Releases
The 'Provinces' Project
The Provinces Project is an audio exploration of a cross section of life in China's provinces. Each month a track will be released constructed of field recordings, found sound and processed instruments, that highlight a particular sound/image/memory of the place in question. Some will be abstract, others less so. The project is of an indeterminate length.
August 2010
Yunnan (Right Click and Save As to Download)
Yesterday, part of the same system that brought extensive and continued flooding to Pakistan. Not really anything I want to add, as it is a constantly changing situation, but please visit here to donate what you can to the Pakistan Flood Appeal
July 2010
Gansu (Right Click and Save As to download)
This piece, the 10th in the Provinces Project (which will conclude in September on track 12 - all will be available to download as a zip file from mid-October), is an attempt to develop a generative work based on one five-note arpeggio and its gradual collapse/build in to granular disorder. The fuzz that seemingly attached itself to the track reminded me of being on the beach at Camber Sands many years ago, and watching as the wind pulled in the dry sand from dunes in to the sea.
China, and particularly Gansu province, has a problem with both desertification, and subsequent sandstorms. A comprehensive, and expensive, programme to combat the problem through international collaboration with the Japanese, South Korea and others, has started to make a dent in the frequency of such events. Gansu province is the area where most sandstorms in the country occur, and so the PRC centred their research and anti-desertification measures there, setting up the Gansu Desert Control Research Institute (GDCRI). The institute has now started rolling out training programmes to other countries suffering from desertification, inviting panels from numerous African nations ( Egypt, DRC, Angola, Tanzania) affected by similar problems. Last year's course was held in Minqin County in Gansu, one of the four major areas in the PRC from which sand storms originate. The county saw 14 sand storms in 2006, down almost 50% on 2005, after it brought 2,000 hectares of desert under control by encircling the sand with nets made of wheat straw and planting drought-resistant plants. Fujitsu, the Japanese electronics company, has invested over 10 million Japanese yen in various desert greening projects in China, under an agreement signed by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and the workers union of Fujitsu in 2006. This sort of cross governmental programme, along with the continuing training the GDCRI is providing to developing nations in Africa, is the only real way progress can be made, and deserts can be reclaimed. For more information on the vibrant and eternally exciting history of anti-desertification measures in Gansu, here are some links:
- Initial 2001 findings
- 2007 article/source material
June 2010
Heilongjiang (Right Click and Save As to Download) Back in 2002, Channel 4 screened a series of programmes about China, including the infamous 'baby cannibal' modern art programme 'Beijing Swings' (the artist in question was Zhu Yu). They also screened a selection of Chinese films, including one that has stuck with me - and indeed formed part of Sunshine and Power Lines - in the intervening years. Sadly, I am unable to find the name of it, but it dealt with a Chinese artist escaping from Xi'an (I think...it was a long time ago and my memory changes things for fun) after being accused of murdering his girlfriend. He decides to travel by train to the northern town of Mohe in Heilongjiang province, which is far enough north that it is essentially polar. He saw it as the remotest place in the PRC. The track I made to accompany this province uses a field recording from an American tourist of a folk song from Heilongjiang which I have cut up and rearranged. In much the same way, the following section has been cut up and rearranged.
Neighbours in arms, characters, a secret body in the mountain near Mohe's northern candles. They stand in the many Waters. Here, in northern skies, kilometres of old strange frequented towns. To eat the opposite, tooth, earth. Their part. Along it, animals of blue, ancient feet, red high latitude rings in northern skies. In their heads, resources from “ Big Walk Lights”, possibly back in the four Chinese, advertisement skeletons. Rising colours likely. Big stares in this remoteness, is too much of a remoteness, there in the belt of stars. The North is tender, the years are rouge from clay. The cockerel's river, ice. A river may like the cold, perhaps the road will come in to the high Mohe winds. There the fights, at the Russian border, in the dam of ribbon-fish that move like a map.
The passengers are an appropriate childhood surplus. In the autumn the river appears and very few of the passengers understood the water mother this spring. Dreaming stares stretches colour to camp. Her brown plants and the Wu nickname. Visits the lights in the magic cube band. Scattered material in polar Mohe. The arms are a boundary of degrees, a boundary for possible river lights. The ink black surpasses it and bacterium likes a ring fungus, like most of nature, a wish on the ocean. Cold gardens of scattered snow. Red now, the cockerel's river, the home, the brew bent wonders of virgin geography. When will we use the dissonant house mouth. Then eat then vanishes Mohe, who stretches heads in the long wind.
