An Interesting Music Video

A while ago I wrote about the movie Scenes of City Life, and later I subtitled the movie and put it up online at archive.org. That led to an interesting if short conversation with Dave Liang of the Shanghai Restoration Project, a electronic music band with a Chinese-y bent to the music. He ended up using the movie as the basis for a music video. It's all very ethereal, and I think it's worth the watch.

A Lament for 4Live; Pixeltoy in Shanghai

I never wrote a proper blog update about 4Live, a live music club that was easily Shanghai's best in the time I've been here. I'm speaking in the past tense, because it closed last month. This will have to do, an update on one of the better bands I saw in the club, Pixeltoy.

The Shanghai music scene being what it is, every semi-decent band is visiting from Beijing. However, Pixeltoy varied it up a bit by being a semi-decent band visiting from Hong Kong! It's a two person band that lists Cornelius as a big influence, and their best music has the sound of a happier, poppier Cornelius, even if the videos don't quite match up to his:



How did it sound? Not quite as good as their Youtube videos, I'm afraid. Maybe it was the heavily-produced nature of the music: done live, I thought they didn't have quite the energy. Plus there's not many musicians who can look cool, when staring at an Apple laptop for most of the show. Here's their live rendition of the same song. Not horrible, but not the best version possible, either.



And while I'm at it, I've seen more Velvet Underground Covers in the last 6 months than I would have imagined possible. Unfortunately, they're often the low point of the show, as was the case with their version of "Candy Says":



But here's a recording of one of the best ones I saw, by the generally awesome Carsick Cars (of Beijing - I'll have to talk about them some time), doing a Shoegazer-ish, heavily distorted cover of "Sunday Morning."



As a quick final word on 4Live: what a shame! From what I understand there were a lot of reasons behind it closing: problems getting people going to concerts to also spring in for drinks (especially Chinese concert-goers, who it seemed never ever drank), problems getting anybody to come in when there wasn't a band, the generally moribund Shanghai music scene and the difficult economics of getting visiting bands in, and the high rent. Even without the music, it was a fun place, dark with lots of red lights, pretty big, all in all just like a music club should be. And of course I'll miss the pseudo-propaganda painting upstairs:

Cold Fairyland

Most Shanghai rock music feels like an impossibly bad imitation of music I wouldn't want to listen to anyway. The big influence seems to be eighties "hard rock", maybe, but it's kind of hard to tell as it's all so generic and boring.

So it was refreshing to see Cold Fairyland, one of the most respected Shanghai bands. Rather than bad rock, it felt like some mix of the classical Chinese sound and a progressive rock band.



The concert was at Zhijang Dream Factory, the new location of Yuyintang, which was closed recently for not having proper permits - it's all BS, considering Yuyintang was in the middle of absolutely nowhere and still couldn't get a noise permit. The new location is more convenient, but missing the cool/weird underground feeling - it's now basically a box, in the back of a lounge, in an under-utilized shopping complex for foreigners. Anyway, it was a CD launch party, the $5 ticket cost also bought a copy of the band's CD.

The most distinct element was a pipa, a traditional Chinese instrument that featured prominently in most of the songs. It's a string instrument, and the sound is somewhere between a banjo and a plucked guitar. It really stood out in the mix, also there were constant fills, the lady was very talented at it. She also was the singer, maybe a third of the songs had vocals. She wasn't quite as good at that. It's hard to see in the picture, but she was wearing some kind of wedding dress to the concert, cool cool!



It was contrasted mostly against an electric cello. I'm a big fan of cellos, and I think it could have stood out more. There's also an electric bass player here, to go along with the (unpictured) guitarist, and the drummer. In prog-rock fashion, they were all given a chance to stand out, even the drummer was given a solo, although the guitar and the pipa had the most emphasis.



I won't lie, I think the band has problems. They're obviously talented, and have a very interesting, unique sound, one that manages to be a hybrid of Chinese-Western music. But it's not especially melodic, nor are the solos particularly interesting, and I don't know if it qualifies as more than very skillful background music. But it's definitely worth the gentle reader having a listen, the band has an English language website with some interesting pages - first an entry on their most recent album, with free MP3s of the CD's two best songs, and also the site's front page, which has a number of songs from their previous albums online, as well as a link to purchase the albums.

