Digest” both being renderings of the Chinese “大学 Da Xue”), as well as the piano piece We Sing for the Future! I also started reading his book, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and in light of Stockhausen’s death, this seems as good a time as any to mention it here. In the introduction he rails against the capitalist notion of copyright, so I don’t think he’d object to my posting it.

Cardew was an assistant to Stockhausen from 1956 to 1960, and later an associate of John Cage’s. Cardew converted to communism in the 1970’s, and a significant chunk of the book is devoted to lambasting both of them as bourgeois idealists. Here’s a taste:

The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first, to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” The bourgeois ideologist today can only earn the title “genius” by going to extreme lengths of intellectual corruption and dishonesty, and this is just what Cage and Stockhausen have done. Inevitably, they try and lead their “schools” along the same path. These are ample grounds for attacking them; it is quite wrong to think that such artists with their elite audiences are “not doing anyone any harm.”

There’s all kinds of interesting stuff that makes this book worth reading. He provides a fascinating overview of the history of the Scratch Orchestra, a kind of pick-up avant-garde collective he founded to perform The Great Learning. He also does a thorough self-criticism of his own works, including The Great Learning and Treatise, referencing Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. It’s valuable as a glimpse of how China was perceived in the West in the 1970’s, and it raises all kinds of questions about the role of composer in society, the relationships between composer and performer and audience, the value of abstract intellectual inquiry, allegations of elitism, etc.

The Great Learning may be a flawed piece, but it actually contains a lot of unique solutions to the question of how to coordinate the indeterminate actions of multiple performers, reminding me in some ways of Christian Wolff. And I’m not completely convinced that a big piano piece like We Sing for the Future!, written after Cardew’s avant-garde reformation, is necessarily demonstrably more “useful.” But his comments about how “derivative” pop music “will serve for the ideological subjugation of the working class…through encouraging degenerate tendencies, drugs, mass hypnosis, sentimentality” do bring to mind Howard W. French’s recent article, “The Sound, Not of Music, but of Control.”




Li Jianhong’s EVP on ArtReview.com

by lawrence

‘EVP’, Li Jianhong’s piece for the China Power Station show at the Battersea power station, London last year, is currently available for online listening on the front page of the newly-overhauled, 2.0-savvy www.ArtReview.com. I wonder if Ou Ning is behind this.




2pi Festival 2007 – 5th Anniversary

by Dajuin

2pi Music Festival (二皮音樂節), the must-see, can’t-miss annual party extravaganza surveying the cutting edge of the Chinese experimental/laptop/sound art/noise scene, is celebrating its fifth anniversary on November 24, 2007 in Hangzhou.

“2pi”, pronounced “er pi”, stands for “The Second Skin,” the name of the record label operated by festival founder/organizer Li Jianhong.


Li Jianhong at 2pi Festival 2006


Torturing Nurse at 2pi Festival 2006

The event this year will run marathon-style from mid-afternoon all the way till midnight, with over a dozen sets featuring artists from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, and Australia.



Time: Nov. 24, 2007 (Saturday), 15:30 - 24:00
Venue: LOFT49
Address: 49, Hangyin Road, Gongshu District, Hangzhou

For complete GNO live coverage of last year’s 2pi Festival 2006 with photos and recordings, see here.

For more information, visit:

2pi Festival Official Site

Maps & Contact phone number

Facebook Group: 2pi Records

Last.fm

YouTube: search “2pi”




Ronez in Rolling Stone

by Ben

Rolling Stone China 滚石 was a strange publication, and it appears to be no more. There were three incarnations by my count.

The first issue appeared in March 2006 with the Chinese title Audio Visual World 音像世界 and featured such controversial content as a cover story on Chinese protest rocker Cui Jian 崔健, an interview with notorious sex blogger Muzimei 木子美, and a scandalously self-serving history of the importance of Rolling Stone magazine in the history of popular music. A free Rolling Stone hat was included with each issue. It was promptly shut down.

The next month a revamped Audio Visual World hit the newsstands with the familiar Rolling Stone font, layout, and translated content, but the name Rolling Stone was nowhere to be found, even though the band the Rolling Stones was featured on the cover, in conjunction with their Shanghai appearance. Several issues followed in a similar vein, the covers graced with Johnny Depp, the Black Eyed Peas, and Placebo (prior to their performance at the Beijing Pop Festival last year).

Then last October the magazine was reborn a second time. A free CD was included, the Chinese name was now Music Space-Time (or something like that: 音乐时空), and the Rolling Stone name and logo were back. Many issues followed; we met Christina Aguilera, mourned James Brown’s passing, and celebrated 2006 in review. The last issue I ever saw featured Sonic Youth on the cover; I heard murmurs of official discontent surrounding their April shows in Beijing and Shanghai, so perhaps the periodical fell afoul of regulators once again. In any event, Music Space-Time (there must be a better English name) has since resumed publication in a completely new format that doesn’t resemble Rolling Stone in the slightest.

Throughout each iteration, pride of place went to Rolling Stone’s staple Western acts, especially if they happened to be visiting China, with much of the content translated from the English version. Second came the Chinese rock scene, with the Subs on the cover one month, and features on bands such as Muma, Tongue, and the Ruins (not to be confused with the other Ruins, from Japan, likely of greater interest to GNO readers). Taiwanese pop icons like Jay Chou and Jolin, so prominent on the Chinese airwaves, received scant mention.

