{"id":128,"date":"2013-03-28T03:04:03","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T19:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundomaso.biz\/chinoise\/?p=128"},"modified":"2018-10-07T23:43:48","modified_gmt":"2018-10-07T15:43:48","slug":"no_se666-dingchenchen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"NO_SE666 – DINGCHENCHEN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DINGCHENCHEN\"<\/a>NO_SE666<\/strong>
\nDINGCHENCHEN<\/em>
\nCDr, self-released, 2012<\/span><\/p>\n

\u300a\u4e00\u5f20\u5173\u4e8e\u5b9e\u5730\u5f55\u97f3+\u5373\u5174\u7684\u8bb0\u5f55\uff0c\u968f\u673a\u7684\u53d1\u58f0\uff0c\u5bf9\u4e8e\u751f\u6d3b\u7684\u538c\u5026\u6050\u6015\u53ea\u6709\u5f52\u4e8e\u566a\u97f3\u3002\u300b<\/p>\n

(“An album about on-the-spot recordings + impromptu annotations, a random production of sound, the return to noise as the only way to to confront the weariness of life.”)<\/em><\/p>\n

What is it we are paying for when we sit, or stand, in the dim visibility of a nondescript art gallery, warehouse, live house, pub, art center, and listen to the same introductory preamble of ticking traffic lights, passing cars, chirping voices of non-concerned passersby, birds, slowly superseded by cheeky swells of anonymous simulations of analog synthesizers, well-calibrated delays and reverbs, automated panning, carefully sterilized bass drone and sporadic, carefree \u201clive\u201d punctuations? Am I the only one feeling the supreme irony of the silenced audience, of the hand that shuts down the air conditioner not to disturb the performance, of the five seconds of silence before the beginning, of the ears fixed on the speakers and, finally, the set, the performance, the piece, the oeuvre, whatever it wants itself to be called: ambient, sound art, field recordings, experimental electronics, all inevitably sounding like a caramelized, absolutely non-challenging version of the same aural soundscape experienced by every member of the audience up to ten seconds before the show? Russolo, a century ago, in a fit of futuristic fervor, wrote a score called Risveglio di una Citt\u00e0<\/em> \u2013 times of rapid industrialization and thundering wars, it\u2019s true –\u00a0 but yet, Italian audiences were not so happy of listening to grating noises coming down from a stage, and threw him back all kind of stuff. Today, recording metropolitan sonic environments, mixing them with clich\u00e9d naturalistic snippets and embedding them in as well-crafted as innocuous slabs of flat and uneventful techno-dreams seems to be the easiest and most profitable way of justifying thirty minutes of one\u2019s presence behind a laptop in front of an audience of twenty-something people. My question remains: as an audience, why do we want to listen to aestheticized repetition of sounds we know by heart, sounds that we are immersed around the clock, sounds we replicate almost effortlessly in our agitated dreams, sounds that feel like home when we immerse in them \u2013 the rush hour in the subway, that traffic jam under the walkway, the advertisement repeated on a thousand screens \u2013 why do we accept their ordered and well-mannered juxtaposition in indulgent fade-ins and predictable climaxes, glazed with major harmonies of lush synthesizers coming straight from the worst post-muzak and propped up by a safe, totalitarian basso continuo \u2013 the real soundscape of our time of capitalist non-places \u2013 and most importantly: why do we treat it as art? I will not accept answers appealing to the need to guide us, poor derelict audience, on the bright path to deep listening and other bullshit \u2013 we know what we listen to, we explore it daily, we absorb it and shut it out of our ears when we had enough, we sift through it and we enjoy it, and we don\u2019t need more processing really \u2013 especially when each one of us, with his\/her shiny laptop and a couple of presets, could do the same.<\/p>\n

