I saw this on Jake Newby’s blog, and it sounds exciting. A one-hour improv session featuring weird acoustic sounds, with no constraints or limits to speak of, performed in a space buzzing with artistic activity? Nifty! In my three (count ‘em!) posts about the Shanghai music scene so far, I haven’t really been about upcoming events. Mainly, this is because I don’t know a damn thing about upcoming events – I find out everything from Jake and Andy’s blogs. I’ve been writing reviews instead, to justify all the time I spend taking notes at gigs.

So I guess this post is a departure from the norm. But I have something to say, so it’s cool.

Before I left Sydney for Shanghai, I was part of a small improv ensemble who recorded the soundtrack for a film by a UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) Masters student. The film was called Sentience, and the final sequence featured a soundtrack performed on analogue synthesisers, which were also a crucial part of the mise-en-scène. The director was after percussive sounds and textures, as the melody came from an improvised trumpet performance by one of the ensemble members.

So, I lugged over my modular synth, Shannon (my old music/sound arts tutor at uni) brought a Korg MS-20 and a Kaoss Pad. Another guy, Dan, had a Roland SH-101 (the best analogue monosynth ever created, and God how I wish I had mine in Shanghai), and another dude, Bernie, was playing garbled voice samples on a laptop with Bidule. That’s not an analogue synth, but whatever. Then there was also the trumpet player, Roger, who happens to be an awesome musician.

We just had to jam three sessions, and the result would be mixed and used as the soundtrack in the film. Here’s what we came up with:

(Click the arrows to cycle through the tracks.)

It’s a shame that Open Goat is all acoustic, but introducing power supply for amps and laptops and whatever else would needlessly complicate the proceedings, when I think the point is just to go and have fun. The press release (is that what it’s called?) on Jake’s blog mentions “a journey into the unknown, an insane foray into the murky recesses of a collective consciousness.”

I reckon a type of cascading effect will take place, as in our jam session for the film. As people feel less self-conscious (and, perhaps, increasingly inebriated), more and more sounds will start to reveal themselves in the mix, building up to a level of noise and clamour that the performers, in silent concensus, find displeasing; it’s just too loud, too much. Then the opposite will take place, but likely not as gradual as the ascent. I reckon there’ll be lots of periods of near silence, or where it seems there’s more silence than noise. It’ll be cool to see how the ensemble, or indeed the “collective consciousness”, modulates it’s own dynamics in this way. I really doubt there’ll be anything resembling rhythm, but I might be in for a surprise there.

I’m also predicting an imbalance towards percussive sounds, but now I’m just talking out of my arse. It’s probably time to wrap this up.

I do wonder how it will be recorded… Multiple dynamic mics? A team of roving sound recordists? The latter would be awesome, and could make a great multi-channel mix. I sincerely hope there’s a video of the event too. Will people talk during the session? Is that going to be part of the improvisation? I guess I’ll just have to see myself.

I saw X is Y during the first gig I ever attended here in Shanghai, which was only a couple of months ago. They stood out then, and they were nifty during Saturday’s Trash A Go-Go night as well. And, like always, I wonder what makes their sort of music cool.

The evening was full of good music, mind. X is Y were followed by a punk act lead by a guy who reminded me of Jon English, and whose name I failed to catch because I was too busy punching notes about X is Y into my mobile phone. The lead singer of The Instigation made some girl in the audience cry, but he did jump onto her from the stage, so that’s understandable. I happen to really like them, but I’ve never really listened to live hardcore/punk music before, so I don’t have much to compare them to. After that, everyone stumbled over to Logo to see Pairs, who were troubled by a mischievous amplifier that didn’t like reproducing midrange frequencies, so it was pretty much all snares. Logo is not even near well-equipped for live music, so in the true spirit of Australian politics, I’d like to publically “name and shame” them.