May 2010
Jiangsu (Click to Download)
Ma Yaohai, a professor at Nanjing University, was jailed for three and a half years by a Nanjing court earlier this week, guilty of the charge of "group licentiousness". Between 2007-2009, he was engaged in numerous group sex acts with nineteen or twenty one others (who also received jail terms...the exact number seems to vary across new coverage) at his home, where Chinese authorities believe he lived with his elderly mother. This case raises a number of questions about the sexual civil liberties in the PRC. There is growing pressure for such laws to be reviewed, and China sits on an awkward bridge between increased sexual experimentation, and legal prevention. Pornography is banned, except if you can get hold of the software to circumvent the government website blocks, and many do,and many Chinese cities operate 'adult health shops' selling a variety of sex toys and related materials. How the authorities proceed after this case is uncertain, with public opinion also veering wildly from utter disgust to feelings of anger at continued government interference in the populations private lives. In her blog earlier this year, Beijing sexologist (yes...this is the actual term) Li Yinhe suggested the 1997 law banning "group licentiousness" should be abandoned. "If the nation's laws interfere with this sort of activity of people in private, then it seems like the participants' bodies aren't their own, they're the government's". This case highlights that the government, as yet, are unwilling to change their minds or their legislation when it comes to sexual liberties.
This composition, in fairly simplistic terms, represents a slightly drugged up orgy.
Li Yinhe's blog (in Mandarin)
April 2010
Shanxi (Click to Download)
This track, the seventh part of the Provinces project, represents an audio interpretation of these three mining disasters
March 2010
Liaoning (Click to Download)
‘40 years in a building in the northern suburbs of this little version, but never naked and cowering behind a rock from the red threat. I was seen as if I had become the red threat, retreating from the old ways, of factionalism, fighting the fractional destruction of the mighty north east when the overseas came inland. I did as told but only when I thought it wise, and moved away when I thought it not. We held him, shivering on the hillside, and made the pact to battle with all, united across the vastness of peoples hell; when light was split between what is today (well a loose version of it) and what could have become – an unending war. Betrayed as straying from my own gun shaking khaki capped allies, and moved/removed to the east four years on from the war to end all wars. There was always conflict though, even after ninety three, when the other two were gone and I could sail further east, to volcanic land and distant recollections. They called me. Ignoring pleas to return, to bestow, to grant credibility to faltering ideology. Neither/nor. Asleep one year after the turn, and enshrined as addict, abuser, failed peacemaker; not simply following my old Generalissimo to the summit, but making him see, if only for a moment, a differing path.’
____ _____ was born in Liaoning province on or around 1898. Liaoning was made using piano fragments from a recording by a well known resident who grew up in the second city of the province.
February 2010
Anhui (Click to Download)
Anhui was created from discarded Chinese pop songs, and music featuring China as a prominent theme. It also features a man counting from 11-20 in Mandarin, and not Wu, a dialect spoken in Zhejiang and Anhui as well as Shanghai. For this piece, I improvised using the samples I had obtained, with a vague image in my mind of Hongcun Village, which some people know was the set for the film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.
The village began life in 1131, during the Southern Song Dynasty. High above the tiny ancient dwellings is Yangzhan Mountain and Leigang Mountain. The climate is a mild one because of their presence, the village almost constantly bathed in thick fog. Some say it resembles a scroll of traditional ink painting showing mountains, rivers, and scenes of man and nature living side by side. This is why Hongcun is known as "a village in Chinese painting".
The town is shaped like an ox. The mountains are its horns, and in the center of the ox is one of four stomachs, a reflecting pool, encircled by plastered buildings with grey tiles; the Anhui style. Waterways matriculate through the Ox like tangled intestines. A third stomach, on the outskirts of Hongcun, has a small arching Chinese bridge, filled with a thousand white lilies. These pools reflect the passing moments of the town, the drifting of history in to milky skies. The world is made mirror, showing the intricate, impossibly detailed wood carvings on Chengzhi Hall, flowers, birds, a slipping past remembered in material . I am sad to say I have never really been there.
