Emptying the Haunted Air

Rudd executed

I will no longer be posting things called travel diaries, because I was never really travelling in the first place. Hell, it’s not even a working holiday – my salary here doesn’t translate too favourably into my home currency, as XE.com is alsways quick to remind me.

In a week where Australian democracy has taken a bit of a pummelling (there is too much good coverage of Kevin Rudd’s political execution at the hands of the NSW Right to select a single story to link) I have tried to distract myself from it all by, once again, surrounding myself with numerous, wondrous tools for digital media creation, in aid of ideas that will probably never come to fruition. Still, it’s fun to fantasize; and I still chase that lofty dream of having a career in the video games industry, and hold, in my ghostly heart, Shanghai as the place to achieve it.

One such idea that has so consumed me is, in fact, a game idea. The idea being that, if I stop daydreaming and pull my finger out, and actually do something game-related, I might stand a chance of getting into the industry. But the idea is the distillate of a certain chain of events (daydreams, mostly), which I shall document on this here blog!

A few weeks ago, I went to my first music gig in Shanghai, at Yuyintang. It was called Good Jive 3 (whose jiving was, presumably, the third in some sort of jive sequence), and it was fun. It was a lot of fun in fact, despite there being a pretty weak turn-out. As in, the audience were so few that we felt collectively intimidated at the thought of approaching the stage. Still, the bands rocked, and jived where appropriate. The Beat Bandits, a sunny, surf-rock quartet, opened the evening, singing about stuff I didn’t really understand, but nonetheless delighting. Ho-Tom the Conqueror (no Douban link!) came next with an acoustic quartet (guitar, banjo, mandolin and mouth organ). This guy has a really warm, good-humoured stage presence and, among his funny, catchy songs about life in Shanghai, he sung the best cover of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ that I have ever heard. X is Y followed with some pretty solid semi-math rock, and Stegosaurus? brought the whole gig to a close with some energetic and kooky garage-rock.

Like I said, it was all a lot of fun.

The thing is – and it hits me every time I sit in front of Ableton Live or AudioMulch, or whatever – I find myself constantly having to justify what I’m doing to myself. Not just because it’s a total waste of damn time, but also in a Modernist sense. I mean, surely – surely, in the postdigital age of media creation – the traditional modalities of music composition are well and truly exhausted. Every timbre, every rhythm, every harmony is accounted for, either as data floating around cyberspace; or else as ideas that are well within a human listener’s capacity for wonder.

This isn’t to say that music can’t amaze and excite, provoke and reach into one’s heart; and that these aren’t noble goals in and of themselves. The bands at Yuyintang the other night demonstrated this with jiving exhuberance. And, shit, there’s more incredible music that ever being released today, most of it free, and wholly aware of the grand musical traditions that inspire the composers in the first place. And that’s the thing. If all this great music is being released, what’s the point of me sitting in front of Ableton Live and attempting to create something that falls into the same traditions?

Certainly, AudioMulch (and, of course, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, and a dozen other software environments) have much more potential to create entirely new musical traditions, and change the way we listen. Listen to everything, that is; to music, to the television, to the world. And, this is where I began (I think). At University, I was fortunate enough to be taught by a handful of people who genuinely changed the way I looked at the world. Maybe that says more about the wonder of  young adulthood, rather than my own experience, but the fact is I wouldn’t be in Shanghai now were it not for these people. I’d probably be working as a media buyer at some pissweak media company.

(Out of respect, I’ll name them all, although I’ll only be talking about one. First, Shannon O’Neill, who drew me into the world of music and audio, after which I subsequently took on all audio subjects where I’d originally planned to study film production. He also supervised my thesis, and basically introduced me to electronic music. Tom Ellard, of the Severed Heads, taught  my Creative Audio Techniques subject for the semester when, for one reason or another, Shannon couldn’t teach it. Again, it was totally mind-opening, and, above all else, he encouraged us to approach music and sound design with ideas. Finally, another one-semester teacher during my Honours year, Theo Van Leeuwen who, aside from being a nifty jazz pianist, introduced me to the form of structural analysis with which I approach art, social semiotics.)

In my final year of university, Theo Van Leeuwen got me thinking about modalities – specific ways that data can be encoded to produce meaning. Obviously, as a discourse it isn’t without problems, but to me it’s the stuff of daydreams. I wonder about the beat divisions in Western music that have been so enduring; can a single beat be divided into five parts (rather than two, three or four), or seven, and still be meaningful, or even listenable? I listen to spoken Mandarin every day and think about tone. (This owes a lot to Tom Ellard, who originally got me thinking about this). That is, tone withour regard to scale, or harmony, or intervals. Just raw tone; it’s upper and lower limits, and how it changes with respect to time.

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And then there’s interactive audio. Or game audio, as I’d prefer to call it, for I can’t imagine a construct outside of the artistic and commercial reaches of gaming in which audio might be ‘interactive’. I also don’t like the word interactive, and consider it a verbal resort for the inarticulate. Game audio is much more relevant and meaningful, and I just happen to like games very much. Which is the reason I’d like – really like, not just half-arsed like – to make a game in Unity 3 and FMOD. I believe it’s well-within my ability, given time and patience. I don’t even intend to design much of a visual element (I completely lack the ability, anyway) as, in this ill-formed, foetal stage, the idea is to explore the concept of ‘emergent gameplay‘ with regard to sound. Like I said, totally premature, and with naïve assumptions about my programing ability. Suffice to say, for now, that I dream of a future where game soundtracks develop and evolve over the entire course of a game; that reflect the choices, style and preferences of the player, in the way Deus Ex’s narrative did ten years ago.