Anyhoo… I wanted to write about X is Y, because they’re the ones about whom I wrote three draft messages of notes in my phone, and whose appreciation distracted me from watching the Jon English guy. I might otherwise have written a blog post about that, and mined it for its boundless potential.

I’d like to think music has a punctum - the first, touching detail towards which your ears are irresistibly drawn – as distinct from a hook, which generally means a repeated, structural component of a composition. It is designed to catch the ear, whereas I’m talking about something that elicits an initial, involuntary response, or feeling. ‘Punctum’ isn’t really the right word, as anyone who has studied a bit-o-Barthes will know, but it’s heading in the right direction. It’s a useful way of talking about live music, at any rate.

And when X is Y play their opening song, the first thing that I respond to is how the guitar and vocals are in lockstep with the drumming. That’s it. The first thing I notice.

It’s a reflection of skilful musicianship, excellent timing; lots of practise. But I’m more interested in the unexpected effect it has on listening. In the crappiest pop songs, you can mouth along with the lyrics even if you haven’t heard them before. You know when the next harmonic shift is coming, and what it’s going to be. You know if there’s going to be an obligatory rap segment when you hear the first notes of the song. I suppose this is what makes pop music comforting. So how does the rhythmic precision of math rock play with one’s expectation? You always know you’re watching performers, sure, but in sparing us the bloated drum fills, wild guitar solos, and cathartic screams of other forms of rock music, X is Y deliberately strip away some of the human spontaneity and unpredictability of rock music.

But in ‘Loved’, their best song in my opinion, when during the chorus* they jump from the dance of muted guitar arpeggios and grooving hi-hats, to the distortion, snare-bashing and cymbals, it just feels right. Perfect, even. This one moment, of this one song, stood out to me the first time I heard them, and stayed with me for the rest of the night. I couldn’t work out why until I heard them play again on Saturday. I think it all comes down to the instant where, an eighth-note earlier than you’d expect, the rhythmic and dynamic change occurs so suddenly. It almost feels like a glitch, and it punctures the atmosphere they create with Guillaume’s soft vocals and Fabien’s measured drumming.

That’s what math rock is about – it elicits an awareness of form, and rewards one’s natural inclination to look for patterns in music. It’s always cool to see rock musicians using thoughful composition to move an audience, and not just relying on wacko stage antics, phat beats and zaniness. The other song of theirs I really enjoy, ‘These’, is full of similar moments like the one I just described, where dynamic changes are part of the composition, rather than just a means of creating contrast. I’d recommend catching them the next time they play at YYT, or wherever. The recordings on their Douban page don’t do any justice to the intricacy and impact of their music.

*Calling it a “chorus” is a loose description, and their song structure is more intricate than this simplification implies.

Coming on after Pairs, who were utterly boneriffic, and the wondrous Duck Fight Goose, Handsome Furs were a load of derivative, four-to-the-floor shit. Shit – as in poo. Right there on the stage.

And it wasn’t just a case of unfavourable comparison – it’s aesthetics. As an audience member, to go from being face to face with the sublime to standing there, listening to something that could be an Ableton Live tutorial, is more disappointing than I am capable of expressing. And the fact that everyone in the crowd lapped it up is just depressing.

I’ll backtrack a bit, first. So, I went along to the Handsome Furs gig at Yuyintang, having never heard of the main act and only really going there because I wanted to see Pairs and Duck Fight Goose again. They were both amazing and Pairs, in particular, were better than the first time I saw them, a few weeks back. You come across music like this and, honestly, you feel like you have an ear pressed against the door to the world of Ideas. And then Handsome Furs came on and played an hour of lameness in 4/4. Stadium-rock vocals (I can’t say much for the lyrics, as I scarcely heard them, but I’m sure one of them was ‘I’ve got no feelings‘, which is about all I need to hear), insipid drum programming and blasts of Native Instruments’ tackiest synth presets were pretty much what was on offer. The guitar added some nice, chaotic textures to the by-the-numbers electronic shit, but it was pretty uninspiring. And when you have a live act where one of the two band members is completely redundant as a performer, then you’ve got problems.