Yuyintang

Yuyintang is a live-music joint in Shanghai. I consider it the second best place to see live music in Shanghai, behind 4Live - which I've shown pictures of a band that played there before. That's a weak compliment, as Shanghai's music scene doesn't amount to much. Still, Yuyintang remains a chill place.

One thing there's no getting past, is that it's not the easiest place to get to! First of all it's way in the far South - it was very convenient for me when I used to live out in the boonies nearby, but now that I live downtown it requires a long subway ride to get there, by the time it's done the subway has closed and it's a three dollar taxi ride back home.

More than that, the actual location is insane. The first time I tried to get there I couldn't find it and wandered around for half an hour. It's located in the back of what looks like a haunted, half-deserted apartment complex/warehouse district, and requires navigating a couple successive dark alleys, until coming across a door marked by a single red light (although usually you can hear the noise first, or see people milling outside).



Partly that's because live music and the associated noise isn't tolerated by the city government, and partly because I gotta believe the place brings in almost no money, and has to stay in a place that charges almost no rent. Yuyintang fits two hundred people tops, there's maybe four or five concerts a month, and cover charges are somewhere around three or four dollars. They also have a small cooler selling cans of soda or beer for a dollar, but it's not really a functional bar.



The insides are fun. It feels just like what it is, a dive for music. That's in comparison to some of Shanghai's other music places, which are dark with the red lights, but then have expensive drinks, or private booths and tables, or large lounges.

A surprise is the quality of the set-up. Particularly the lights, even well-set up music venues in the US often don't have the fancy array of swinging lights that change color, the way this place does. To me it's very corny, but kind of fun I guess. Something like a small-time version of a big 70's band playing an arena.



The sound system can't compete with the strangely excellent sound systems used in some other Shanghai clubs, but it's passable, and doesn't have the overwhelming massively muddled bass that was endemic to small music clubs in San Francisco.



As for the bands? Of course different bands are at different levels, but generally I find Shanghai bands to be competent but unoriginal, playing a generic classic-rock or punk sound - it was definitely true for the local opening band, Plastic Chocolate. Sometimes there's small bands visiting from other countries, which always surprises me, given the small amounts of money involved. This musician was from Japan, I wasn't so into it though.



Update 8/21/07 - This location was closed for a BS reason, and Yuyintang now hosts concerts at Dream Factory in New Factories, and operates at a private house on Yan'an Lu.

Street Music, Part 1

I'm mostly going to let the videos do the talking in this update. Suffice it to say that Shanghai has a fair number of street musicians. Perhaps not as many as in San Francisco or New York, but they're common enough to see in areas that are crowded, but not too crowded. I guess the police keep them away from performing inside the People's Square Station, or the central shopping district of Nanjing Lu.

The following three videos were all taken in the tunnels leading to Jing'an Station. I'll start off with perhaps my favorite.



Pretty talented! Compare and contrast to the following fellow, who as far as I can tell isn't actually playing a song, just making loud noises. On the other hand his tone is OK and I wonder if he can actually play pretty well, and just makes these loud nonsese sounds due to having only several seconds to attract people's attentions as they walk past.



Here's a longer video of an erhu player whose talents lie somewhere between the first two. I've heard him play better, but I wasn't getting it on tape!



Most of these street musicians are blind. Perhaps it's an expected profession for the blind, and they don't recieve government assistance or have much infrastructure to help them. Another common thing to see is street musicians being led down the street by a partner, such as this example from near Beijing Lu. It usually looks like a husband and wife partnership, but I have no idea if that's really the case - I'll talk about it in a future update.



The large majority of the musicians are playing the erhu, a two-string violin-type instrument, traditionally with a snakeskin base. There's also the occasional college kid playing guitar, or other traditional instruments being played, such as the Souna (a sort of bugle), the Xiao (a kind of flute), or the Sheng. That last instrument is a really complicated mouth organ, as shown below, with a video taken near Zhongshan Park:



Oh, and a few notes. First off, the videos are hosted on tudou.com, a Chinese imitation of youtube.com. Please let me know if there's any problems viewing them, it's no bother to mirror or move the videos onto youtube.

Also, a lot of the videos, and some of the recent pictures, have been taken with my new Canon Ixus 850 (SD 800), an ultra-compact that I take with me everywhere I go! I wish it had manual controls, but I'm otherwised very pleased with the camera.

