Li Daiguo at Yugong Yishan

Contemporary Chinese music can often feel dramatically polarized. On the “modern” side, one could lump all of the sugary KTV Mandopop and simultaneously rebellious and conservative Western-influenced indie rock. Then on the other, more “traditional” side, one could place all the folk, revolutionary period and classical Chinese music. It’s a rough split, admittedly, but one that speaks to the dramatic schism that Opening and Reform’s ensuing influx of Western culture has created within Chinese musical culture.

Li Daiguo, an Oklahoma-raised ABC who has been based in China since 2004, offers a refreshing aberration to this bifurcated environment. His music, played on a mixture of Chinese and world instruments, joyfully mines numerous folk traditions, continuously pushing the boundaries that instruments like the erhu or pipa are generally held within. On a chilly Wednesday, he held captivated what was surely one of Yugong Yishan’s quietest audiences to date.

Li is based in Chengdu, though he spends considerable time touring, and while living there, I was fortunate enough to see him play a dozen or so times. This extended exposure has allowed me to get beyond his virtuosic mastery and further into the probing, open-ended themes that his music explores.

The mastery tends to leave most first-timers dazzled, and often blown away: a Li performance will involve any combination of huqin, hulusi and other increasingly obscure Chinese folk instruments, violin, clarinet, mbira, beatboxing that slides from hip hop to Four Tet-like electronica to tabla-mimicking Carnatic Indian beats and finally, almost casually, over-tone throat singing (from all accounts: an extremely difficult craft to learn).

If all of this musicality were strewn together in a “look-at-me” medley of instrumental ostentation, most might probably forgive him. But Li’s performances have never been about showmanship; they are explorations of consciousness and the internal life, with pieces that leap purposefully from a Bach-like contrapuntal melodic line to rapid bluesy-riffing to screeching cat-claw white noise. Through it all, motifs of existential conflict, spiritual yearning and playful non-sequitur appear. Experienced live, his music is often rapturous, while never losing its sense of modest folk tradition exploration.

Dressed on Wednesday in blue worker’s uniform, a red and white striped hat and his signature over-sized owl glasses, Li cut a figure somewhere along the lines of Where’s Waldo, Taoist sage edition. His first set was split between a pipa-like instrument and violin, his beatboxing and throat singing lending rhythmic agency to the sometimes serene, sometimes unnerving mood.

His second set, featuring Beijing-based musician Mi, continued along this more theatrical vein, with Mi’s childlike scat and jibberish interspersed between her gorgeously high-pitched, folk minority-styled melodies. The two have played together for years, and their comfort with one another was clear, as Li slid easily into the background, while Mi, on accordion, lifted the mood to a place of confused hysteria and searching—a sonic exploration so germane to her generation’s current situation, yet one so rarely expressed in public.

Links:

Li Daiguo's Douban (most often updated): http://www.douban.com/artist/love.betternonsequitur.com/
Myspace (not as regularly updated): http://www.myspace.com/specialaffection
Musician's website: http://love.betternonsequitur.com
Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published December 17, 2009: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/li-daiguo-at-yugong-yishan-december-16-2009/

Review: Great Lake Swimmers at Yugong Yishan

While waiting for the Great Lake Swimmers, one of Canada’s numerous indie-folk jewels, to take the stage, I found myself discussing the peculiarities of bringing mainstream Western acts to mainland China. This narrow market is built around kids: those middle-class, nouveau-angsty teens who will pay good money to fill out a stadium for Linkin Park but would shrug their shoulders at the prospect of, say, the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. At the smaller level, however, Split Works, a promotions company based in China, is doing just fine, as it continues to bring increasingly notable indie acts (mostly Canadian) over to tour the Middle Kingdom, culminating at the end of January with Andrew Bird.

“We’re the Grateful Dead Swimmers!” joked Tony Dekker, soon after the group took the stage. The unerringly polite singer-songwriter’s gentle, confessional songs, with their poetic couplets and naturalistic imagery, have been gradually winning over an increasingly large audience in the West.

“We’re so proud to be in China,” he would repeat several times, as the band glided through a two-hour set which wound along at the shuffling pace of their sparse folk tunes. He was accompanied by long-time musical partner Erik Arnesen on electric guitar and banjo, their signature minimalist sound rounded out with Bret Higgens on double bass and Greg Millson behind the drums. Dressed in plaid shirts and tidily groomed, the band looked as tasteful and saccharine as Travis, but for the occasional glimpse of several tattooed arms, a subtle hint at the punk rock past that Dekker has referred to in interviews.