Anyhow, I left the main audience and went to the beer garden after four songs. I had work early the next day, and I figured that it would be silly to endure temporary hearing damage from music that I don’t like. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be this negative about a band. I mean, there was nothing terrible about Handsome Furs and, as far as that sort of music goes, it was a tight performance. But I’m annoyed that Duck Fight Goose and Pairs were opening for them. It’s great exposure for these two, super-nifty bands, I know – they’re just on another gorram level.

At the end of The Great Gatsby, in the final four paragraphs, Fitzgerald seems to step out from behind the narrator, Nick Carraway, and he ponders the limits of our ability to see and understand the world; that which is “commensurate to his (man’s) capacity for wonder”. Fitzgerald captures this idea perfectly in the image of Long Island in the distance that “flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world.” It is one of those ceaseless, penultimate moments that you find in many great literary works; a statement about the way illusions of things that are just beyond our comprehension can captivate us. Steal us away to somewhere else. It is doubly powerful, because Fitzgerald conveys the idea in such wonderful prose.

This is about all you can hope for in the greatest of art – an encounter with the limits of human perception and embodiment – even if you’re an atheist and an anti-Platonist like me, and you know there’s nothing beyond that one can possibly encounter. Some bands really push the limits of what you expect to hear, and what your brain is wired to tolerate. Not to invoke their names with overzealous fervor – that’d be missing out on a lot of the fun – but Duck Fight Goose do just this. And so do Pairs, to a lesser extent. And so do Battles, and so did Throbbing Gristle, and Steve Reich, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cage, Schoenberg, and Schaeffer. So did Davis and Zappa. So does Aphex Twin, and Joanna Newsom, and a thousand other great musicians and artists. It’s not an exclusive club, but it requires a band to be just a little experimental – and Handsome Furs definitely ain’t that, which is why they were a waste of 120 Yuan.

Duck Fight Goose play in unconventional time signatures (I counted verses in 7/4 and 5/4 that jump into 4/4 and 3/4 – all sorts of craziness), they use tempo as liberally as a guitarist moves their hand across the fretboard. They compel you to move, jump and dance to things that your brain has difficulty processing. With Pairs, the energy they give off is visceral. They play insane, propulsive, phrenetic rock – almost more than you can take.

What possible chance did Handsome Furs stand?

In what amounted to the best weekend I’ve had in Shanghai since I arrived in February, I made my way to Yuyintang on both Friday and Saturday night for two vastly different shows. Friday was the second night of Rock0093′s third anniversary celebration and, while it was good fun, was nothing worth writing about. In fact, it was a little disappointing, because the only band I really liked there, MOMO, played but three songs as part of the night’s rapid schedule.

Saturday night was on another level.

Eat Naked Lunch, an evening of beautiful photography bookended by mesmerising, surreal music, was the sort of event that reminds you of everything you love about music, art, and the people involved with its creation. And every other damn thing in the world, for that matter.

It began with Duck Fight Goose, a local band I know little about, but now desperately want to find out more. The only band I can liken them to is Battles – both in the style of their music and the tightness of their performance. Except I find that Battles’ music – their twist on the hook/verse/chorus structure of popular music – tends to draw attention to the ludicrous technical mastery of the band members in playing their respective instruments. Duck Fight Goose – themselves not lacking in technical skill – seem to be more about texture, mood and musical diegesis, while heavily experimental. The songs I heard – and I would love to get my hands on their forthcoming album to confirm this – comprise of different musical ideas that float around and combine in interesting and captivating ways.