January 2010
Qinghai (Click to Download)
As a precursor to Laogai, this 4 minute composition features a Tibetan singing bowl reverberating through numerous filters in a 10 x 10 room. The idea is that it reflects the confinement and inescapable decay of the physical and mental environment; it is a small, short piece, and in no way does justice to the thousands imprisoned on exaggerated charges in the People's
Republic. Rather it is designed to create a moment for reflection and consideration. It is also a tool for highlighting one particular case, that of Dhondup Wangchen, a Tibetan filmmaker who was sentenced to six years in prison for filming interviews with Tibetans about their hopes and frustrations of living under Chinese rule. He was sentenced on Dec 28th, in Xinjing, Qinghai, without the knowledge of his family and friends, and has until January 7th to appeal the conviction. Rather than my simplified ramblings, here are some links to the Reporters Without Borders site, where you can read the back story to the case, and Leaving Fear Behind, a site featuring some of Dhondup Wangchen's work. Finally, I would urge people to sign the Writers Without Borders petition for his release.
Links
- Sign the Petition
- Reporters Without Borders
- Leaving Fear Behind
- New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prisons and Labour Reform Camps
in China
- The Laogai Research Foundation
December 2009
Beijing (Click to Download)
Beijing was made using no Chinese instruments or samples. Instead, it was created using music software and midi instruments, then mixed/mastered via Cubase. The piece, although a departure from previous Provinces releases, is intended as a sound track to a specific event, in this case the dust storm that hit Beijing in May 2008, a short time before the Olympic Games of that year.
For an accurate description of similar events, please go here.
November 2009
Guangdong (Click to Download)
Guangdong was made using distorted and rearranged samples of Tiqin (an instrument similar to the Banhu), three-string, Yueqin and the horizontal flute. More importantly, samples of erhu and gaohu were used. The overall effect attempted was the recreation of a sound similar to the Vangelis soundtrack to Blade Runner. This intention was aimed at distilling a particular Westernised image of Guangdong, or more notable Guangzhou and also Hong Kong, as a future nightmare style environment, though the Pearl River Delta area of Southern China is still far from an overdeveloped Orwellian megacity.
The gaohu was an instrument supposedly developed by renowned Guangdong folk artist Lu Wencheng. Lu Wencheng changed the erhu's silk strings to steel and altered the erhu's resonance chamber box in to a smaller sounding one, meaning higher octaves could be reached using the combination of these two changes. Lu Wencheng's music, composed in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, was concerned with representing the beauty of the natural world in musical form; his particularly well remembered pieces, now considered classics of the Guangdong genre, were meditations on Haungzhou's West Lake in autumn and rain drops falling on plantain leaves symbolising the end of the drought in the delta region.
For further information on Chinese provincial folk music, please visit:
Chinese Culture Questions and Answers
Taipei News Feature on the erhu - Translated in to English
Gaohu Sound Sample
Chinese Traditional Instrument Info - In Chinese
Google offers a limited but useful translation service for non English speaking websites.
October 2009
Xinjiang (Click to Download)
Xianjiang was made by adapting two-string dombra lute, Kazak vocals (along with East Turkestan samples), field recordings taken at Tarim River and in Karamay, a Xun ocarina and Koudi flute.
On the 8th of December 1994, 325 people (of whom 288 were children) died in a fire whilst on a school trip to the Friendship Theatre in Karamay. Eye witnesses at the time recalled the heat of the stage lights setting fire to nearby curtains and the theatre being engulfed within minutes. The children and teachers were told to remain in their seats to allow Communist Party officials to leave the building first. The phrase 同學们坐下,不要動,讓領導先走, roughly translated as 'All of you sit and don't move. Let the leaders out first' was immortalised in Zhou Yunpeng's song 'Don't Want To Be The Children of The Chinese'.
For further information, please visit:
New York Times Article - Dec 10th 1994
Epoch Times Article - In Chinese
DWNews Article - In Chinese
Google offers a limited but useful translation service for non English speaking websites
Lao Gai
Silk and Dogs will release 'Laogai' following the completion of the 'Provinces' project.
The Death of China (Click to Download )
'The Death of China' attempts to explore the way in which China is adapting to its status as the 21st century's superpower. China is a nation experiencing rapid, and largely unchecked and unregulated, economic expansion. This 'progress' has been marred by human rights abuse, increasing environmental problems (it is now a greater polluter than the US),and the destruction of traditional ways of life, both in the city and in rural communities. The songs use a variety of samples from musical traditions across China, taking in the Tibetan plateau, the snow of the Northern province towns of Mohe, and the tropical heat of the Guangdong Province to construct an image of a country beginning to understand its own might.Track names:
- 1. Shanghai
- 2. Hill Town
- 3. Hong Kong
- 4. Nam Co
- 5. The Lake and The River
- 6. The Street Music of Chongching
- 7. Manchuria Parts I, II, III
The download is in. rar format, to make it slightly more compact. Please unpack to listen.
Links for this release can be found in the rar package and on the links page