• Civilization and All Its Created
    Reviews

    Madness & Civilization – Civilization and All Its Created

    2019年07月14日
    Civilization and All Its Created

    Madness & Civilization
    Civilization and All Its Created
    CD-R, TIC Productions, 2008

    No, this is not an audiobook of Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault’s 1961 genealogy of folly and no, the CD isn’t damaged and the first track is supposed to be ninety seconds of hissing, bitcrushed noise reverberating over a gurgling bass. This is not a meme either, although the small portrait of Foucault at the center of the white cover might make it look like post-ironic graduate student humor; the second track is a progressive layering of multiple time-stretched audio clips driven into digital distortion, climbing up in pitch one after the other. Under the “Michel Foucault 1926 – 1984” dedication, two lines of text (the album title?) read “civilization and all its created apartness, crazy, rapacity, corrupt, anomalism…”, and the third track puts this object squarely in the category of noise music: the panning is extreme, and a droning bassline pulsates on the right while a magma of overdriven hiss churns on the left – after a minute, a sudden jolt fractures the composition and throws things off-kilter, as sequences of sweeping digital clipping stutter from different locations in the stereo field. This could be a lesser Merzbow record about a peculiar Japanese bird, if only the cover didn’t anchor it to the weird undergrowth of late-2000s Chinese noise. I forgot where I bought this CD-R, and only vaguely remember it being the last one of its kind, housed in a broken jewel case – it might have been Beijing, but it was probably Shanghai. Track four continues the surprising tour in lo-fi deconstruction, as bouts of spurting and hissing frame a recurring synth beep, sudden microphone pops, and a continuous grinding sound in the background. The aesthetic purpose is clear, as is its enthusiastic lack of direction.

    According to the few traces of this record available online, its title is Civilization and All Its Created, and it is the first full-length record released by Madness & Civilization, a noise project of a certain 楊彬 (Yáng Bīn) from Kunming, Yunnan province. Also known as “Moose”, Yang Bin loves Death in June and Current 93 and has previously formed some bands which all quickly fell apart – after setting up Most of the Taciturn, his first solo project, he established Madness & Civilization in 2008. Some concrete tinkling sounds introduce track five, featuring ominous synth lines and fragmentary samples coming in and out an unstable droning distortion, a funky bass counterpointing the collage as harsh noise restlessness veers toward the playfulness of a certain post-industrial lineage. Released by Beijing-based TIC Productions in 2008, this record is clearly a concept album: as Yang Bin asks from its liner notes,

    Human beings are bound to go mad to the degree that non-madness becomes just another form of madness. Are there still people in China who care about Foucault?

    With its booming tremors crisscrossed by metallic synth squeals, track six seems to share this existential despair about the questionable status of Foucault’s heritage in the People’s Republic. The label’s record description introduces Yang Bin as a state-owned enterprise employee who enjoys delving into philosophical and historical questions, “thinking while reading, doubting while thinking, and hating while doubting.” Madness & Civilization is his new “weapon”, a harsh noise project dedicated to “the most extreme and violent music in human history”. Track seven sounds like a ring-modulated lead fed into a short delay through a broken cable – it might not top the world chart of extreme musical violence, but it’s definitely irritating.

    Before this record, Madness & Civilization released the demo single 198-964, clearly titled after the date of the Tian’anmen protests crackdown. Surprisingly, unlike most cultural artifacts nodding towards the event, this record’s page is still available on Douban, and one listener comment even reads

    I think of the Summer Palace, and I also think of those young people, and those equally young soldiers. The generation of our parents has experienced the fluttering of white clothes, the age of college campus poets. I haven’t experienced it personally and I feel lucky, but I also feel sorry.

    The stuttering continues on track eight, now coupled with rising and falling volumes, as if the signal path broke down under signal saturation. Writing about Madness & Civilization, Yan Jun connects its output to the arrival of broadband internet in the country, which put an end to the last ideological decade of the country’s cultural landscape: “violence was over, and pornography began”. Prompted by Yang Bin’s vague melodies and fuzzy noises, he concludes:

    Rather than calling this noise, it is better to say that the author finds himself among fragments of language, trying to recompose them back into a once-complete subject: he also wants to cry.

    Track nine quickens the pace, as rhythmic surges of bubbling synth overlap with flanger-processed noise crackle. Only around fifty people have listened to and rated Yang Bin’s records on Douban, and their relative obscurity has afforded their pages a degree of invisibility to censorship; it is unclear how much Civilization and All Its Created manages to “kidnap people’s homesickness by using seemingly unfamiliar materials,” as Yan Jun suggests, but this record remains a quirky chapter in the history of Chinese noise. The last track ends in a thunderclap and a prolonged synth scream that suddenly cuts to silence.

