A slightly belated audio/visual postcard from blustery Hohhot

Two weeks ago, I had the honor and the privilege of spending three days in Hohhot (the capital of Inner Mongolia) with members of the Mongolian folk ensemble Anda Union. I had the luxury of being the only one in my guesthouse, and by extension, somewhat alleviated the bitter loneliness of its owner who, since the temperature plummeted to 30 below zero (c) and people stopped traveling to Inner Mongolia, seriously needed the company. I sat in on a rehearsal, participated in a wedding, and ate more than my fair share of hot-pot mutton.

My experience was educational, inspiring, uplifting, and really, really cold. Here are some A/V souvenirs I took away from the trip.

Narisu, the front man of Anda Union, gave me a taste of Khoomii throat singing while driving to his band mate's wedding.

Here is the wedding.

About two years ago, Narisu founded his own horse head fiddle (morin khuur) school. Here I am jamming out on a traditional tune with him and one of his students.

Click HERE to listen. Try not to listen for too long though... between icy fingers and a sketchy guitar, I get kind of sloppy by the end.

Rush hour violin

On warmer nights, a man stands outside of the east gate of my university and plays an old violin plugged into a little battery-powered amp. He cranks the reverb all the way up, and the overall effect is eerily disarming. This particular piece is “Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yintai,” a 1958 composition based on an ancient legend. A violin, a Chinese song, a low-grade amp -- add the sounds of rush hour traffic, and I think we’ve got a pretty good sonic metaphor for contemporary China. Click the heading to listen.

Perspectives on the Beijing Underground

Look up Chinese underground Chinese music online and you’re bound run into the rock bar D-22. It's owned by an economics professor named Michael Pettis, who with absolute confidence, foretells an explosion of underground Chinese music that will rock the world. The BBC, Time, and the Guardian are all on board. But still, I wouldn’t be so quick to pin Chinese rock music as a nascent social movement -- naturally, the reality is far more complicated than the Western press has made it out to be. Rock here has some obvious limits, the least of which are government-imposed.

In truth, the fat cat bureaucrats don't mind their youth showing a spark of creativity, and have been relatively supportive of artistic ingenuity (even the loud kind), within their jurisdiction. But they set some firm boundaries, and there’s no room for social protest -- we won’t be hearing any Chinese analogue to the “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol” or "Hail to the Thief," at least not any time soon.

Last month, I went to the Modern Sky music festival, the second biggest rock festival in China (after Midi). The higher-ups had inexplicably denied visas to a bunch of foreign bands at the last minute, so Modern Sky slashed the ticket prices and highlighted the Chinese acts. And while they put on a pretty good show, I was more than a bit distracted by the row of soldiers in front of the stage, another in front of the designated standing area (which they closed off at about half its capacity), another facing the grassy knoll, and a fourth at the top of the hill. Sponsors like Google and Levi Jeans and Myspace sold T-shirts out of booths along the periphery. No horseplay. No beer. Just a few hundred college-age Chinese kids sitting on the grass, lost in quiet curiosity.

Security, as I see it, had nothing to worry about.

Ironically, many of the folk/rock musicians I’ve talked to here look back to the 80’s and 90’s as the golden age of the Chinese underground, and blow off the current wave as faddish and imitative. Hindsight bias? Maybe. But this is where Michael Pettis is important, with his doctrine of exclusivity and his confidence in the scene. It’s all about the attitude. But that’s just rock & roll, isn’t it?

The Passion of Laoyang

Laoyang moved The Sugar Jar, his “experimental/noise” record store, to 798 back when it was nothing but a few subversive art galleries on the edge of town. Since then the place has been almost Disney-fied, but The Sugar Jar itself remains the same, a Zen-like space that discretely harbors more noise than you’ll find anywhere else in China. On a rainy night last weekend, he agreed to meet with me at a nearby cafe to talk about my research. My first impression was that the man personifies his business. Dressed in a leather jacket, collar pulled up to his ears, heaps of scarves and a goatee, right off the bat, in a soft, breathy voice, he said some things about the government that left even me, a foreigner, feeling slightly defensive.