The tagging system is new, it should make navigating content a lot more manageable than posting several year's of content by month. I'd appreciate any recommendations on that.

Finally, about this update, it's an area that interests me greatly! I won't follow-up immediately, but expect some more posts on the subject over the next several months.

Nana

I've been absent for too long, not having a home computer to post blogs off of. Getting a new computer in Shanghai isn't as easy as I had hoped. It's part of living under a Communist system - high-end electronics all get slapped with a hefty luxury tax, making computers cost far more than the invisible hand in the US charges, despite the products having actually been manufactured here in the People's Republic.

Anyway a short post on a subject close to my heart: weird underground music!



In this case, it was Nana at 4Live. 4Live has an interesting history: Tang Hui's co-owner used to own the eminent music bar, Tang Hui, which moved to a new location and went upscale. Then Tang Hui's former co-owner opened a new bar, and dedicated it to being the same general sort of bar the Tang Hui had been before it moved. If it all sounds a little pointless, it's a general outlook on the nightlife of Shanghai, where what little does exists changes with a great regularity!

Anyway, getting on with the music: It was trip-hop. If you're not familiar with the sub-genre, imagine music that is about as trendy as possible. The above picture even shows Apple iBooks on stage, my god. Nana featured a torch singer going along with simple computer-generated beats and melodies, and the look was like something out of Twin Peaks or My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album.



I go to concerts for those instances where I am unexpectedly shocked by the beauty of it all, and momentarily consider following the band like the Grateful Dead. Nana didn't quite have it. The electronic backing was too generic.



Her voice was relatively beautiful but the melodies didn't at all let it play out - and furthermore, some of the songs felt half-thought out, going on aimlessly for just a minute or two, before stopping.

If you're curious to hear the music, check out the band's Myspace page. There's a music video made with the computer game Sims 2 that's pretty cool.

The club itself is a top spot. I chose to walk from the nearest subway, it's about 15 minutes past mostly empty streets. The final location is surprising, it's in a small strip of souped-up bars and restaurants, feeling like a miniature Xintiandi - the recognized ritzy-tourist center to Shanghai. The insides hold a couple hundred people, with an open-floor bar downstairs, and an upstairs with the little nooks and tables that allowed private parties to gather - including a top-down look at the next band, New Pants, also from Beijing. They were punk-pop, or something, and my god did they suck.

Karaoke

Karaoke is probably the most popular form of entertainment in Shanghai, maybe alongside bootleg DVDs. Still, I've been here almost a year, and had avoided going all this time. Don't get me wrong, I like Karaoke fine, I did it sometimes in the US and always enjoyed myself. But as the number one form of entertainment, I just don't understand.

Oh, and I won't lie: the pictures are awful on this one. My cameraphone takes OK pictures in bright light, but at night it's just horrid.

I went after work, my first reaction when I entered was almost to laugh! I think of karaoke places as sightly seedy, but this karaoke place was like a huge office tower. Cancel that, all the clean dark surfaces and weird lighting and glass elevators made it a huge office tower - of the future!



It's the private karaoke booths, not the larger karaoke halls and bars that are more common in the US. I asked some people about it and they told me ten years ago karaoke bars were very common, but now it's pretty rare. I also asked the people how often they went. Defying stereotypes, they told me they hadn't been in a long time, or just once or twice in the past year...definitely there's people who go every week, though. It's also worth mentioning that some Karaoke joints are often basically hostess bars or straightforward fronts for prostitution.

We brought our own food and drinks, mostly chips and soda, although we weren't allowed to bring in our own alcohol- you had to buy that from the hall, at big mark-ups of course. Only one of our group smoked, but there were ashtrays everywhere and a crazy-strong air ventilation system, so obviously they're prepared for the possibility of more. Near our room was some gourmet-looking food on fancy metal platters.



Inside the room, it was dark with evil red lighting. I admit I didn't really enjoy myself, although it was fun to see that a couple of the people I know actually have really amazing voices - I wouldn't have suspected it. My problem was, I don't know most of the popular songs here. OK a lot of them I've heard around and could even hum the melodies, but I don't really have any attachment. They're pretty mindless and often just the Chinese equivalent to the Backstreet Boys or other overly manufactured pop.

