Emptying the Haunted Air

There was a time when I used to post about music here. I even went and saw music shows and stuff!

Hasn’t been happening so much of late for utterly unspectacular reasons to do with work. I hope that this post marks a return to regular writing for me. Oddly enough, I think that writing about music was the thing that really compelled me to go out and see bands, rather than the other way around.

In any case, I’m here to talk about Duck Fight Goose, and the significant changes they’ve undergone in the last year.

They were the first band that really gave shape to my conception of music in Shanghai. Yuyintang had seemed to me no more than a little bar with a little stage. But they got up and played ‘Ghost is Online’ and the place suddenly became youthful, subversive. So large that I could barely feel myself as a presence there.

It is a great feeling; a dizzying sense of shared experience not unlike being part of a mass crowd at a sporting event. The other music I’d seen at YYT went from being (super nifty) pub bands to a part of this massive, lively thing. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t written as much lately. It’s hard to cast a critical eye upon bands who, in my mind, are all part of one incredible musical city. Duck Fight Goose are not entirely responsible for this. There are bands here that I like just as much, and even more. I hope to write about some of them soon.

But Duck Fight Goose were the first to give me that blissful feeling of disembodiment.

I saw them twice in September. The first time I felt nothing, and the second time I felt everything – including a modicum of resentment that they won’t play their older songs. But mostly good feelings, like happiness, arousal and smiles.

The Tenori-on no longer hangs around on stage with them, shoving its bleep-blippity silliness into their songs. They still basically finance the Roland Corporation, mind you. But they use every bloody loop pedal, synthesizer and vocoder you see on stage. They stomp all boxes.

And this is one difference I have picked up in their new songs. Duck Fight Goose have always played music that accumulates; drawing attention to moment-to-moment changes, and lulling us into a comfortable stupor in the wake of larger, more striking dynamic shifts.

This hasn’t changed. There’s just a hell of a lot more going on. One of their new songs – something about a “highway”, or some such - is a new favourite of mine. It’s faster than anything on the Flow EP, driven by a clean guitar riff, and is the most rocking-muscular song I’ve heard from them.

The guitar just goes and goes, and doesn’t try to resolve itself in any melodic sense. The whole song is like a taut string that would break if not for the precision of it all.

Yet bearing down upon this dangerously tense thing is a careful weight of timbres, mostly vocal, mostly Han Han. It’s a brilliant song; an example of incredible tension created not through narrative or lyrical indulgence; not through harmonic conflict and resolution.

Just the physical, acoustic tension of packing a space – both physical and cerebral –  with as much meaningful sound as possible without it falling apart into a distorted, meaningless tangle. The tension of watching musicians manipulate a stage full of equipment perfectly while they move across this tight-rope of a song. Easily – as though it’s scarcely an effort for them.

They rock, in other words. I’m sure a lot of this comes down to mixing. In fact, I know it does, so cheers to Brad who, I understand, is responsible for that side of things.

Duck Fight Goose are still a defining part of my notion of Shanghai’s music. The exhilaration I feel when they play is more than a physiological response to loud, rhythmic noise. It’s the sense of being a part of something cool.

Although it must be said that I’ve been stolen away by Next Year’s Love. They deserve some kind words also.

Hopefully soon. I don’t want to spent so long away from music or blogging again.

I haven’t written very much this Summer, have I? Long hiatus, and all that. I didn’t reply to a comment from Kev of Girls Like Mystery on my Rustic post, either. Totally forgot. Sorry Kev! I spent the better (and the hotter) part of Summer in Australia, which is my home country but is also cooler in July due to the axial tilt of the Earth on its orbital plane (true!).

I’ve spent the past week (and most of my dignity) living in a hotel in Yangpu District, because my landlord is a bastard. But now I write, and with good reason, no less!