Before opening the store, Laoyang dropped out of high school and worked odd jobs as a construction worker, a janitor and a hawker before getting his hands on some no-wave albums and deciding that there was "more to life than this." He’s come to believe that music itself has come full circle -- that the most cutting edge experimental artists on his shelves are only now attempting to capture the powerful, minimalist effect of old folk songs. Accordingly, he harbors a deep disdain for the academic song collector. “They're not collecting songs, they're just collecting money,” he said, shaking his head.

Laoyang took a small package out of his bag and put it on the table, a bunch of brown paper-sleeved CDs wrapped in yarn. His good friend, Huanqing, compiled them in Chengdu after months of recording in the field. One was Tibetan, another Miao, another Yi. The labels were all hand written. “This is the real shit,” said Laoyang. I listened. It was.

“Too bad it doesn’t sell.”

Gangzi the Wise

The fist time I met Gangzi was in early September, when I took off for a Sunday night show at D-22, an underground rock bar in the student district. I had just begun my research, and was feeling a strong desire to get off my haunches and jump headlong into the Beijing scene. This was only the second folk show I’d been to in the PRC. The first, at Jiangjinjiu, featured a couple of college kids with Brit-Invasion hairdos singing 3-chord pop tunes about imaginary girlfriends who set the bar so low that, when I eventually walked out, I was almost relieved to hear the hum of Beijing, the Cagean rhythms of the city.

This precedent made Gangzi’s style especially striking. Dressed in a red and gold Mongolian robe, he played heavy open-C chords straight out of early 90’s grunge, and in some interludes, slid around the neck as if to conjure a guzheng. His voice built gracefully into Hoomei throat singing, unleashing a harmonic drone that flooded the room like airag. Gangzi had all his bases covered -- the rebellious edge of Seattle, the meditative stillness of the zither, and a vocal style that's claimed by many Mongolians to have originated in the mountains and the lakes.

Well, I thought, I had a number of open afternoons, and if I was going to be learning any songs in the southwest, I’d need need to break away from my suburban-teenager singing voice. So, after the show, I decided to ask him to be my instructor. And as it turned out, Gangzi didn’t have much to do with his weekdays either. He told me to stop by his hutong the following afternoon.

***

There exist two competing camps in contemporary Chinese minority music, and they repel like magnets laid south-to-south. One is the government’s promotion of specific minority traditions -- Miao flutes, Zhuang bronze drums, Hoomei -- to boast China’s diversity and tolerance to the international sphere. The other is the ragtag group of artists who are taking these traditions into their own hands -- the Yi rockers, Uyghur DJs, and self-taught Hoomei singers who do it for the music, not some far-flung political creed.

Now that I’ve had four or five lessons with Gangzi, I’ve come to two conclusions. One is that I’ll never be able to sing like a nomadic herder. The other is that Gangzi belongs firmly to this second camp, and that makes him the best teacher I could ask for. He doesn't talk about it much -- when I asked him why he was initially drawn to Hoomei, he replied, “because it’s awesome, why?” So for now, I'll let the music speak for itself.

(Click on the heading to listen)

Why don't we blog about it?

Friends, family, curious strangers,

For my birthday last Saturday, I decided to treat myself to a year's VPN subscription. Here in Beijing, that means access to Facebook, Youtube, and most importantly, the majority of the American blogosphere. And I couldn't think of a better way to meta-celebrate than taking part.

The title, Aur(ient)alism, stems from Edward Said's Orientalism, and naturally, the ways it might express itself in the musical sphere. Chinese music is struggling to straddle the line between East and West, tradition and modernity. It's changing quickly in some ways, and stagnating in others, enormously exciting and deeply distressing, deceptively simple and just-as-deceptively profound. In other words, it's China in a nutshell, a very big country packed into a very small space.

My job this year is to see where it's been, where it's at, and where it's going. In the spirit of my title, I'll try and make this thing an audio-visual experience. It'll be like you're right here with me. So here we go, takeoff. Lets see how long it lasts.

Enjoy, guys.

-Jon