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  • Sonic Rituals
    Reviews

    梅志勇 – Sonic Rituals 声响仪式

    2018年10月07日

    Sonic Rituals梅志勇
    Sonic Rituals 声响仪式
    DVD, Fuzztape, 2015

    I’ve crossed paths with 梅志勇 (Méi Zhìyǒng) on a few occasions, mostly at shows he was playing in the city I happened to be living – sometimes it was Hong Kong, other times Shanghai. He consistently struck me as an outward, fun-loving guy who was always either drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette or stomping on a chain of distortion pedals while screaming his lungs out, and Sonic Rituals 声响仪式 confirms my impression. This DVD, released by his own Fuzztape label, documents the 2014 “Sonic Rituals” tour that brought Dave Phillips and Mei Zhiyong to more than fifteen Chinese cities (including Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, Shenzhen, Xi’an and Dalian) with the help of the Nojiji collective, Yan Jun’s Subjam label, the Pro Helvetia foundation and the Zürich city administration. Zhiyong and Dave’s sustained collaboration, which has led them to record music and tour together in both China and Europe over the years, is one of the most evident examples of how international cooperation between noise artists can lead to creative opportunities and degrees of mobility that would be unattainable and unreachable by individual musicians operating in the cozy yet restricted milieus of their local or national scene.

    Sonic Rituals is, at heart, an urgent documentation of events that, for director Mei Zhiyong, could only exist in the form contained in this DVD: as he writes in the epigraph at the beginning of the film,

    For me, what is important are images and sounds, not the text. It’s about feelings, about atmospheres, about traveling, about friendship. It’s about sound, about passion, about rituals.

    Performing noise and touring with friends in China and abroad can’t really be written about – that’s the job of scholars, critics and journalists whom no one really reads – and the most fitting way to chronicle and celebrate these moments is instead capturing them with cameras and audio recorders, ingesting everything from cab rides to backstage laughter and later condensing these memories into a fifty-two-minute, black & white reel. On a backdrop of punctuated distortion, freeze-frames of a blurry Zhiyong squirming on stage give way to digital footage of Dave Phillips grimacing playfully in front of the camera. Train stations whizzing by, crowds shuffling, Dave stating that “Chinese is so difficult”, Zhiyong pointing the camera to his own face while sitting in a cab. The combination of quick cuts, metallic noises and grainy black & white footage seems an obvious nod to Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, but the existential anguish is here forsaken in favor of the positive, ecstatic excitement of traveling together to perform across the country. Bullet trains speeding through the landscape, Beijing’s urban sprawl, unclear shadows moving in poorly-lit venues, audience members taking photos with their smartphones: the sudden juxtapositions and rapid fade-outs are Zhiyong’s way of replicating the sensory assault and unexpected turns of harsh noise improvisations by manipulating moving images rather than sounds.

    The initial disorientation gives way to longer, fixed shots of performances from the tour. Wearing a Nojiji t-shirt, Mei Zhiyong screams in fits and starts into his microphone, driving the saturated distortion to the brink of feedback before throwing himself onto the floor and rolling back towards the guitar amplifier, the speaker cones feedbacking into trembling sinewaves. Kneeling on the floor, Dave Phillips feeds some field recordings from a MP3 player into the venue’s massive sound system, and the chirping sounds of frogs and insects pierce through the room as he adjusts their frequencies on a mixer. Sitting next to a concrete basin, Zhiyong is recording the sounds of dripping water and of a nearby hand-dryer, as a haunting percussive composition starts playing in the background. The rhythm slows down in the second half of the film, almost entirely dedicated to a recording of a Dave Phillips show that begins with him ominously breathing in a pitch-black room, while a projector occasionally flashes grisly images and cryptic statements on a screen behind him. The performance builds up into a chilling set of power electronics augmented by a montage of disturbing videos of animal mistreatment, including monkeys with sewn eyes, cats being tortured and cows being slaughtered. Despite the gripping nature of the live set, the haphazard camera angle cutting parts of the screen as well as most of Dave’s performative presence out of frame smothers the dynamism of the first half of the film, prompting questions regarding the inclusion of this extended take. Fortunately, the ending of the set, with Dave Phillips leaving the stage while some unhappy audience members vocally protest the graphic nature of the video projections they have been exposed to, explains the decision of including an almost integral recording of the entire performance to contextualize the controversy.

    Is Sonic Rituals a tour diary? A travelogue? An experimental film? A cinematic attempt at noise-making? In an off-camera dialogue captured by Zhiyong himself during the soundcheck of the Hong Kong tour date, he tells someone else: “I’m shooting a jilupian [documentary],” to which the other person, acknowledging that he is indeed recording a lot of footage, replies by asking him to take a look. “Mei you yisi”, Zhiyong replies – “It’s not interesting.” The Chinese term jilupian used by Zhiyong to describe his own production might hint at a broader understanding of ‘documentary’ that emphasizes the participatory act of recording as a form of memory-making – capturing footage that is perhaps “not interesting” in the moment (as Dave Phillips notes in one shot, while he tries to finish his soundcheck, “there’s fucking cameras everywhere”), but that can be later on reworked into a cinematic form resonating with the embodied experience of a touring noise artist. Regardless of the genre it belongs to, Sonic Rituals definitely portrays two friends having a good time: riding a sanlunche around Beijing’s hutong, sliding down a slope while sitting on a wheeled suitcase, muttering “fuck!” in various circumstances, and sitting in a backyard while someone strums an acoustic guitar.

