*40 copies limited edition* Poems without Words brings together fourteen improvised guitar solos by Xu Cheng, recorded over twelve years. Xu Cheng first emerged in the Shanghai underground in the early 2000s, as an early member of the harsh noise project Torturing Nurse. He went on to become a versatile sound artist working across a wide-ranging array of influences, from Fluxus event scores to Buddhist sutras. The project originated in Xu Cheng’s attempt to restore a broken instrument he had picked up in a vintage store some fifteen years ago, and to play it as though a guitar reborn. In this process, he came to realise that the art of improvisation consists of endless exercises in forgetting: to forget what the body has learned before, and to learn how to play in a state of “having forgotten”. Xu Cheng told the story in a note: 

"Bit by bit, I applied thin veneers of pine, replaced the tuning pegs, and polished the frets until they gleamed. Eventually, the guitar shed its uncanniness, revealing the basic shape of a musical instrument. From time to time, I would glance at it and attempt to play it in the ways that guitars are supposed to be played. Was such playing a habit preserved through time, was it a fixture of my life? Or perhaps the goal is to forget—to forget the act of playing, and the very present moment of life being lived. Isn’t that one of the true purposes of music in this world? As muscle memory fades, some echoes remain. ‘Mistakes’ occur, and new memories are forged, and once more, one strives to learn how to forget. This happens over and over again, on different guitars, in different settings, and across different lives. In this sense, these moments of playing are the moments when hearing and living coalesce: through the instrument, life is transmuted into sound, and sound, in turn, becomes life." 

This album documents such moments of learning to forget, through which the materiality of the instrument and the disposition of the player dissolve into one another. Half of these recordings were made in a small park located in the Shihua subdistrict of southwestern Shanghai. Occasionally, the sound of insects in the atmosphere interfered with guitar harmonics, a gentle hum piercing through the eye of the storm that is life.