The Sound From My Inner Self

From Rock in China Wiki

The Sound From My Inner Self

By Jun Yan

Translated By Wang Ao

In July of 1999, fed up with my job as a young editor at The Lanzhou Evening News, I left my hometown and traveled 2000 kilometers to Beijing, all for a girl who claimed to love me. A month passed swiftly, and love and life, hand in hand, went to hell.

I borrowed money from friends to rent an apartment and began to create a brave new life. Then Dickson, a man from the Hong Kong label Sound Factory (now Noise Asia), appeared out of nowhere: "Hey, you wanna do something cool? How about putting on an Otomo Yoshihide live performance?" Absolutely! Although we only had ten days to prepare, my answer of yes was without hesitation. For a music critic like myself, having just sold, at great cost to my soul, 500 essential music albums from my personal collection, what could be a better high. After all, outside of work and learning to cook for myself, I wasn't doing much. A show cooler than self-destruction, and hotter than eccentric cuisine might just do the trick. And anyway, if I passed up on this incredible opportunity, it was highly likely that no one else in Beijing would be have wanted to do the show. And in any case, I desperately wanted to see Otomo.

Things happened. At top speed. A new friend found the first venue, and then, by a curious twist of fate, I found Zhenhua, who was then working as a music organizer in a club. He helped us find a second venue. No posters, no mailing lists, only a few announcements in newspapers and magazines to let local music fans know where the action was. Up to that point, there had not been shows or musicians like this in Beijing. It was true that Otomo and Jon Rose had visited in 1993 and John Zorn and Yamasuka Eye had visited in 1996, but at the time we didn't even know who the hell they were. We saw Otomo and Rose as foreign "giant pandas" at the Beijing International Jazz Festival. No one appreciated their music as Music, except for a handful of exceptionally hip musicians and a few students driven by curiosity, who went for the thrill of the bizarre. And in any case, the tickets were four times the price of seeing a local rock gig.

On August 27, we had already sold 19 tickets. In the nearly empty Volcano Club, Otomo, his girlfriend Sachiko M and Dickson stood behind a table five meters long.... Dickson's ghostly 808, CD player and turntable roared. His noise drifted and converged into a huge wave. Then out came "Filament", duo of Otomo and Sachiko. When Otomo began to abuse the turntable with chains, cymbals and other bits and bobs; our eyes were fixed on him, expecting something to happen: an explosion, a rupture, or the backfiring of one of his outrageous techniques.

But what we witnessed instead was the birth of an infinite space of sound. We were confronted with his "toys" as well as real instruments; we found some fragments of the music he had composed for the film Blue Kite. Dynamical moves on a sublime scale, tonalities coarse, and music twisting and turning like someone cutting a fancy paper doll. In contrast, Sachiko M did not drive her music to howl. Her sine waves were a radiant, tantalizing counterpoint to Otomo's powerful blows. Yes, they blew my mind.

Otomo reloaded, and came out with guitar in hand. He knew how to play the guitar in every possible way, including the normal one. In about five minutes, he had played with his knees, scratched with hooks, and drove sounds with his hands and arms. He tortured his guitar. Musical notes rolled into one other, whipped up by a mad conjuror conducting an airport.

Besides ordinary rock bands, I had not really experienced any kinds of new music live events, before this except for a Czech duo band called Sabot. This was all too fast! Such a rush! I was shook up and exhausted. But Otomo's final guitar stroke found me suddenly exalted into a state of pure energy. Something quite different had happened in that moment, something way beyond mere improvisation. Rather, the drawing out of a new idea of order in nature itself, a wave of instinctual life.

For the second concert, we sold four tickets. Twenty back-up friends and reporters constituted the entire audience. And ten minutes after the show began, a famous Chinese rapper rushed out, shouting, "Give me my money back! I thought I bought a ticket to hear some music! This is not music!" Never mind. Sachiko's role was even greater today than in the first show, emerging herself into the sine waves. I always feel driven to describe her performance using a Tai Chi phrase, "four liang beats one thousand jin." Or, one accurate stroke fells a great oak; butterfly wings cause a storm in a remote continent; a mosquito defeats a lion; small moves in our eyes and little drops of ghostly sounds measure the revolution of the planet.

In a later interview, Otomo said, "Now... I will hold a single note for a long, long time, because it comes from my inner self." That is exactly what I am looking for. What he calls a "Post Sample" is a quiet moment, embedded in an ocean of noise. This also is my own understanding of the sound of Zen. Volumes of sounds are not essential because they are always relative... The key is that it MUST come from within.

Since that day, I have taken to freely mixing and matching experimental, avant-garde, improvisation and noise creating my own sound-vision, no longer spell-bound by the conventional techniques and shallow lyrics of major rock. I have kept my eye on Otomo and Sachiko, enjoying their new albums and news. What I have learned from them is not music, but a sense of what opens the body to the infinite in the blinking of an eye, what transcends all boundaries; I have learned to approach the order of nature, and to listen, modestly and gracefully, and then to produce new sounds.

Contents 1 Remarks 1.1 Licensing 1.2 Translation 1.3 Further information

Remarks