Bleep, the online music-store-thing established by Warp records a few years back, are running a competition. It’s called Bleep: Filtered, and is basically a call-out for unsigned artists (which is a fancy word for musicians – also true!) to have their music released and promoted by Bleep, and then mastered and put onto a bleepy CD.

Bleep, as an online retailer, have got some serious clout, principally because of their association with Warp. And Warp shouldn’t need much of an introduction; they’ve released music from some of the most influential electronic musicians over the past two decades, like Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Battles, Grizzly Bear, !!!, Flying Lotus… It’s a pretty long and storied list.

Anyone familiar with these musicians/bands will be familiar with Warp, and will therefore know the sort of music that Warp’s A&R department will be looking for in this competition. That being said, we’re talking about a fairly diverse collection of musicians here, so it might be worth writing something about electronic music. It also gives me a chance to rant a bit while I wait for my socks to finish soaking in the hotel sink (again, true!).

Electronic music, broadly and uselessly, refers to a stupidly huge range of musical styles and practices. In the most general sense, it  denotes music that has, in some way, been informed by electronic processes or instrumentation, or otherwise by past electronic music practitioners. That could mean anything though, and in the age of digital production it almost certainly can refer to everything.

More specifically – and people who are familiar with the musicians I mentioned before will know this – Warp’s particular brand of electronic music is quite as arbitrary as any other musical style. So, punk rock where the guitar happens to be mangled by digital processes (delays, harmonic modulation) probably wouldn’t fit with Warp’s overall sound. But if it’s just guitar, and you’re singing with a fishbowl on your head about pastoral shit in a vaguely folksy way, then you might have a chance.

Similarly, if you’re just a Live-whore who indulges in a bit of casual beat wizardry, you probably should re-think your entry to this competition. I dunno, try OverClocked Remix, or something. But, if you’re a producer with idiosyncratic, slightly experimental techniques, and some sort of characteristic sound or feel, then go for it.

I realise this probably doesn’t help. Obviously, everyone should try this. Why the hell not?

I am yet to hear a remotely talented or interesting producer in this city, but there are one or two bands in Shanghai who might just be right for this competition. Duck Fight Goose are an obvious one, because electronic processes definitely inform, and are pervasive in, their music. Although they’re signed or something, right? That would exempt them from this competition, unless they submitted music that isn’t subject to a contract.

Snapline… Yyyyyyes. Maybe. I don’t know. They fit, just a little.

Next Year’s Love. Now there’s an interesting one. They haven’t released any music, and are totally new, but there’s something about them that is a bit truer to the sound and spirit of Warp than Snapline. The electronic percussion and synthesizer melodies push them in such a direction, but it’s more than that. There is a hazy, harsh atmosphere about them that evokes the folk side of Warp’s repertoire; musicians like Bibio and Grizzly Bear.

There’s probably others. I’m a long way off being able to comprehend all the dimensions of music in Shanghai, let alone China.

Most of all, I just think news of this competition should be spread far and wide. It probably won’t happen now, but I have a feeling that a time will come when labels, music historians and journalists, academics and wankers will be climbing over each other to say they were there (here) when it (music) happened.

(Image of Next Year’s Love stolen from Douban. Don’t call the cops!)

Pictures don’t speak louder than words, but moving pictures with audio do a pretty good job. The following video describes the Dudettes festival better than I am capable of with words alone.

It’s Simon from The Instigation singing ‘Like a Prayer’, and it felt like a celebration, and sweet goodbye, of The Dudettes.

I’ll have some words soon enough, but for now this seems more appropriate.

I really should write something about this Wuhan trip-thing that a bunch of us did a couple weeks ago, but I’m severely lacking in insights.

A drunken, ranting Irishman – ever the most reliable of sources – once told me that Wuhan’s rock scene is more authentic than the music he saw in Shanghai. I didn’t see any Wuhan bands, because we brought Shanghai to them. I later saw the same guy, drunk again, at Prison Bar, but didn’t feel inclined to find out what he meant in the first place.