The selection of English songs was really small, too, and took some guesswork - for instance, "kabingda" (or something like that, I forget) was a transliteration of "Carpenters." The only Carpenters song they has was "Yesterday Once More," probably the all-time most popular song in China - you hear it everywhere, including blasting out over speakers at the construction site near my apartment.

They also had "I Want You Back," although it wasn't the familiar Jackson 5 version. You could choose through the book, but mostly we used a computer system to pick the songs.

Bootleg Music

Just as there are bootleg movies in Shanghai, CDs are also bootlegged. It's not quite the same, though. Sure, CDs aren't all that difficult to find, and a lot of the stores that bootleg movies will also have bootleg CDs available for sale. On the other hand, it's obvious that CDs are an afterthought to bootleggers. Mostly I think pop music simply isn't all that popular in Shanghai, whereas movies are extremely popular.

Take the example of Faye Wong. She's long been one of the top Chinese pop stars. I'm hardly expert, but I consider her album Restless the best Chinese pop album. Still, good luck finding any of her music besides greatest-hits collections, or the last 3 or 4 albums she's released. Despite her popularity, most of her back catalog is only available as a set, or isn't even in print!

The bootleg CDs available reflect this. Mostly you'll find the latest bubble-gum pop from Hong Kong, or the most mainstream of American music, the type Americans have gotten tired of long before I arrived in China: Kenny G, Celine Dion, etc. Perhaps the reason (and the relief) for this is music is largely downloaded off the Internet. Even major search engines, such as Baidu.com (heavily owned by Google), will offer services like a MP3 search engine. It's hit-or-miss, but you can often find even relatively obscure American songs.

Sometimes the bootleg shops will have a few CDs that seem worth getting, but just by chance. So I admit I was surprised (and even delighted) to run across a cool CD shop in Shanghai.

It's a little out-of-the-way, even relative to my out-of-the-way apartment. It's on the shopping street of Tianmu Lu, which is kind of interesting for being a pretty busy place, even though (as far as I know) it's not near any Subway or Train Station or something that would bring a lot of people there.



It has both movies and DVDs inside. Strangely enough, the shop will sell both legitimate and bootleg editions of the same movie. The music selection is more interesting. Like the Velvet Underground or not, a music store needs to have the Yellow Banana somewhere, to be considered any good.



It can even get a little obscure. Bootleg-only albums by major acts such as the Smashing Pumpkins were there, as were Frank Black's solo albums. Kim Deal is cooler, and the Breeders are on the right. Also pictured is Sun Kil Moon's and the Cocteau Twin's discographies. On the other hand, by no means is this an Amoeba's, or Jelly's - massive record stores where you might find anything, whether it's in print or not. It's more a small shop with an interesting but slipshod collection of good albums.



The bootleg movie selection is pretty good, but very expensive by Shanghai standards - $.90 to $1.50 for a single DVD! Strangely enough, the bootleg CDs are even more expensive than that, going for $1.50 to $2.00. On the other hand, these are basically exact replicas of what you'd find in a legitimate CD store, aside from a few typos and such. Whereas, the bootleg DVDs are pretty obviously bootleg DVDs.

Rock Around the Clock Concert

Half of Shanghai's bands came together this past weekend for one...decidedly minor event. Shanghai Streets is an excellent resource on the Shanghai music scene, but you can't help but notice that it only lists about 20 bands total, in a city of 20 million people - you do the math. By contrast, the Foopee Bay Area Concert Calendar listed more than 100 rock bands playing on that same date, not getting into the various other styles of concerts you find in the Yay Area.

Much as I love music, it pains me to say I just can't get into the Shanghai scene. Between the small size and the popularity of punk & metal, I imagine the music scene would be more appropriate to a small Midwestern town, one without a college. Regardless, I still hold the hope of being pleasantly surprised, so I decided to make the Rock Around the Clock concert, which went on for most of the PM.

The location was pretty cool. It was maybe a twenty minute walk Northeast from the extremely crowded Bund area, but the area still seemed distinctly under-developed for Shanghai. I'm sure that will be change in the next few years, though. This waterfront building was getting knocked down, expect a skyscraper to come up soon.



