• Critique,  Reviews

    鐵觀音二重奏 – 殺不死的牛

    殺不死的牛鐵觀音二重奏
    殺不死的牛
    CD, Sub Jam – KwanYin Records, 2006

    Let us discuss commerce. It is almost the year two thousand fourteen, and I still take pride of extracting all the .mp3s offered on this blog from the original copies (which is in itself an ironic contradiction in terms, the laughing remnant of the work of art reinstated, instead of exploded, through the mass reproduction of auras) that I have been collecting since 2006 from trades with friends, musicians and stores around China. So, what about the stores, the often neglected sites of exchange around which entire scenes develop and thrive through stockpiling and suggestion? Where are they, how do they look, which market do they serve, who is selling and who’s buying, and most importantly, where should you go to squander your wads of RMB on limited editions of Chinese experimental music? I have no idea. Speaking of this specific record, I acquired it in either Beijing or Shanghai, if memory doesn’t fail me: it might have been at Sugar Jar in 2006, right after it moved to the 798 art district, or at 2046 in Shanghai, the following year.

    I ended up in Sugar Jar without any actual plan or interest in finding a record store in Beijing – I was there for school, and 798 seemed like an hip spot to visit at the time, although it ended up being fairly disappointing: wannabe-edgy artworks and political pop for sale in dusty gallery displays and young urbanites with large DSLRs hanging from their necks. I remember the store clerk suggesting me a couple of local releases because I said that I was into post-rock. Among them was a band called 戈多 (Gēduō, Godot) and an enigmatic release by 武權 (Wǔ Quán) that at the time seemed a refreshing effort in digital ambient sketches. Sound art, and the stuffy vocabulary with which it quickly fills the air, were not around yet. I was the only customer in the store. One year later, I ended up in 2046 by pure chance – I was living two blocks away from it, a little and unassuming shop on the strip of cheap restaurants closest to the university I was studying in. When one day I walked inside to get some pirate DVDs, I was quite amazed to find a nice selection of Torturing Nurse records lined up in the first shelf right after the entrance, along with releases by the major (that is, the only three or four) underground labels in China at the time: ShaSha, 2pi, Shanshui, Sub Jam. I still don’t know what the shop-owners thought of me and my cousin systematically raiding it to buy almost all the limited, handmade, DIY releases we could find, along with scores of Japanese idols’ dakou CDs. 2046 closed, moved and re-opened several times during the following years – its shelf of experimental records appearing and disappearing depending on mysterious circumstances. Sugar Jar in 798 closed as well, and I don’t know what happened to its other branches or to my clerk friend; the only thing I heard about it is that the owner, 杨立才 (Yáng Lìcái), is the 老杨 (Lǎo Yáng) behind the conceptual record made out of circular saw blade recently released by Sub Jam. I personally prefer records made out of circular saw blades that also contain amazing music, such as Isis’ Sawblade EP from 1999, but anyway: at some point, somewhere, I bought a record called Viva la Vaches by Tie Guan Yin Duo, which Sub Jam’s website describes as:

    two year-of-ox-born improvisors use this title to say hello to fm3’s Staalplaat album Mort Aux Vaches (kill all ox). a powerful studio improvisation which was lead by unknow force

    The two improvisers in question, playing under the name of 鐵觀音二重奏(Tiěguānyīn érchóngzòu, Tie Guan Yin Duo), are 王凡 (Wáng Fán), the reclusive pioneer of experimental music in China, and 颜峻 (Yán Jùn), the main scene-mover of the early 2000s now turned sound artist. The record title, oscillating between the Franco-Spanish coinage Viva la Vaches (long live the cows) and the Chinese 殺不死的牛 (shābùsǐ de niú, the un-killable cows), is supposed to ironically hail the release of a FM3 record on the Dutch label Staalplaat’s series Mort aux Vaches (death to cows). In his recently published book Japanoise, David Novak argues that noise music functions as a vector of circulation of cultural practices and artistic tropes between fringes of national communities of musicians and listeners. Seven years ago, this record seemed to me a very good example of how a scene could resonate with the excitement of circulation, as the freshly minted cogs of collaboration and exchange set up by Chinese experimental musicians started engaging with international partners.

    殺不死的牛 is a 30-minute piece of minimal electronics hiding a sincere cheapness and bricolaic attitude under a thin veneer of digital asepsis. Its uncertain development stumbles forward relying on samples, interferences, contact microphones, laptop bleeps fed into mixer feedback loops and delay pedals, resulting in textures and gentle droning hums swelling up and down, grainy atmospheres and pulsating tones building up layer upon layer. The amateurish feel of a direct line-in home recording and the accidental drops of volume dampen the general sense of ominousness created by the accumulation of loops sounding like the anxious cycling routines of old hardware. Sparse instrumental punctuations avoid the accretion of boredom: a single guitar note plucked over a syncopated delay, sparse gongs and timpani, until the obnoxious tremolo through which the main electronic tracks are fed  generates a syncopated rhythm that propels the track into the middle section, more bubbling synths and enveloped buzz leads hover over it, and eventually everything coalesces into a tamed white noise pattern. At some point a moaning didjeridoo emerges from a feedbacked reverb, the plucked guitar returns with a trail of echoes, and some high-pitched tones reeking of stale microhouse follow without much consequentiality. When the piece seems to be over, a roaring reversed percussion sample is deployed to show some muscle along with KaossPad-like manipulations, sampled pads, more drones, little tinkering metal percussions, bubbling noises and delays on the brink of self-feedbacking.