Maybe Wuhan is more authentic, but the Shanghai crew still made it a great night.

Five of Shanghai’s best and most experienced bands took a bunch of groupies (like me) over to Vox to teach the Wuhan crowd a little something about something. In doing so, we learned that drinking on a train is pleasurable, and that the best way to deal with a woman trying to steal your seat on the train is to whack a Dudettes sticker on her arse.

So, Wuhan. What’s it like…

We didn’t really see much of Wuhan, except for Vox. And no Wuhan bands played, and there weren’t exactly tonnes of Wuhan people there, either. It was pleasantly packed, but not overflowing.

Vox, then… It’s like Yuyintang. More floor space, and cheaper drinks. That’s about all the context I can provide, I really don’t know much about Wuhan or Vox.

X is Y played first, but they were a strange, truncated X is Y, with the usual intricate drumming replaced by a rather clean and steadfast Casio drum machine. It four-to-the-floor all the way which, as anyone who has listened to them will know, is a huge change from what X is Y normally play. Their distinctive sound was intact though, and they played as well as I’ve ever seen them.

It served as a reminder that spontaneity, creative limitations and cheap electronic keyboards can be combined to make good, memorable music. I have always liked X is Y, but seeing them perform such a drastically different set by adapting their songs was pretty exciting. I could recommend a different drum machine, but that would be missing the point.

…

The relegating of the drums to a few narrow frequency bands, and a purely utilitarian role; the removal of the bass in favour of thin, mouth-organ timbres and sparse, quiet synth melodies; it all allowed them to play a more spacious, considered type of music. More so than usual.

Shit, I talk about space a lot, but it’s incredibly important. The more instruments that are added to a mix, the louder everyone plays, the more variables you introduce into your performance. As the opening band at a pretty laid-back venue, playing to a small, early-evening audience, X is Y benefited from their creative divergence.

It was basically the band remixing themselves for a special occassion, and I’d like to see it done more often by bands over here. Just fire the drummer for a gig, or poison your singer, or something.

Moon Tyrant are in the process of poisoning themselves by paining metallic facepaint onto their skin for every show. I’m pretty sure it’s not a great idea, but it looks nifty. They were the last on stage though, and I like sequences, so…

Although this is now turning into a recount, and there’s no point recounting stuff, because Adam at Luwan Rock did that already.

I’m looking for insights here, but none are forthcoming. So, a summary:

Stegosaurus? were typically fun, and I’ve seen them enough times now that I can confidently share something I’ve observed in their gigs: they elicit the attention of the ladies more than any other band I’ve seen. The Dudettes of course did their thing, but I’ll write about them in my next post. Rainbow Danger Club played the same tight show they’ve become known for. In fact, they could do with just a little trashiness now and then. I wrote about Moon Tyrant recently, and actually preferred that previous show. They benefit from a bigger crowd, and last on the bill doesn’t really suit them. There was a very good reason they were the final act, I’m just saying that the audience wasn’t really there for them.

VJ Tina Sprinkles’ visuals throughout the evening deserve a mention here, and not just because they were amazing. Dwindling crowd aside, the images that coincided with Moon Tyrant’s performance created some of the most striking visual moments of the evening. Vampires and shadows and skeletons; it was quite suitable.

Hopefully, another post will be coming soon, in which I reflect on bands who play for too long, and on the drunken melancholy of the Dudettes festival last night.

Timely posting, as usual. But it has taken me about this long to get my head around what it was that Rustic were doing at Yuyintang last weekend, and I’m not sure that it involved the playing of good music.

In fact, I’m almost certain that they weren’t playing good music, and the Shanghai bands that evening shone particularly bright in contrast. I’m quite fond of the idea of rivalry between Shanghai and Beijing bands, even if its an artificial rivalry with no basis in music. Tribalism is in my nature, and it pleased me greatly that the two Shanghai bands on show were decent, and that Rustic were completely balls.

