Category Archives: Music

My broad taste in sound.

Interview with Sun Dawei

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Today I’m really pleased to follow up my interview with Wang Menghan that came out a few days ago, with a short interview with Sun Dawei, one of the most influential experimental electronic musicians out of China. Sun Dawei started producing music in his hometown of Beijing in the late 1990s, emerging from a punk background to become a full-fledged electronic musician by the early 2000s. At the same time he founded the record label Shanshui, which continues to be a great resource for experimental electronic music. Early on he became internationally known for his chiptune/8bit releases and performances under the artist name SULUMI, but his music has always been diverse, moving into the fields of electronica, techno, or ambient, reflected by the particular artist name he used. In 2010 he moved to Osaka, Japan where he has continued producing music. He was recently back in Beijing to take part in a residency at the M WOODS Art Museum, with a number of other contemporary artists from China, responding to the Museum’s current show of Buddhist cave paintings from the Xinjiang region of China. The following interview was done by email, and I want to thank Dawei for being so accessible. In the near future I hope to be able to present a more detailed interview with him, so keep checking back!

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Critical Music 7: Interview with Wang Menghan

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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.

Wang Menghan portrait

Wang Menghan

Wang Menghan is an electronic musician based in Beijing, China, going by the artist name MengHan. While known primarily for her performances as a DJ and computer centered improviser, her practice is much broader, and she has recently started to focus on sampling and field recordings to develop works that include more elaborate presentations and conceptual ideas. In September Menghan will be moving to Berlin to start a Masters program in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts, at the University of the Arts Berlin, and to further develop her practice.

While many claims are made for the transformative nature of the club experience, in reality it can often feel a somewhat self-absorbed space. I am of course generalizing here, but it seems to me that the kinds of critical sound practices I am interested in do not appear in clubs very often. Although in the past Menghan has mainly performed in clubs, she seems to be driven to seek out other forms of presentation that provide better settings for her ideas and that are not tied to the requirements of any particular space or audience. I met up with Menghan recently to find out more about her practice and thinking.

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Where is the Field of Field Recording?

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Text written to accompany the cassette ‘Beijing 2016–2017’, released on Zoomin’ Nights Recordings, December 2017

zoominnight-beijing_2016-2017

[photo and design by Li Song]

What effect can captured sounds have in the world? What process are we setting in motion by switching on an audio recorder at a certain moment, and then switching it off again after a certain period of time? What is the significance of this act by the holder of the recording machine? What is the significance of the movement from sound as a register of location, to the abstract representation of sounds, to the registration of their playback format as a new location?

All the pieces on this cassette represent cuts out of time, taken from specific locations (in this case, between 2016 and 2017 in the city of Beijing, China).

As snippets of sound, maybe they actually tell us very little, as they are abstracted from their original situation and limited to the single sense of hearing. Yet in themselves it is expected that they provide some minimal description of a place and time; they can be appreciated as a limited reportage of the situations they were recorded in.

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Sound Transmission from Japan to China in the Early 2000s

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Yan Jun in conversation with Edward Sanderson, at Nooo Kitty, Osaka

Yan Jun has been involved in the music scene in China since the early ’90s, originally as a poet and a journalist, as well as organizing gigs and events for experimental music and sound. He began organizing these in his hometown of Lanzhou, and later moved to Beijing. He runs Sub Jam, a very important record label in China, releasing all sorts of works by Chinese and international sound artists and musicians. In terms of sound and experimental music in China, Yan is one of the central people. And not just in China, but also internationally: for many years he has been making links between China and the rest of the world. In October he was in Japan with the group he performs with, FEN, which is himself, Yuen Cheewai from Singapore, Ryu Hankil from Korea, and Otomo Yoshihide from Japan. The following interview with Yan Jun took place after a performance by Yan and Tim Olive at the Nooo Kitty space in Osaka on the 17th of October.

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