Mid-way through the show, the other band members departed, leaving Dekker to play a few solo numbers.

“Can you play ‘Imaginary Bars’ please?” asked a female member of the audience.

“You’ve got it,” he responded, almost instantly. If only all musicians were so accommodating!

Then, as his reedy, emotive tenor delivered lines such as “When the sun fell down and fell asleep/drunk from drinking all the heat” one young Chinese listener remarked to his girlfriend: “His voice isn’t bad,” and “I can understand the lyrics.” I doubt that when Dekker began writing songs as a hobby—he still considers himself a writer before a songwriter—that he imagined himself winning over new listeners in Beijing.

The crowd remained thoughtfully attentive throughout, though it felt like, after a few of the band’s jangly, more up-tempo numbers, they wanted the Swimmers to switch completely over to rock mode, rather than slip back into more finger-picked melancholia. Still, they demanded two encores, and Dekker closed the night appropriately with “Concrete Heart.”

The song makes reference to Toronto’s CN tower, and its refrain goes: “This is the place where I felt/Like the world's tallest self-supporting tower/Or maybe number two.” Number one, as you might guess, is in China, and was completed last year in Guangzhou.

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Links:

Great Lake Swimmers Myspace: www.myspace.com/greatlakeswimmers
Split Works: www.spli-t.com/
Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published January 11, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/review-great-lake-swimmers-at-yugong-yishan/

Concert review: Andrew Bird at Yugong Yishan

There were faces of deep concern at the nefarious smell of a blown fuse from both stage crew and crowd when the sound blew out with a dramatic bang mid-way through Andrew Bird’s set at a packed Yugong Yishan. The Chicagoan singer-songwriter’s visit has been the buzz around town for weeks now and, judging by the squeeze, he could have easily filled a venue twice the size.

But after several minutes, the sound returned and Bird, who had reacted to the potentially concert-halting explosion with remarkable calm, soldiered on to complete his set, tired as he clearly was. In a way, the bang provided an unusual climax to a performance that otherwise lacked one: for all of Bird’s dazzling virtuosity and comfortable stage presence, he doesn’t quite possess the showman’s feel for lifting musical tension to its peak or the fine balance between instrumental exploration and pop execution. As a result, Saturday’s show was stunning without being fully satisfying, beautiful but somehow lacking closure.

What was never unclear was Bird’s gifted mastery of the violin: watching him construct his soundscapes, mixing deep, orchestral foundations with syncopated grooves and floating pizzicato, before launching into constantly astounding solo passages, was worth the price of admission alone. His guitar playing, on the other hand, is heavy-handed and raw, and while it provided his songs with a certain garage rock bite, it just left me yearning for more violin. Holding the ship together between this instrumental juxtaposition was his voice, which was much fuller than on his occasionally sleepy-sounding recordings, extending into grand Rufus Wainwright-like warbles before dropping into grittier, throatier territory during a Blues number.

“Are you guys having a good time?” he asked the crowd with an affable smile, looking casually smart in a faded green dress shirt and dark blazer. “I’m having a good time!”

Having opened with an easy-sounding half-time “Darkmatter”, in which his strummed violin sounded almost ukulele-like, the set picked up pace with “Nervous Tic” and “Fits and Dizzyspells,” both played rough and rocky. Part of the joy of a Bird live show is the faint sense of chaotic danger involved: you start to get nervous as he bounds back to pick up his violin or fling his guitar around his back to squeeze in a glockenspiel line—“Is he going to make it in time for the loop?”

The set pulled heavily from his latest album, “Noble Beast,” disappointing fans looking for earlier favorites. Still, his “Section Eight City” rendition was superb, and the set ended strongly with “Imitosis” (“brought to you by the letter ‘I’”) and a drawn-out, powerful version of “Anonimal,” whose skittering, ruminating-on-existence lyrics are imaginatively squeezed into a complex melodic flow. He closed with “Scythian Empires,” enlisting the crowd’s help in helping him keep time while he syncopated loops. Its majestic melody was entirely re-worked, which, while more fun for Bird, meant that it possessed little of the grandeur of the recorded version.

Despite endless cries for “Simple X”, it wasn’t to be, and he closed the show with an intimate cover of Dylan’s “Oh Sister.” It was a moving end to a show that the crowd was grateful to have had in the first place, sonic mishaps and all.