But what do we need? This objectless tirade is all meant to balance my question with negative answers \u2013 what we don\u2019t need, what we are tired of, what we don\u2019t want to be given as pre-packaged, candy-eyed urban dreamscapes. If it is true that, as the over-quoted Attali writes, recording has always been a means of social control, it is in the same way true that recordings, especially the variety traditionally termed field recordings, as one of the most technically simple and egalitarian forms of composition, can be at the same time exceptional documentary material, emotional anchors, and empowering, political statements. Yet, this can be the case only when they don\u2019t deliberately ignore, cut out, divide, exclude, separate, repress, aestheticize, when they don\u2019t sanitize the captured panorama from mobile phones ringing, gusts of wind and unprovoked interferences, when they don\u2019t extract the short, interesting bits and ignore the flat, unchanging, non-dynamic plateau of ordinary boredom, the wrong moves, the loud coughs, the sound of that specific ten minutes that passed without anything noticeable besides your arm holding the recorder, far from the perfect traffic jam on the highway, far from the romantic bustling of a central street. So, let\u2019s boycott the\u00a0habitus<\/em> of cinematic long shots, the utopian agglomerations of all-too-perfect snippets of metropolitan sound clinging to the ritual bass line of modernity. Let’s forget post-production. Let’s situate ourselves within in<\/em>-activity as such, to paraphrase Bourdieu, step down from idealist standpoints, and dislodge our knowledge from performance and representation: let’s record practice. Let the recordings of our field explode into bruitism, let them deal with themselves and depict a real field in its extension, ordinariness and fundamental dispersion. Let the singular moments shine in embarrassed constellations, let them last too long, too wide, too muffled, too unrefined, as they really do in the low pressure of our repetitive days.<\/p>\n

With DINGCHENCHEN<\/i>, NO_SE666 (a moniker that works as a rite of passage removing the “I” from the old Noise666, towards the new DINGCHENCHEN) compiles a beautiful, sincere collection of sound diaries from a lived life \u2013 not China, not a cinematized Shanghai, not modernity, not the dreamworld of a vainglorious sound artist empowered by a MacBook\u00a0\u2013\u00a0 everything in this record is a fragment with no beginning and no end, an opaque surface enclosing a very specific field: someone\u2019s daily existence, unwinding over vectors of transportation (A TRAIN<\/i>, STREET<\/i>, and TAXI TALKING<\/i>), transcribed through the unconcerned recording of moments of lazy leisure (the nostalgic WAITING HALL<\/i>, the beautiful SCHOOL GAMING<\/i> or A GUITAR<\/i>, which stands in stark opposition to the gargantuan and pretentious balcony-based guitar and laptop meditations recently released by Mind Fiber), and laid bare even in the details of the domestic fiddling with music and software (DJ COMPUTER<\/i>) that short-circuit the very nature of field recordings, bringing music, technology and play back into the dreary tradition of naturalistic or urban idealizations: what happens when your field recording captures the silence of your gaze fixed on the LCD screen, the clicks of your mouse, the sound of mp3 house hits distorted by crappy speakers and fluctuating in the still air of your dorm room? The unexamined life, in CAPS LOCK, with love: deep listen <\/i>this, if you care.<\/p>\n

DOWNLOAD<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NO_SE666 DINGCHENCHEN CDr, self-released, 2012 \u300a\u4e00\u5f20\u5173\u4e8e\u5b9e\u5730\u5f55\u97f3+\u5373\u5174\u7684\u8bb0\u5f55\uff0c\u968f\u673a\u7684\u53d1\u58f0\uff0c\u5bf9\u4e8e\u751f\u6d3b\u7684\u538c\u5026\u6050\u6015\u53ea\u6709\u5f52\u4e8e\u566a\u97f3\u3002\u300b (“An album about on-the-spot recordings + impromptu annotations, a random production of sound, the return to noise as the only way to to confront the weariness of life.”) What is it we are paying for when we sit, or stand, in the dim visibility of a nondescript art gallery, warehouse, live house, pub, art center, and listen to the same introductory preamble of ticking traffic lights, passing cars, chirping voices of non-concerned passersby, birds, slowly superseded by cheeky swells of anonymous simulations of analog synthesizers, well-calibrated delays and reverbs, automated panning, carefully sterilized bass drone and sporadic, carefree \u201clive\u201d punctuations? Am I the only one feeling the supreme irony of the silenced audience, of the hand that shuts down the air conditioner not to disturb the performance, of the five seconds of silence before the beginning, of the ears fixed on the speakers and, finally, the set, the performance, the piece, the oeuvre, whatever it wants itself to be called: ambient, sound art, field recordings, experimental electronics, all inevitably sounding like a caramelized, absolutely non-challenging version of the same aural soundscape experienced by every member of the audience up to ten seconds before the show? Russolo, a century ago, in a fit of futuristic fervor, wrote a score called Risveglio di una Citt\u00e0 \u2013 times of rapid industrialization and thundering wars, it\u2019s