Surprisingly, the experimental music scene got some decent coverage. One article focused on Shanghai’s growing underground scene, and Torturing Nurse was mentioned alongside post-punk groups like Top Floor Circus 顶楼的马戏团. There was even a picture of TN’s Junky and former vocalist Miriam performing at the now defunct 36mm CD shop. FM3 and their Buddha Machines also got a big feature. Laptop whiz Wang Changcun 王长存 and noise artist Ronez were represented in CD reviews alongside Bob Dylan and The Game.

For me the fascination was to try to see how at least one publication pieced together the fragmented Chinese musical landscape, to try to parse what constitutes underground music and the mainstream, to see what people are really listening to, and where it comes from. This task is all the more difficult in a country where legitimate CD sales count for so little that there’s no standard hit parade to arbitrate musical popularity. The charts in Rolling Stone China were primarily based on sales in Hong Kong or Taiwan, or on celebrity hot picks.

So in this spirit I attempted to translate into English the Rolling Stone review of Ronez’ release Ni Hao! I’m Deaf And It’s OK from the November 2006 issue, to see what was actually being said about this scene. I quickly realized that the writing (by Yan Jun 颜峻, in fact) was far beyond my skill level, so I relied heavily on my dictionary and on patient friends (several of whom reprimanded me for wasting my time on what they considered an irrelevant mouthpiece).

But I slogged through, and here is the fruit of my labor. The original Chinese version is mirrored on Sugar Jar, so you can check it for comparison. I welcome all suggestions and corrections. Enjoy!

Ronez
Ni Hao! I’m Deaf and It’s Okay
Harsh Noise
By Yan Jun (translated by Ben Houge)

The international standing of Chinese experimental music already exceeds that of rock and roll, and noise music is particularly prominent. Ronez, from Guilin, recently released an album on the American label Harsh Noise, and in addition to teaching foreigners how to say “hello” in Chinese, it further ushers the country’s underground music onto the world’s stage. By now, Ronez and Shanghai’s Torturing Nurse have joined stars like Stimbox and The Hater in the pantheon of noise artists.

“Harsh noise” was originally the name of a genre, usually indicating rough, hardware-generated sounds; mad exuberance; high energy; and fast-changing noise. Releases were typically hand-made and low-key, allowing the output to be prodigious. Ronez’ new album conforms to all of these criteria. From the first second, you begin to wonder if your speakers have blown, and over the course of one hour’s manic vibrations, you continually suspect that your neighbors are pounding at the door. Shrieking high frequencies assault your eardrums, punctuated by low frequency blasts that sound about as mellow as rock and roll. The seventh track’s shrill beginning contrasts sustained tones with intermittent pauses, exposing Ronez’ bent for humorous parody. (This is also the only track that fades out at the end.) He prefers piercing tones, high-velocity particles, and impulsive feedback, sometimes laying down a bed of low frequency noise as a cushion, sometimes sustaining high frequencies to test your endurance. All sonic events are clearly differentiated for a clean and solid mix. Your ear keeps rushing from one extremity to another, until you finally realize the whole album consists of nothing but extremities.

If someone were to assert that this kind of music, scarcely granting an opportunity to catch your breath, is more grand and outgoing than Ronez’ earlier work, I could only reply that it’s because he’s become more calm and unhurried. Before the end of the eighth track, there comes a moment of relief, masterfully yet effortlessly constructed to produce an additional adrenaline rush from the contrast. In the presence of such a veteran noisemaker, of what significance is deafness?




He Xuntian: Tianlai (MP3 download)

by lawrence

A number of my musician friends have asked about the Chinese composer He Xuntian 何训田. Many are aware of his experimental early works but have had no luck trying to find them. As far as I know, the only released piece of those early works is Tianlai 天籁 (the sound of nature), which was included in a now-hard-to-find compilation CD of ‘young Chinese composers’. I lost my copy of this CD but came across an MP3 file of it in my friend’s hard drive today. It was ripped by yours truly, from whom my friend downloaded via Soulseek years ago in the pre-Web2.0 days. Now here it is for all of you who are interested in He’s (pronounced ‘her’) music other than Paramita 波罗密多, Voices from the Sky 央金玛 and Sister Drum 阿姐鼓.

Click here to download.




Karkowski - Uexkull

by lawrence

I suppose everybody already knows this, if not, it’s available in AIFF and 320k bps MP3 here.




v.a. - Music for Shopping Mall

by lawrence

A CD release (Kwanyin Records) of the soundtrack for Shopping Pleasure 购物乐, a work by British architect Celine Condorelli (of Support Structure) and Chinese architect Wang Hui 王晖 (who is responsible for the re-planning of the 798 art zone) for Get It Louder ‘07. Sleeve designed by Condorelli, Music by 718, Zafka, Yan Jun and Erik Satie - whose work’s copyright has expired. According to the sleeve notes, the CD is intended to be played as background music and will be sold during the Get It Louder exhibition.




Peter Brötzmann in Shanghai

by lawrence

Time: 20:00, June 23, 2007
Venue: Zendai MoMA (199 - 28 Fangdian Rd., Pudong, Shanghai. Near)
Entrance: 80 yuan/50 yuan for student (one drink included)

Please make reservation through Michelle: 139 1835 3967

This is actually a trio of Brötzmann, drummer Michael Wertmüller and Chinese instrumentalist Xu Fengxia 徐凤霞. The show is made possible by Sun Mengjin 孙孟晋.




RYC Project

by lawrence

Zafka’s project for Get It Louder ‘07. Seven participants - not all of them musicians - will be working with him on mapping the SOHO Shangdu neighbourhood with sound, photo, video and text. The field recordings made by the crew will be incorporated into Google Maps. RYC stands for ‘reinvent your city’. They also write a group blog called ‘Floating Soundscapes‘. (In Chinese.)




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