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  • Reviews

    Torturing Nurse – In Ruins

    2015年02月16日

    In RuinsTorturing Nurse
    In Ruins
    3” CDr, Shasha Records, 2006

    I’ve been in and out of Shanghai since 2006, and each time I return to the city I can’t help considering how much Shanghai has changed, and how this impression isn’t simply a consequence of less than a decade of intermittent visits and stays. “What do I think of Shanghai?” – a local friend, born and raised there, takes her time to reply to a question by a first-time city visitor: “It’s always changing. The buildings, the landscape. It changes. A lot.” In the crevices between stylized narratives (from the Whore of the Orient to the Paris of the East to the blueprint of China’s urban future) and aestheticized contrasts (Puxi versus Pudong, tradition versus hypermodernity, the hot hell of Beijing versus the cold hell of Shanghai) lie the corrugated histories of everyday lives traversed by the shifting configurations of urban change. In terms of sound ecologies, the place occupied by the auditory presence of construction work in the living matrix of the city is perhaps a good example of these everyday rugosities of change: in contrast to other Chinese metropolitan areas undergoing more recent and more reckless waves of development and renovation, unfolding on the massive scales of peripheral conurbations or engulfing entire districts, the relatively long history of Shanghai’s multilayered urbanism has by now trapped the concrete sounds of demolition (拆迁, chāiqiān) in the walled pockets of construction/destruction sites popping up around the city overnight, remodeling housing blocks piecemeal, and weaving a cyclical patchwork quilt of noises which stands as a contrappunto to the routines of urban living. In a conversation with Bivouac Recording‘s own Terence Lloren about the label’s long-standing series of soundwalks Growing Up With Shanghai, graphic designer Ericson Corpuz reflects on this peculiarity:

    It is the never-ending construction in Shanghai that stands out. The raw sound of concrete scraping, being torn down and being rebuilt stands out from the everyday cackle of the City. [It is] the stains on the road, the concrete walls that are witnesses to the sounds that make the Shanghai experience rich and memorable.

    It is precisely the sounds witnessed by the concrete walls of Shanghai’s construction sites that Torturing Nurse engage with in this EP. In Ruins is perhaps my favourite release from the outfit: as a minor work from their early years, and perhaps their most conceptual record (so to say) it is also the one that better situates Torturing Nurse as a noise act emerging from the Shanghai of the mid-2000s. Ethnomusicologically speaking, In Ruins documents how a trio of locals, in their early efforts of forging a distinctive sound in an aesthetic community largely obsessed with Japanoise, turned their ears and hands towards their daily experience and the closest noise at hand – the tools and rubble available in each construction site and abandoned semi-demolished unit – and broke in one of them with the sole purpose of sounding the ruins of Shanghai. Despite the faux-glitch transparencies and cut&paste photos of the recording activity that characterize the artwork, In Ruins isn’t yet the solipsistic post-harsh noise meditations of 不活了’s Xin Fu, picking up the sounds of the chattering city with cheap digital devices and bitcrushing distortions. What Junky, Youki & Miriam mapped, quite physically, in this EP is the raw sound of the materials of urban change hidden behind the temporary whitewashed walls and metal fences of construction sites: short, metallic echoes; things, smashed one against the other; ruined structures, collapsing; screams, bored parodies of repetitive physical labor. In In Ruins there is no order nor thought nor composition, but not even disorder, frenzy or excitement. There is rather randomness, dejected constance, casual bursts of violence and animalesque grunts, which at times make the EP sound like a disturbing audio veritè of a mental institution.

    The 17-minute recording starts with a thump, echoing in a tail of backdrop ambience – passing engines and car honks which pulsate with the presence of saturated audio; the trio screams, bangs rocks on concrete, shatters glass and ceramics, crashes pieces of metal, breaks wooden planks. The urgency of the first minutes has nothing of the naturalistic intent of extracting the sound of specific matter – it’s just a mess, a senseless outburst of caged insanity, a romp. Vocalizations get weirder, gusts of wind rumble in the condenser microphones of the portable recorder – one more object among objects – as the thuds of discard and junk punctuate the space in uncertain regularities. Some droning sounds hint at the possibility of one of them tinkering with a portable device, maybe a small amplifier. Basslines and beats from a pop hit filter through the walls, at some point, as a car with a loud sound system passes by. Things are dragged, scraped on the pavement, thrown around, smashed in different combinations without any climax to aim for or any progression orienting the process. The praxis of sounding is not experimental: there is no trial and error because there is no goal. There are instead instinctive rhythmic figures, repeated sketched crescendos, ending with the mistreated object shattering or being thrown away in pseudo-ritual screams. Listening to In Ruins in its entirety is unexpectedly cathartic: a few minutes into the record the sounds lose their specificities, and a sense of primal immediacy sets in. As the anger subsides, Torturing Nurse quickly lose their fascination for full-on destruction, and settle for an annoyed tinkering with sonorous tools: they crumple sheets of paper, knock on wood, pour rubble on the ground, and slowly drift back into the regular hum of muffled traffic around them.

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  • Critique,  Reviews

    鐵觀音二重奏 – 殺不死的牛

    2013年12月30日

    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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