Pleased in hindsight, that is. I still had to force myself to listen to it. The first impression I had of the Rustic turned out to be the truest. Dickhead fashion and wacko stage antics drive their music; are the entire basis and motivation for their music. Three guys wanked up in torn clothing, hair all floppy. It’s like cock rock, but with none of the self-reflexivity or irony.

The first song begin with a stomp beat on the kick drum and a hello boys from the bassist, and set the tone for their entire set. By the third song it was clear that Rustic know how to fill a space with sound and energy, and most of the audience was getting something out of it.

Half way through the show, they played something that began with a swinging beat. Lazy, conversational vocals laid over the top. It was a nice change of tempo, and added some pockets of space into, what had been, a sonically dense performance. Unfortunately, once the song proper began, they just packed in this space by ejaculating guitar spunk over everyone.

So, they’re good at what they do. But what they do is basically stand on stage and masturbate furiously. There’s nothing rustic about them. Rustic spoke only to the power and capacity of sound to excite the air inside a room. There’s nothing else. Their music moved no further, physically or conceptually, than the walls of Yuyintang.

So, yeah… Good sign, Maybe Mars.

It needs to be said, too: this shit with encores at Yuyintang is ridiculous. Truly. Just play the bloody “one more song” as part of the regular set list, and spare us the false exeunt. Wankers.

Ultimately, there are at least a dozen local bands in Shanghai that play more interesting music than Rustic. I’m not yet sure if Girls Like Mystery are one of those bands, although I’ve seen them only twice. This time, there were no jumpers tied around wastes, which is, you know… Cool.

They are one of the few bands who write words, put them into songs, and then let us actually hear the stuff that was important enough to let people know in song form. Still… “You and me/Just as happy as we can be.” Or :“We finish our song/and start to move on./I’m stuck in the curly lady,/the curly lady.” Lyrics are hard to write, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if bands just shoehorn them into songs. And I think I misheard that “curly badies” lyric.

I hope I misheard it.

They’re quite new (October last year, I think) and they’ll no doubt keep producing new music. Having a keyboardist makes them stand out a little already, here in Shanghai.

Whereas Moon Tyrant seem to aim higher. It shows in their music and the effort they put into their performances. They also have a better sense of pacing than certain other bands here. Songs flow cleanly from one to the next, without lengthy bullshit banter with mates in the crowd. And they didn’t play too long. Man, how some bands here don’t know when enough is enough.

Their second song (whatever it’s called) had an extended into, with unpredictable bursts of volume and tempo. I liked it. I wanted them to groove this way for longer, before going into the song proper. From there is was all stabs of coarse, throaty vocals, genuine guitar wailing, heavily distorted bass.

The timbre of Ivan’s vocals actually suits the rest of the instrumentation. As in, it fits into a frequency range between everything else, and the human voice is a genuine instrument in the mix. As opposed to a thing that’s just put into a song because… Just because.

Because a century of commercial music has conditioned people into thinking that guitar + drums +bass + vocals = BAND!

Moon Tyrant’s sound is clearly a product of many musical influences. There are distinct dynamic shifts in their songs that go beyond just volume. I mentioned changes in tempo before, but shifts in songs also brought along different salient timbres. Sometimes (often) it was a guitar solo, other times it was the voice, or hi-hats. A snare spasm every couple of bars that seemed to undo the drum pattern that preceded it.

Everything had a place, and the voice of each instrument was not just distinct, but also given space to explore its own modes of expression. I went through university studying computer music and digital composition, so this side of things is deeply interesting to me (hence the wankerlink to Wikipedia, there).

Most people would simply have heard loud, tight, aggressive metal. It’s pretty good shit. The cathartic scream of vocals and guitar froth at the end was probably the coolest part of the set, but then again that should be true of all endings to all things. They didn’t play too long, which is wise, not to mention considerate.