true –\u00a0 but yet, Italian audiences were not so happy of listening to grating noises coming down from a stage, and threw him back all kind of stuff. Today, recording metropolitan sonic environments, mixing them with clich\u00e9d naturalistic snippets and embedding them in as well-crafted as innocuous slabs of flat and uneventful techno-dreams seems to be the easiest and most profitable way of justifying thirty minutes of one\u2019s presence behind a laptop in front of an audience of twenty-something people. My question remains: as an audience, why do we want to listen to aestheticized repetition of sounds we know by heart, sounds that we are immersed around the clock, sounds we replicate almost effortlessly in our agitated dreams, sounds that feel like home when we immerse in them \u2013 the rush hour in the subway, that traffic jam under the walkway, the advertisement repeated on a thousand screens \u2013 why do we accept their ordered and well-mannered juxtaposition in indulgent fade-ins and predictable climaxes, glazed with major harmonies of lush synthesizers coming straight from the worst post-muzak and propped up by a safe, totalitarian basso continuo \u2013 the real soundscape of our time of capitalist non-places \u2013 and most importantly: why do we treat it as art? I will not accept answers appealing to the need to guide us, poor derelict audience, on the bright path to deep listening and other bullshit \u2013 we know what we listen to, we explore it daily, we absorb it and shut it out of our ears when we had enough, we sift through it and we enjoy it, and we don\u2019t need more processing really \u2013 especially when each one of us, with his\/her shiny laptop and a couple of presets, could do the same. But what do we need? This objectless tirade is all meant to balance my question with negative answers \u2013 what we don\u2019t need, what we are tired of, what we don\u2019t want to be given as pre-packaged, candy-eyed urban dreamscapes. If it is true that, as the over-quoted Attali writes, recording has always been a means of social control, it is in the same way true that recordings, especially the variety traditionally termed field recordings, as one of the most technically simple and egalitarian forms of composition, can be at the same time exceptional documentary material, emotional anchors, and empowering, political statements. Yet, this can be the case only when they don\u2019t deliberately ignore, cut out, divide, exclude, separate, repress, aestheticize, when they don\u2019t sanitize the captured panorama from mobile phones ringing, gusts of wind and unprovoked interferences, when they don\u2019t extract the short, interesting bits and ignore the flat, unchanging, non-dynamic plateau of ordinary boredom, the wrong moves, the loud coughs, the sound of that specific ten minutes that passed without anything noticeable besides your arm holding the recorder, far from the perfect traffic jam on the highway, far from the romantic bustling of a central street. So, let\u2019s boycott the\u00a0habitus of cinematic long shots, the utopian agglomerations of all-too-perfect snippets of metropolitan sound clinging to the ritual bass line of modernity. Let’s forget post-production. Let’s situate ourselves within in-activity as such, to paraphrase Bourdieu, step down from idealist standpoints, and dislodge our knowledge from performance and representation: let’s record practice. Let the recordings of our field explode into bruitism, let them deal with themselves and depict a real field in its extension, ordinariness and fundamental dispersion. Let the singular moments shine in embarrassed constellations, let them last too long, too wide, too muffled, too unrefined, as they really do in the low pressure of our repetitive days. With DINGCHENCHEN, NO_SE666 (a moniker that works as a rite of passage removing the “I” from the old Noise666, towards the new DINGCHENCHEN) compiles a beautiful, sincere collection of sound diaries from a lived life \u2013 not China, not a cinematized Shanghai, not modernity, not the dreamworld of a vainglorious sound artist empowered by a MacBook\u00a0\u2013\u00a0 everything in this record is a fragment with no beginning and no end, an opaque surface enclosing a very specific field: someone\u2019s daily existence, unwinding over vectors of transportation (A TRAIN, STREET, and TAXI TALKING), transcribed through the unconcerned recording of moments of lazy leisure (the nostalgic WAITING HALL, the beautiful SCHOOL GAMING or A GUITAR, which stands in stark opposition to the gargantuan and pretentious balcony-based guitar and laptop meditations