Soundeye [Day 1]
I just watched a documentary that made me want to drop everything and start a band.
A couple friends of mine started a new initiative, Tanso, to introduce new wave Chinese music to a Canadian audience. The words Tanso in Chinese stand for “discover” and there is a lot to discover in Tanso’s inaugural event, Soundeye.
Being a part of the Chinese jook-sing diaspora, I’ve always felt a “culture gap” as a result of the older generations’ self-censorship on issues regarding China and my inability to read Chinese, not knowing anything about China other than sporadic anecdotes by my parents and reports from the Western media which rarely commits to foreign underground culture. I’ve only recently started being immersed in the Chinese scene.
Last night Tanso screened In the moment of Improvisation, a documentary by Huang Jun Yao from Shenzhen. Apparently, she made this documentary specially for Tanso’s screening which was really cool. It has never been seen before in Canada and certainly never with English subtitles. The movie focuses on a Polish-Chinese experimental music collaboration. Musicians Wu Wei, Dickson Dee, ZenLu and experimental artist Kenbo from southern China when on an exchange to the Poish cities of Kielce, Krakow, Poznan, and Warsaw to tour and collaborate with local experimental artists.
The movie itself is long, runs past its welcome at approx 90 mins, and at times quite repetitive but given that the documentary itself was finished post processed just days before the screening gives it a candid appeal. One has to be patient with the subtitle flubs and the poor pacing of the text which makes some parts impossible to read. I also didn’t enjoy the director’s need to insert a weak political theorem. Any comparisions between the matured Japanese music scene to the barely-out-of-the-crib Chinese scene makes the whole movement seems like it has a Superiority/Inferiority Complex.
The real charmers were the subjects of the movie. One particular musician, Wu Wei, attempts to create new experimental sounds out of traditional instruments with astounding results, combining throat and falsetto singing with dreamy electronica. Visual artist Liang Guo Jiang creates interpretive ink paintings to the experimental sounds of Dickson Dee and ZenLu, founder of a post-rock group Consciousness, and Japanese Buda dancer Miho. During “violent” or “explosive” parts of the music (hard to tell with the translation), he lights his paintings on fire using incense sticks. The results are powerful and profound. It is interesting to note that most of the artists are the children of the cultural revolution, the tensions of which is felt throughout the documentary particularly when the musicians comment that their music is considered too “inflammatory”.
This is the first time in a long time that I felt the need to update my cd collection.
Location: Hart House, East Common Room, 7 Hart House Circle at University of Toronto
Daily Schedule:
Apr 25, Fri. 8pm-1am, Opening Party
8:30-9:30, Feature Documentary – Chinese Sound Art in Poland
9:30-10, Feature Documentary
April 26, Sat, 7pm-1am, The Experimental Sound
7-7:30,
7:30-9, – Experimental/Noise Artists: FM3, YanJun, WuQuan, WangFan
9:30-11, – Electronica Artists: Sulumi, ME:MO, Nara, Panda Twin, Dead J, etc.
Apr 27, Sun, 1pm-1am, The New Era
1:30-5:30, – Experimental Music from Hong Kong, Taiwan and southern China Artists: Dickson Dee, Alok, WuWei, Yao Chung-Han, etc.
6-7, – The Best Music from China in all genres, SynthPop, New Folk, Skinhead, Punk, Emo, Experimental Noise, Post Wave, Rock and more
8:00, Feature Documentary – 20 Years of Chinese New Music
