Tag Archives: yugong yishan

Critical Music 3: Interview with Ake

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Critical Music series: This series of posts focuses on individuals, groups, or organisations that have played notable roles in the history of critical music practices in China. These practices appear in many different guises, often related to concepts such as “experimental music” or “sound art”, although neither term is entirely satisfactory in describing the practices which often exist in many hybrid forms. My adoption of the term “critical music” (following the writings of G Douglas Barrett) attempts to avoid the limitations of these terms, while highlighting the active nature of the sound component of the practices. These posts will primarily take the form of interviews, each one aiming to place the subject within the general history of critical music practices in China, and contextualise their current practice within their overall development.

Welcome to the third interview in this series. Today I am very happy to be able to publish an interview with Ake 阿科, the Beijing-based experimental musician. Ake is a young (born in 1990), self-taught artist, who has only been performing for a couple of years but has become a regular participant in experimental music events in the city. While initially working with violin drones, she has recently started investigating manipulated field recording. I interviewed Ake because I think she represents a new generation of artists in China whose practice is developing within a relatively stable environment for autonomous experimental work, an environment that does not depend on the “regular” music scene to provide it with outlets and reasons to exist.

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Carsten Nicolai at Yugong Yishan Club

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Lot’s going on this week on the music front. Tuesday saw Carsten Nicolai playing at Yugong Yishan courtesy of Goethe-Institut, with Kid Koala playing there the next night. Over the next few weekends we have the NOTCH Festival (NOrdic+CHina) which was at Yugong Yishan last year, but has now decamped to the rather more chichi surroundings of the Sanlitun Village. I plan on getting over to NOTCH tonight, to experience a:

Halloween sleeping concert with hypnotic audio-visuals and specially designed air bed by Swedish architecture group Testbed.

Lineup: Biosphere (Norway), Mokira (Sweden), Vectral (Denmark), Dead J (China), Chen Xiongwei (China)

I’ll post some pics of that tomorrow – or maybe even tonight if they have a free internet connection there.

Before that, though, I made some notes after Carsten Nicolai’s performance which follow on from my thoughts about live music/events in general, which I outlined after the Laoban event we hosted at the Gallery last year and which keep coming up for me every time I go to hear a performance. I have rather confused, ambivalent and romantic expectations from music, I want it to move me and excite me, and that means for it to have a “meaning” for itself and hence for me. As far as the former are concerned, I know that’s problematic and indicative of a surrendering of my control to someone else; for the latter, that seems an overly analytical reaction to the former on my part. Where is the middle-ground, if indeed there is such a thing?

Carsten Nicolai at Yugong Yishan Club Case in point: Carsten Nicolai’s appearance. I didn’t know much about him before going, but his name had cropped up in art-related contexts, so I was pleased to be able to get a chance to see what he was about. His set seemed short, possibly due to it being marred by some technical glitches (at one point I thought the whole thing would just be called off). At the end of it all I felt quite a bit of frustration. Carsten is described as someone “who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes.” From my point of view, as music I was not hearing anything very “creative” or giving an insight into the processes involved, and as a visual experience it failed to reveal anything beyond a confusing array of techno-fetishism. Sure, there was the requisite amount of glitch, noise, and the visuals were distracting for a short while, but there seemed very little meaning behind it all, very little of an idea to hold on to, very little of anything interactive between the music and visuals beyond a certain didactic “this is what I’m playing and this is what it looks like.”

Carsten Nicolai at Yugong Yishan Club In terms of my reactions, I think it all comes down to what criteria I judge the evening on, either as music, or as visuals, or as art; and I obviously apply different criteria to each format. So, for the music I didn’t hear anything imaginative about the beats he was using, the glitches seemed more or less random, without an underlying form which would have allowed you to follow the reasoning (or an algorithm?) behind them through some sort of progression (in the way you can with Autechre, for instance). The visuals of the filters and processes the audio and video were going through were interesting, but left me with a bit of a “so what” feeling. And, ultimately, as “art” the whole was less than the sum of its parts for me.

  • My stream-of-consciousness notes following the event:
    • I want to feel some connection to the music.
    • Do that through the beats and melody, I think.
    • Beats that make you move, force you to react.
    • Trying to put a good view on that, as it seems like tyranny in a way. Being controlled by the beats, that can’t be good, no freewill.
    • Maybe more like some kind of empathy between the beats and the person – naive, idealistic maybe.
    • Dangerous, as it is too close to letting yourself lose control – letting someone else control you.
    • So CN’s music could be good in that it prevents me from letting go? hmmm..
    • But as a DJ what are you doing? Obviously many different types of DJs. But I think most will want some sort of recognition or connection with their audience – otherwise they could just stay as bedroom noodlers. Working for public display as a means of verification? approval?
    • Doing work is one thing, but in a milieu which guides you, which you participate in, in which you like contributing things – a community of agreement.
    • For CN its slightly different. He is at a stage when he can do what he wants. He is known and he already has an audience which accepts him. He does not have to remake his audience every time.
    • But in a way that’s what we always have to do – hence the technical problems being a way to lose your audience. You already have an audience before the show. Some come to the show and then you have to retain and satisfy that audience in your performance.