Ding Chenchen

"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 never be able to recreated. Towards the end of 2018 I moved to Dali, Yunnan, and lived there for just over two years. I remember how I was thinking before I moved, that I was hoping to take in the different environment and create new sounds. Now that I think back on it, it didn’t quite work out that way. My practice was to create new works during live performances, and as for the recordings of these, I think of them as ‘field recordings’. It’s interesting to listen back to them afterwards. Some of the recordings here document my first attempts at certain ideas. In my heart these ones are the most meaningful." - Ding Chenchen

Ding Chenchen is a noise musician. He lived in Beijing during 2015-2018 and had many performances there. Before that he lived in Shanghai, where he started his noise practice. Ding Chenchen moved to Dali, Yunnan at the end of 2018. The recordings in this cassette are all selected from this period. Ding Chenchen left Dali in 2021. Ding Chenchen’s solo project has many monikers using for different projects, including: BAD-LIFE (harsh-noise-wall, 2019-present), bad-life (looptape/ambient, 2019-present), noise666 (sample/sound collage/free improvisation and more, 2009-present), 丁晨晨 (no clear directions), DINGCHENCHEN (harsh-noise, discontinued). Ding Chenchen participated in some hard-noise groups including XXSEXX and K.M.K.M.K. His name could also be found on some early Zoomin' Night releases (Clarinet, 20150505, 2 Compositions).