★Zoomin' Night
A Cappella
"Beginning in 2022, I started to process those layered, dense, dry, and beyond-words matters in the form of a voice diary. Gradually, I gathered a collection of 100 modulated voice recordings that were sealed on 50 cassette players. In June, these cassette players were set in my solo exhibition "100 Shits"(一百天的訴辯) staged at Hallucination in Kaohsiung. It allowed the audience to select how they would like the tapes to play. The exhibition also included a musical work entitled "A Cappella," which …
Leverages 杠杆
Born in Yamaguchi city in 1982; Masahide Tokunaga lives in Tokyo. He plays improvisation music, using alto saxophone.Tokunaga released the CD Alto Saxophone on Slub Music in 2009. Since around 2010 he has set himself apart from other sax players in pursuit of establishing an extremely original blowing style/playing structure permeated with delicacy and tension. The results of this exploration can be heard on his following solo/collaboration albums released on Ftarri, and also the new cassette in…
Encyclopedia of Luxinpei's Scandals
Luxinpei is a two-piece band from Beijing, formed by Ma Meng and Ma Yuan in 2007. Back to 1990s they were classmates, sharing a same desk. In 2008, Ma Meng became friends with Zhu Wenbo and they formed another another duo project Fat City. After some performance, Zhu started organized a weekly Tuesday performance series in 2009, which was the beginning of Zoomin’ Night. Both Luxinpei and Fat City were core names in early Zoomin’ Night days. Luxinpei’s work could be found in a Maybe Mar’s live co…
Durch Den Vorhang Gehen = 穿过屏风
The term ‘acousmatics’ refers to the tradition which tells us that the Greek philosopher Pythagoras gave his lectures from behind a curtain, whereby visual information was withdrawn off the screen and the audience could concentrate on listening. Listening to acousmatic music is not a static process as if the listener is aware of something hidden behind such a curtain. In the case of acousmatics, the sonic events reverberate through the curtain, beyond where they actually are produced, meeting up…
September '21
Before the concert, we hadn’t discussed much of what we will be playing. Kirill proposed to place the "June ’21" score on the table, to follow the impression, the feeling, the direction of what it suggests to play. Sometimes we noticed how one part of the score or another would lead us to new ideas whilst we were playing. It was a special concert because of its circumstances. We decided to have one big table for both our setups, and to be standing up during the performance. Kirill used some obje…
Dali Sections 2018-2021
"In 2017 after I finished a tour of Taiwan and returned to Beijing, I left my hard drive on one of those share bikes and it was lost forever. I had close to ten years’ worth of live recordings on that hard drive (I never made any backups). Since then, I’ve made sure to keep recordings of my live performances well organised. To a certain extent, it’s through live performance that I create new ideas. What I regret, then, is that every performance from different phases of my music making life will …
Killed As Time
Conscious Feedback Group (C.F.G.) is a gang of three formed in 2018 by MAI mai, Xu Cheng and Jun-Y Ciao. Improvisation is their way. They use mediums of music, sound, text and performance to explore a non-identifiable style that has nothing to do with fancy illusions.
June '21
The score for June '21 was made in early summer of 2021, in a dialogical process of close live collaboration. Everything we talked about — music, time, politics, and place — was treated as a kind of material with the possibility of being brought into the piece. We didn’t aim to use sound to express such concepts directly, but rather created music with attention to the circumstances: when it was written, where, to whom and by whom it would be played. There was a mutual understanding that we were …
摇晃沙漏 Shake The Hourglass About
Shake the Hourglass About is Realtree’s second release. Comprised of full band and mixed ensemble works, it highlights the varied interdependent relationships within the group. It is indebted to the work of Bill Dixon, Duke Ellington, Dai Satō, Thérèse of Lisieux, Gene Wolfe and others. Realtree is a band made up of cello, clarinet, cornet, electric guitar and laptop. They focus on performing songs that use monophonic and timer-controlled compositions as temporal structures for improvisations. M…
Floating Tape
Anne-F Jacques lives in Montreal, Québec. She started running crustacés tapes from 10 years ago, and in last year she stopped it and start a new label named presses précaires. I always love the sound she made, and we traded cassettes many times, shipping always taking too many days. We have not met each other though we have some common friends, and seems it might be difficult in the following a few years. In the summer of 2021, we started talking about some possible collaborations. A collaborati…
gear, gear
Zhao Cong used micro-cassette player, spray, bug zapper, pop rocks, voice, magnetic pickup, microphone and other daily objects.
Snare Drum +
Snare Drum + is the latest piece by legend composer/guitarist Taku Sugimoto in 2021, containing some variations of his snare drum solo piece which was written in 2011. In Snare Drum +, three or more additional performers try to follow the sound of snare drum as immediately as possible with percussion instruments or objects which decay quickly, while walking around the snare drum. In the recordings, different walking routes were used for each take.
Text
No Performance is Li Song and Zhu Wenbo. This duo started in Beijing, 2015. They wrote and played compositions focus on acoustic instruments, environment sound, computer algorithm and random sequence. In 2018, Li Song moved to London. In 2020, Zhu Wenbo suggested a recording plan: to write some composition pieces for each other and then perform solo or with local friends. They used one month on writing, exchanged on a same day, then another two months on recording. Finally they got seven pieces,…
Mirror One
Tip! "noel meek is from new zealand. he used creates electronic music. he also runs a label called "end of alphabet". we have never met yet. once in 2016 he asked me to compile an album. i then contact zhu wenbo for expand the idea. the result was the “there is no music from china” compilation. in summer or late spring of 2020, while everybody was trying to understand the pandemic thing, noel emailed me about to record an album together. i said yes, and maybe we can do it this way... but could y…
Parade
Parade is organized by Tadashi Yonago and Kayu Nakada living in Osaka. It is an event in the open air for sounds since Aug 2017, that held on an irregular base. Artists play at a spot they choose, such of a road side of downtown, residential area, parks, riverside... And we can listen the performance fused with the situation/atmosphere of the place.
2527
Tip! Takashi Masubuchi (acoustic guitar) and Staytone (modular synthesizer) are musicians based in Tokyo. Both of them are new generation involvers in post onkyo Japanese improvisation music scene, active in Ftarri, Otooto, Permian and other small, quiet, warm spaces. Takashi Masubuchi is also (one of) Permian’s runner, which is specially focus on free improvisation music. This duo has deep collaboration for many years. 2527 are some selections from their 2018 recordings in Permian.