Ah- of course! That’s the other thing that’s been the subject of my daydreaming of late – Happy 10th Birthday, Deus Ex. We love you more that can ever be exressed. RPS’s coverage is as good as anyone’s.

An exemplar of Intelligent Design

One of the best things about coming to China is the extent to which I’ve been able to keep up with Australian politics, as well as the international issues that interest me. I was expecting it to be much more difficult – the firewall, my (mis)conceptions about the reliability of internet connections in Shanghai, as well as some vague idea that geographical separation would, somehow, disengage me from public debate in Australia.

In fact, it’s turned out quite the opposite. Being away from Australia has made me more determined to remain in touch which, in turn, has resulted in me spending more time on the internet. More time watching streaming video, reading articles, blogs and forums. (Of course, it helps that every media organisation in Australia is allowed through the firewall over here.) For some reason, the habit of tuning into politics via television made me complacent, for I always had the option of not watching my nightly dose of news and current affairs. If I missed Joe Hockey making a dick of himself on Lateline (now celebrating its 20th year with a series of fascinating archival videos on the website), it wouldn’t worry me. I’d be sure to see something equally interesting on tomorrow’s news.

Now, I’ve entered into an almost-unhealthy ritual of consuming each day’s current affairs in the early hours of the morning. And, because I am far less likely to watch news reports (preferring meatier analysis and commentary), I don’t get my little snacks from Australian Parliament. So, instead, I just go to its website and watch the whole gorram’ thing. Or, at the very least, much more than I used to watch. In Australia, I tended to miss the ABC’s Q&A, because the format is tiring a little and the panellists are frequently dull. Last Monday’s episode looked intriguing and, considering I was already on the internet watching old Lateline videos, I decided to watch it. So, when Steve Fielding made an absolute dick of himself, I was able to savour every moment.

Zhabei at night. Not pictured: My nonexistent photos of Nanjing Road

I’m eating at a little KFC on Fuzhou Road, mainly because I felt nervous about drawing too much attention to myself at the busier one on Nanjing Road. There are a few Westerners here, possibly for similar reasons. Walking down Nanjing Road, you get waylaid frequently by street-peddlers. They swoop in, making a respectable attempt to match my brisk walking pace, and all seem to offer the same thing: watches and iPhones. Presumably these are stored inside their coats, but I will never find out for certain, because of all the things I could buy off a chap in the street, watches and phones are the least appealing. Perhaps if one of them was offering old Super Nintendo games, I might be inclined to peruse their coat pockets. Instead, I simply mutter something that means “Don’t want”, and walk on.

I walked all the way down Nanjing Road tonight. I’m not terribly interested in shopping; I derive little pleasure from the indecision. In any case, my apartment is too small to fit anything else at the moment. So I just walked and looked at the enormous advertisements, the crowds of happy shoppers, and the distant buildings fading into the smog. A skyscraper that is invisible in the night if not for the neon-blue lines that join each of its vertices. All the while keeping track of the astonishing Tomorrow Square as a geographic marker. I walked all the way to the riverbank, found that it was inaccessible for some reason, then walked down to Fuzhou Road and headed back towards People’s Square.

And I found myself in a KFC. One of the first things I notice, aside from the fact that the burgers taste the same as in Australia, is one of those employee propoganda posters on the window to the street. ‘一起工作， 一起快乐!’ Work together, happy together. It’s not at all some Communist credo. I’ve been taking note of these posters in fast food chains in Australia for a few years. They’re clearly not for the staff who, consciously or not, regard the pairing of the words team and work as nothing more than corporate speak. The posters are just marketing, and are unremarkable in this sense.

The thing that strikes me is how the face of consumerism is so similar between these two, vastly different countries, right down to the smallest details. All this advertising, the brands and the familiar images are possibly the main reason I have felt at home in Shanghai. I can decode the semiotics of commercialism on Nanjing Road as easily as in Sydney.

At the same time, this familiarity worries me, for it exposes my profound ignorance and gullibility. Everyone knows KFC, McDonalds and Apple are global empires; they, as corporate entities, can’t escape it. I didn’t know that LJ Hooker, Century 21, Boost Juice, and dozens of others were all the same. But there they are, feeding off the crowds at Nanjing Road. And I realise that, however much I have regarded my cynicism as a Palladium against the effects of advertising, it’s clearly had a lasting impact on me.

All the ads (whose early 90s iterations I seem to remember best) must have resonated in a personal way. However, for me to assume that their products are uniquely Australian, when all commercial sense should indicate the opposite, implies something else entirely. Successful advertising doesn’t just appeal to one’s personal tastes or moods. It resonates in a part of us that sympathises with that elusive thing called national identity. It’s the part of myself that I find most irrational and cumbersome. The reason, perhaps, that I have found myself in Shanghai, of all places. But it is also a part of us that is impossible to resist or escape.

So I just finish my Zinger Burger, and return home.

TV is no less entertaining here than in Sydney.

So, today I arrived in Shanghai, after about two months of planning, and five years of dreaming on it. First impressions are that it’s an astonishing city, teeming with life and contradictions. Chinese militarism against the kitsch, neon Japanese katakana that illuminates some of the trendy downtown shops. Grey apartment buildings that look as deserted as something one might find in Pripyat, clashing with shiny hotels topped with jittering, animated signs. Shanghai seems more cinematic than picturesque – it’s all angles, foreground and background, shadows and light. The way colourful shadows get thrown about everywhere as cars drive past. The shadows of pedestrians getting swollen and mutated to epic proportions in the headlights of the bus that took me through the city. There’s light everywhere, reflecting and refracting in glass until you’re not sure that you can locate the source in the illusion.

There’s more trees that you’d expect, too.