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Links:

Andrew Bird - official site: www.andrewbird.net/
Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published January 31, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/concert-review-andrew-bird-at-yugong-yishan/

Trippple Nippples at Dos Kolegas

When one considers Beijing’s own No Wave scene, whimsy is rarely one of the first things that leaps to mind. Earnest indie scholarship, with required devotionals at the altars of Sonic Youth and Joy Division? Check. Insightful exploration of their generation’s nihilism and/or search for authenticity in an ownership-obsessed society? Check and check. But what of irreverence? Absurdity? Dressing up as a cow and devoting yourself to the “shooting of miracle magic milk” into audience’s minds? For such specific needs, we should look no further, of course, than swaggering Tokyo: home to a famously odd, vibrant underground arts scene.

Trippple Nippples, or PPP, have yet to release an LP, but their bombastic live performances, soundtracked to glitchy, funky poptronica, are already the source of much enthusiastic online chatter. The crowd was clearly ready for some “Japanese weirdness,” and as such, dressed for the occasion in leopard print and stonewash, sailor hat and grandpa cardigan. In a city like Beijing, in which, regardless of whether you’re a yuppie climber or artsy sub-cultural diver, sensible black or navy are the mode de rigueur, PPP’s show became a colorful celebration of unabashed fun, of wackiness for wackiness’ sake.

It began humbly, with opener Platinum (Bai Jin 白金) leaving some wandering if he was indeed the opening act, or simply a well-dressed man playing electroclash numbers off of his iTunes. After several songs, all utterly devoid of anything resembling “live performance”, he began to shout-sing into a microphone. And after that…hurrah! He put on a guitar and it began to feel as if we were at a concert. Bai Jin’s songs are catchy, well-crafted pieces of post-punk rock, mining themes of disillusioned youth and bitter love. The guy just really needs some band members.

PPP, on the other hand, in addition to nippple sisters Yuka and Qrea, included a band of three hip-looking white boys with tribal-signifying painted faces. They played the drums, turntables and keys with assurance and swing. Half the fun of a PPP show lies in discovering what costumes the sisters will conjure, and on this occasion they wore no shirts, but rather black clouds of tape and gladiator aluminum foil head crests: it was part cow, part Roman gladiator, all tongue-in-cheek, libertine fun.

The gig began like a fashion show, with earnest young DIY photographers and video-camera operators vying to snap the sisters Nippple, whose performance appeared half-rehearsed, half-spontaneous. After the first song, Yuki and Qrea smashed pillows against one another, and the exploding sea of feathers made their way throughout the show from stage floor to audience body. Halfway through the set, with the crowd suitably warmed up, the camera crew gave way to a sea of giddy, moshing revelers, leaving the crowd fittingly sweaty, slightly bruised and covered in goose down.

While undoubtedly a performance-over-craft act, PPP’s songs, with titles like “RIP Meat” and “Cavity”, feature endearing English bubblegum raps over well-patched beats. And while their nonsensical theme songs are a far cry from MIA’s anthems of the oppressed or Santagold’s righteous rap-singing, watching these confident young women leap about theatrically, masterfully overcome technical difficulties, then leap climactically into the crowd for a surf felt similarly globalized, gender-liberated and triumphant. I imagine the after party at White Rabbit only built upon such infectious good vibes.

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Trippple Nippples official site: http://trippplenippples.blogspot.com/

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/trippplenippples

Platinum: http://www.douban.com/artist/bj/

Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published May 21, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/trippple-nippples-at-dos-kolegas/

Rustic at Dos Kolegas

Around the time of Rustic’s band members’ births, about two decades ago, their country’s doors were just being opened up to the rest of the world. With that came sweeping changes, new opportunity and exposure to alternative lifestyles previously unimaginable in China, especially for three self-proclaimed “poor boys” from rural Hebei. Jump forward to 2010, when Rustic, on their way next week to London to compete as China’s national entry in the upcoming Global Battle of the Bands, are well on their way to their openly stated dream of rock stardom: eyeliner, booze, women and all.

They’re not quite there yet. On Friday evening, they played before a half-full Dos Kolegas crowd, which warmed to their trademark retro rock and roll theatrics without being completely won over. Rustic’s tightly wound pop-punk, which gleefully mines everything from early Sex Pistols-era punk to 80s hair metal, makes for an escapist, hope-fuelled performance, where members announce their starry-eyed dreams as brazenly as bassist Ricky Sixx’s open chest; the stage a platform that lifts them—at least for now—far above the cynicism and irony of the modern world.

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend…but girls are always a boy’s best friend!” screams lead singer Lucifer, wearing his trademark rectangular sunglasses, a nod to his idols, the British “punk pathetique” band Toy Dolls, whose coarse humor and working class pride present clear inspiration. He continued to throw out a litany of tongue-in-cheek one-lines throughout the set, including “If you say you don’t play rock for girls or money, you’re a liar!” and, in reference to their upcoming contest: “We’re just three boys from Hebei who are going to kick the world!”