    Despite a general lack of feeling, the simplicity of the sound design and the inconsequentiality of the composition, with its abrupt volume changes and deliberate shifts from one pattern to the other, 殺不死的牛 sounds like a playful exploration of the possibilities of home-studio recording with cheap pieces of electronics, sampled instruments and digital production. In an historical perspective though, this record might epitomize a missed chance: while most of the pioneer labels active seven years ago have halted their operations or have changed names and shifted to other directions, while the record stores where I bought this and other records have moved and closed and changed, while youngest musicians have carved their own path across international and local alliances, Sub Jam is still around, being even recently featured on The Wire along with Yan Jun’s vacuous statements peddling his latest book (“Please snatch one if you can”) and a hit-and-miss catalogue (“I need money. I made 500 copies of this album in 2003. There are still 250 left to sell!”) topped by an obtuse circular saw blade in a cheap jewel box that seems to give rise to revelatory questions: “Why do we make or listen to music if it has no weight?” Again, I have no answer to this kind of question, but my impression is that this specific edge of circulation has been spinning in a dangerous and boring void for a while.

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  • Reviews

    王长存 – Homepage

    Homepage王长存
    Homepage
    CDr, self-released, 2012

    This one is a little gem. I was abssent-mindedly scrolling through my Twitter feed a while ago when I came across 王长存 (Wáng Chángcún) announcing that he was going to play a live set in Hangzhou without any hardware/software except for Google Chrome running on a laptop. At the time, I thought this to be an extravagant claim or an ironic form of minimalism, I imagined that he was just going to use some fancy web-based sequencer or simply play samples and field recordings, and I dismissed the whole thing as a clever statement of net-artsy fun: as this review explains later on, I was wrong. However, some days later, I apprehended that 小王 (xiǎowáng, little Wang, yeah) was going to perform all his major releases at the North Hotel in his hometown Harbin. Wang Changcun has been doing experimental stuff (actually orbiting around the uncomfortable zone of ambient/minimalism/field recordings) for quite a while, being featured on the already historical China: The Sonic Avant-Garde Post-Concrete compilation, then becoming a Sub Rosa pupil and slowly amassing a noteworthy résumé of playful and elegant sketches of sound-related artsy programming (or net art, if you care) that would make any contemporary Tumblr-curator happy; yet, the sole thought of listening to his entire musical production in a freezing hostel in Harbin made me cringe in lethargic horror (you can put your patience to test here with the whole set, if you dare). Anyways, looking at the tracklist of this behemoth celebrative live set I decided to rehash his beautiful 2006 record Parallel Universe, and I ended up suggesting it to a friend that liked it to the point of deciding to release his next EP. The circle was closed in December when, by chance, he ended up playing his Google Chrome set right here in Hong Kong. As I said, I was wrong: with one laptop, a calculated darkness and some speakers he blew the audience away.

    For Homepage – the name of this set, a version of which is contained in this super-limited (5 copies!) CDr I got from him – Wang Changcun does indeed only use Google Chrome, but the sources of the sounds are in fact several .html pages containing Timbre.js patches that he programmed in order to obtain a slowly and unpredictably morphing synthesis, building blocks of swelling dissonances assembled and overlaid in different ways during the course of every live performance. The tones of Homepage are subtle and glassy – like thin tubes of a transparent vitreous alloy in which small particles collide and scatter, tumbling across the curved surfaces of sinewaves. As the traces of the collisions interweave as a small and undulating subtext beneath, the main wave mutates and shift according to partially unpredictable algorithms. The bass end is lush, throbbing, supporting an atmosphere that vacillates between meditative voicings and unsettling, sharp tremolos over minor, unresolving swells. The result is a placid rustling of membranelike drones that envelop the act of listening with a purifying simplicity: in a live setting, Homepage sounded astonishing, with the clash of frequencies generating extremely positional effects, gifting each member of the audience with a unique rendition of the piece enriched by microtones and auditory illusions that changed according to the subtlest movement of the head. On CDr, the outcome is definitely more bland, favoring the soothing and tranquil quality of a palette of sounds that, despite its simplicity, never becomes childishly chiptuney or faux-industrialist. I am fairly impressed of the direction Wang Changcun is headed – although I enjoyed his previous output in an ambivalent way, I admire his dedication and compositional straightforwardness: just as Flicker was just a collection of extremely naturalistic and unrefined field recordings, Homepage maintains a very precise trajectory, exploring limited possibilities without self-indulgence.

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