Cool bananas, all of them.

Don’t know where everyone was on Friday the 20th, because they definitely weren’t at the Plastic Chocolate EP release. Last Friday as well; Yuyintang was very spacious when The Fever Machine hosted The Dancers for their monthly show. I’m guessing there must have been cooler things to do on both nights.

I like EP/album launches though, especially when I don’t know the band at all. The possibility of discovering something new and fantastic is difficult to resist, and you end up with a copy of a CD to listen to. That aside, it’s just nifty to see young people hanging out, and sharing music with the bands they like.

Sharing being the important word, here.

So it was with Plastic Chocolate, supported aptly by Pinkberry. The crowd wasn’t brimming, but enthusiastic enough. Pinkberry played first who, weirdly, I’d never seen before. The first thing that caught my attention was how they seemed to match some Platonic, visual shape of rock music. The way the guitarist and bassist moved their fingers along their fretboards. The iconic rock stance; legs wide, pelvis thrust. I wonder if the theatrics are self-conscious, or in earnest.

They sing a song whose chorus spells out the name of the band, cheerleader style, barking out the letters one by one. All this would ordinarily turn me off, but it didn’t that night. This was a different type of gig – for me, anyway.

It was the sort that infects you with a very real and tangible sense of place. I said in my last post that, during The Song Dynasty’s show the week before, I felt for a moment like I was standing in one of Sydney’s famous music spots.

This doesn’t happen with Pinkberry. Hearing them play, I feel the powerful, startling reality of being in Shanghai right now, and not simply because I’m listening to a Chinese band play to a Chinese audience in China.

Pinkberry played for the audience, and the audience were there for Pinkberry. It was a shared experience; a simple and discernible connection between the musicians and their audience, the place they met, and the music that pulled everything together in the first place.

Music like this, in a venue like Yuyintang, is empowering in this way. It makes you feel like an important, albeit small, part of what’s going on.

It’s not really my sort of music, but that hardly matters. There was a considerable amount of variety in Pinkberry’s songs though, considering the conventions of their style of music. A laid-back, slow tempo ska song. A solid pop-rock song that went into a kick drum and guitar stab spasm during the chorus. The chord progressions in the bass grooves covered a few octaves so most of their songs, while forceful, weren’t murky in the bottom end. Punk-brightness a lot of the time.

Plastic Chocolate obviously deserve a mention, although I didn’t stay for their whole set. They began well enough, with spacious, textural post rock stuff. The drummer let beats hang in the air, which is something I noticed in a few of their songs. I love hearing musicians explore the possibilities of silence and implied sound. Some breathy vocals too, Serge Gainsbourg style.

The lead singer had a great voice, high and clear in the mix, singing a counter-melody with the instruments. He sang lot of chromatic tones, which gave his lyrics a lazy and delicate quality, and complimented the light groove and gentle rhythm of the song. The salient sensation was one of floating.

That was the first song, anyway. I’ve actually forgotten how they played the others, because I’m so amazing at keeping this blog up to date. Things got a bit heavier later on, and I remember feeling that the pacing of their set was a bit uneven.

The lead guiatrist who, I’m told, trained at Starfleet Academy or something, was restrained in his solos and guitar frippery. They sounded a little sugary at times, and could definitely have made better use of dynamics (spectral and temporal), but this was just an EP launch. I suspect that they’ll come up with some interesting new stuff.

Quickly, on new stuff: X is Y have released a teaser song to promote their upcoming album. It’s called Never Sever, and pretty much typifies everything I love about this band. Space and density. Rhythms that are complex, but not attention-seeking. There’s some sublte mixing of Yajing’s vocals, and a measured burst of distortion at the end; it’s more textural than stuff they’ve done in the past.

There’s a lot of good music in this city.

(The picture atop this post is not my own, and I use it without permission. I’m not even near talented enough to take photographs like this, so I don’t bring my camera to gigs anymore.)