They led the set with “Girls Are Not Yours”, a riff-tastic dedication to hedonism, whose fast-flowing hooks and chorus are all Mötley Crüe and Poison, a nod to Ricky Sixx’s glam metal roots. His is an obsession turned way-of-being that flows through his entire soul, from his bleach blonde shag and skin tight cow (niubi) pants to his sensual, phallic bass-playing. Lucifer, who briefly demonstrated his musical prowess with a surprise clarinet solo early into the set, sneers his way a la Billie Joe Armstrong through tales of debauchery like gutter punk-ish “Pay to Cum” and “Rock n Roll for money and sex.” His guitar playing is smooth and assured, and he and Ricky possess a magnetic, naturally flamboyant interplay. Behind them, drummer Li Fang, with his bright red mop top, propels the mythological Starship Rustic forward with swift, deliberate economy.

They closed with “Anarchy in the UK,” fitting given that their next gig will take place there, but also because of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s recent passing. The show was entirely over-the-top, utterly anachronistic and filled with a joie de vivre so refreshing within Beijing’s gloomy post-punk-focused scene. It was also a lot of fun.

Forget the fact that hair metal died long ago, or that most casual observers will see Rustic as a group of country boys playing dress-ups. These three wild boys from rural China—poverty-stricken, naïve and boundlessly talented—are out trailblazing a new path to that of their yuppie peers, but one born of the same ambitious dreaming and dedication.

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Links:

Official Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/rusticpunk

Written for Beijing City Weekend, published April 11, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/rustic-at-dos-kolegas/

DJ Kentaro at Yugong Yishan

There is something innately attractive about the guitar, an intrinsic pull—be it in the promise of flocking groupies or the fan boy dreams of Hendrix-like rock legend. Which makes this listener all the more thankful for DJ Wordy, who put down his guitar, left his rock band, then proceeded to teach himself the art of turntablism, to the level at which he is now one of China’s leading exponents of the digital art.

Opening for DJ Kentaro, his set was both swaggeringly cocky and scientifically precise, warming up the crowd masterfully with a set that, while gliding between Kraftwerk-influenced electronica, old-school nineties hip hop and ragga, maintained an easy, mid-paced tempo which slurred and swayed as much as it rocked. In between, samples celebrated the local—a Mandarin rap was set to MIA’s “Paper Planes”—and the entertainingly pop cultural, such as when he dropped in the Ghostbusters theme song. A three-time winner of the national DMC turntable championship, those looking to work out that hip hop itch would be well-advised to get themselves to one of his monthly Hot Pot parties soon.

By the time Kentaro took to the stage, momentarily partnering with Wordy, the crowd had filled out thoroughly. “This is a journey into sound!” announced the sample, and the turntablist—the first Asian DJ to win the World DMC Championship—wasted no time demonstrating his considerable scratching ability, a performance the live video feed projected for the audience to observe. Even when one table quickly went out of order early on—a problem swiftly rectified by staff—he kept the crowd engaged with some golden era hip hop.

In addition to his obvious skill, what separates Kentaro from other DJs is his engaging, confident stage presence. Wearing a black bowler hat, he frequently held one pointer up to the crowd, as if saying “Wait for this!” before dropping one perfectly timed beat after another. Otherwise, he exuded utter control, reinterpreting and reshaping tracks with eclectic originality, as well as a healthy dose of flair, such as when scratching around his back.

While the crowd seemed most receptive to Kentaro’s slower, sing-along reggae jams, those looking to dance were less impressed by the occasionally lengthy beat-holding, scratch-indulgent passages. Regardless, all would have admired the ease in which he silkily led followers from the syncopated glide of dancehall and hip hop into a powerhouse middle section of pacey drum and bass. By that point, he had won over most of those who had previously been too sullen or self-conscious to move, and punters of every calling—from stiff-collared suits to the baggy jean-ed, and everyone in between—were grooving along gleefully to a set both crowd pleasing and jubilant. Particularly hypnotized was one attractive young lass at the front of the stage, positioned directly in front of the turntables, who didn’t seem to stop moving once, and would occasionally throw herself against the stage walls in barely-concealed adulation and longing, arms outstretched in a virtual embrace.

This is 2010 after all: could it be that turntables are the new guitar?

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Links

DJ Wordy: http://www.douban.com/artist/djwordy/ DJ Kentaro: http://www.myspace.com/djkentaro

Written for Beijing City Weekend, April 19, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/dj-kentaro-at-yugong-yishan/