recently released by Mind Fiber), and laid bare even in the details of the domestic fiddling with music and software (DJ COMPUTER) that short-circuit the very nature of field recordings, bringing music, technology and play back into the dreary tradition of naturalistic or urban idealizations: what happens when your field recording captures the silence of your gaze fixed on the LCD screen, the clicks of your mouse, the sound of mp3 house hits distorted by crappy speakers and fluctuating in the still air of your dorm room? The unexamined life, in CAPS LOCK, with love: deep listen this, if you care. DOWNLOAD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[8,16,22,29,37,44,54,66,67],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/DINGCHENCHEN.jpg?fit=363%2C363","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5DeFo-24","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":113,"url":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=113","url_meta":{"origin":128,"position":0},"title":"\u738b\u957f\u5b58 – Homepage","date":"2013\u5e7402\u670801\u65e5","format":false,"excerpt":"\u738b\u957f\u5b58 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 \u738b\u957f\u5b58 (W\u00e1ng Ch\u00e1ngc\u00fan) announcing that he was going to play a live set in Hangzhou without any hardware\/software except for Google Chrome running on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Homepage.jpg?fit=1200%2C1200&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":162,"url":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=162","url_meta":{"origin":128,"position":1},"title":"Mind Fiber – Hello Balcony","date":"2013\u5e7408\u670811\u65e5","format":false,"excerpt":"Mind Fiber Hello Balcony Double CD, China Free Improvisation \/ JNBY, 2012 Free improvisation and its (if existing) boundaries have been the topic of ongoing theoretical and practical discussions. Yet, more than the recognition than even the freest, most skilled, most eclectic improvisers will at some point stick to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Critique"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hello-Balcony-PM.jpg?fit=800%2C800&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":220,"url":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=220","url_meta":{"origin":128,"position":2},"title":"\u9435\u89c0\u97f3\u4e8c\u91cd\u594f – \u6bba\u4e0d\u6b7b\u7684\u725b","date":"2013\u5e7412\u670830\u65e5","format":false,"excerpt":"\u9435\u89c0\u97f3\u4e8c\u91cd\u594f \u6bba\u4e0d\u6b7b\u7684\u725b 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Critique"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Shabusideniu.jpg?fit=902%2C899&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":51,"url":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=51","url_meta":{"origin":128,"position":3},"title":"Dissociative Disorder – Mother-to-Child","date":"2012\u5e7407\u670828\u65e5","format":false,"excerpt":"Dissociative Disorder Mother-to-Child CDr, Notrouble Records, 2012 My admiration for the work of \u4f59\u76ca\u88d4 (Y\u00fa Y\u00ecy\u00ec) is not a secret. This guy from Kaiping, Guangdong province belongs to the new generation of post-80s noisicians and, while managing his own label Notrouble Records, moves effortlessly between field recordings, minimal electronics and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Mother-to-Child.jpg?fit=610%2C619&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":182,"url":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=182","url_meta":{"origin":128,"position":4},"title":"\u4e0d\u6d3b\u4e86 – Xin Fu","date":"2013\u5e7410\u670825\u65e5","format":false,"excerpt":"\u4e0d\u6d3b\u4e86 Xin Fu Tape, CHUI, 2013 How does urban China sound today? What does the pervasive dissemination of digital devices as hybrid conglomerates of affordances, be them glossy last-generation iPads for the recently enriched or parasitic \u5c71\u5be8 (sh\u0101nzh\u00e0i) knock-offs tucked in every pocket, purse and street corner \u2013 mp3\/mp4 players,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Xin-Fu.jpg?fit=782%2C1200&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":322,"url":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/?p=322","url_meta":{"origin":128,"position":5},"title":"Torturing Nurse – In Ruins","date":"2015\u5e7402\u670816\u65e5","format":false,"excerpt":"Torturing 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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/In-Ruins.jpg?fit=461%2C461&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chinoise.elgranfio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}