interview with Zhou Pei aka Ronez

Portrait of Zhou Pei

Back in 2003, in an ecstatic review of the Sounding Beijing festival for The Wire magazine, Steve Barker wrote about a “stone-killer electro-nerd star” named Zhou Pei , and in 2017 Yan Jun’s history of experimental music in China recorded that Zhou’s music was “amateur electronica/avant-pop” . Zhou has therefore been active since the very early days of experimental electronic music in China, and continues to perform and release material under a series of artist names, including Ronez, Karassage, and OddChordSpace, reflecting the diverse styles of sound he is producing. Zhou, however, still considers himself an “outsider” artist, living in Guilin city, in South China’s Guangxi Province, away from the major conurbations where experimental music has usually been found in China, so I got in touch with him by email to ask about his music and life in experimental music.

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Critical Music 6: Interview with Li Jianhong and Wei Wei

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 sixth interview in this series, and the last for a while. It’s a real pleasure and an honour to be able to publish this interview with Li Jianhong and Wei Wei, the couple who in their various ways have been central figures in the experimental music scene in China for many years. Originally from Hangzhou, Li and Wei Wei were both involved in the music scenes in that city before coming to Beijing around 2011. Since then they have been highly visible with their solo projects as well as performing together under the names Mind Fibre and Vagus Nerve. This interview concentrates on their early musical development, the 2pi Festival that Li founded in Hangzhou in 2003, and their thoughts about improvisation and the state of the experimental music scene in Beijing.

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