There are moments right throughout Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians when the pulses rise to the surface and the music, all of a sudden, becomes more urgent and powerful. It happens again and again. Duck Fight Goose’s songs are a little like this. They give you the time to become accustomed to each new idea in turn, so that a simple change – like the addition of another snare hit every bar – feels all the more significant and, to the audience, seems to take the music in an entirely new direction. Having only seen them once, I don’t know how much they improvise with their music when playing live, but this is the sort of structure that makes you feel special for being there, hearing it in person. As though you’re hearing something that’s being played for the first time – a musical idea that is created right before your eyes.

Then there’s the fact that their music is incredibly textured, with warped vocals, looped guitars, and what I took to be some sort of small synthesizer. And the way they play with tempo, speeding up and slowing down, teasing you with the prospect of intensity, before settling back down into a groove. It’s great stuff. I recorded two videos of them with my cheap digital camera, one of which is a full song. The quality isn’t bad, and I remixed the sound to better capture the feeling of their performance.

The Yuyintang audience really dug Duck Fight Goose, and Yuyintang was packed and buzzing by the time Ren Huang’s photography was displayed. The photographs, which seemed to be united by a theme of playful, sexual exploitation and awakening, were absolutely stunning, and very warmly received by the audience. While they were presented as a simple slideshow, Ren had clearly given a lot of thought to the sequence of shots, which made the whole thing more cohesive and meaningful.  Pink flowers were a prominent visual motif; sometimes as background colour, line and texture, or as mise-en-scène. Or sticking out of some guy’s arse. I guess there’s the idea of deflowering in here, somewhere, or maybe that’s just my reading. This was contrasted with occasional political imagery – the Chinese flag, the colour red, a poster of Communist poster boys adorning the wall behind a girl stripped down to her underwear. Red curtains parted so as to frame a naked man looking expressionlessly out to a grey, industrial sky. But the politics seemed to be all background noise, rather than subject.

The feeling I got from the photos was a celebration of youthful polysexuality in the face of all this noise. The audience would woo and giggle at predictable moments of nudity and eroticism; stretched-out penises, a cigarette poking out of a vagina, a homosexual embrace or kiss. It’s hard to imagine that a photographer with experience of exhibiting his work would not predict such a reaction. It was all part of the show, I felt. The audience was welcomed to enjoy and react to Ren’s photographs, and the exhibition felt more energetic and moving because of it.

So, the night was going pretty well. And then came Boojii. They are, more or less, the same lineup at Duck Fight Goose, but their music is very different. Almost exclusively in 3/4 time, the best phrase I can use to describe their music is ‘nightmare circus waltz’. Or ‘drunken, swinging trapeze act’. And if they did break out of 3/4 time, it’d be for a couple bars of wonky 7/4, before returning to the waltz. Except I’m not exactly sure, because their music is so weird and wonderful and atmospheric that I had trouble counting the beats. Apparently, the drummer and singer in Pairs (Rhys, who I got to hang out with after the show was over) was trying to get my attention from the side of the stage for the whole performance. And it wasn’t as though the music was so loud as to impair my hearing; I was just utterly enthralled. One of the things I like about Boojii is the amount of sonic space they leave in their songs – you can hear the vocals, the creepy synth arpeggios, and the crooked basslines. The chaos and distortion is measured. It bursts out at you like a monster in a B movie.

Bell-like sounds and dissonant, ring-modulated synths were the timbres that characterised their sound, which contributed heavily to the tolling rhythm. The lead guitarist (who is the singer/lead guitarist of Duck Fight Goose) was in a close-eyed stupor for the whole set; it’s music for nightmares.

I could say a lot more about this – and I might well in another post- but I’ll never come close to capturing the mood, excitement and sheer awesomeness of the night. On a more personal level, it’s the first time I’ve felt a part of something really special, here in Shanghai. I loved the music, the photographs were wonderful, and I had a great time afterwards, hanging out with some of the nifty people who are involved with the Shanghai music scene. I should thank Andy Best and Jake Newby for organizing the event, as well as everyone else involved. Cheers for a lovely evening, cutters!

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.

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.