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!

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.’

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.)

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/

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.”

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”

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?

Click here to download.