I walked past the place the first time, without catching any concert going on. It took place in a big warehouse called DDM Warehouse, the upper floors are used to house art and the occasional mega-concert. It's a huge building and a really cool space, it reminded me of the warehouse parties I enjoyed so much in Oakland and San Francisco. There were a few vaguely artsy looking things scattered about on the walls, and a completely nonsensical projected video that seemed to have something pretentious about it - I felt right back at home!



But only a small part of the space was utilized for the concert. Truth be told, maybe it was too small, the area was packed with people.



The bands? Well, I wouldn't call them incompetent, but I wouldn't call them particularly creative, either. To me it felt like some high-school talent competition. They could keep time and didn't miss the notes, but the songs were nothing and the sound was impossibly generic.

This band, Loudspeaker, does the metal/rock thing. Most amusing to me, was the band's singer was just terrible, in contrast to the other members of the group who were competent on their instruments - the drummer was actually pretty good. So, the sound guy turned the mic's volume way down, by the end I don't even think it was being amplified.



I don't want to come off too negative - the $5 entrance fee got admission to a cool space, a Tsingtao beer, a raffle for some pretty nice prizes, and a lot of bands. And even the worst music is fun on some level. At the same time I couldn't help but be amused at how thoroughly the scene is being documented, irrespective of the quality of the scene. In San Francisco every hipster thinks they're a great artist, in Shanghai maybe every hipster thinks they're a great photographer. People with quite nice digital SLRs roamed around, snapping away at everything they saw, and when bands first came on stage it felt like half the crowd was holding a camera, a video-recorder, or at least a camera phone. Obviously I was one of this number - when I got bored with the music, it was something to do! I don't know how bored you have to be before you start taking photographs of other photographers, though.

Happy Avenue-Rock Music!

Given the choice, I'd go to a concert every day. Not just for the music - I like the possibility of seeing something unexpected, I like scoping out the hipsters, I like talking story with friends before and after, I like kicking it for a bit before going.

In the Bay Area I average at least one a week. When I'm really feeling the spirit, I probably catch more than two a week. In China, I've only been to a few. A very few. I hate to say it, but the music I've seen has been pretty much god-awful. 80s cover bands (usually imported from the Philippines) play at even the most prestigious clubs. I was beginning to get all analytical, wondering if the comparative difficulty of finding any CDs beyond Celine Dion and the top HK pop stars indicated a general distaste for pop music in China - perish the thought!

I'm not qualified to do anything more than muse idly, but I was happy to run across a cool band and a cool club on Friday night. The name of the band is, unfortunately, Happy Avenue. The club is alternatively called Club 288, or the Melting Pot. Neither name really fits the club but I like the first one better. It's located at 288 Taikang, an address that took a couple of native Shanghainese quite some time to find on the map.


The club itself is small and cozy and dark and dominated by the color red. That more or less exactly fits my demands for a perfect bar - although it is hard to photograph, so I cheated on a couple pictures here, and used the flash. One unusual thing is the music started at 7:30, ending around 9:30 or 10. That's around the time bands start in San Francisco. It means you have to rush there after work, you can't chill out before, and the concert is the start of a night rather than the end. However, the bar is a little on the small side, and it got packed full. It was hard to move, and it got pretty hot. Perhaps living in Shanghai has numbed me to that, though. And in response to what my sister asked, I held the camera up to take these pictures, I'm not two feet taller than everybody else in the club.

The band was fun! Their first few songs reminded me of the Talking Heads. The singer's vocals were crazy, although mostly a different form of craziness, with strange sounds, and vocals being used as an instrument. Perhaps if I spoke the lingo better, the art-school vibe would have been more distinct - the website mentions some prestigious literary university. My main comparison was, the rhythm section was really on-point and funky. I was also impressed by the guitarist who inserted stylings that at first seemed to clash with the rest of the songs, but quickly grew on you. After the first half of their first of two sets, I was ready to follow them around like the Grateful Dead.

However they didn't quit keep it up. Their music progressed towards slower songs that almost resembled an annoying rock ballad or even a Canto-Pop ballad, yuck. What kept it going was the occasional oddball guitar solo and the singer inserting weird vocal flourishes into the ballads.

There were a few demographics you couldn't help but notice. The band was 10+ years older than the average audience member, who knows why. Also, the audience was 10-20% white people, a huge percentage, mostly they hanged out in the back and drank beer.

When the concert ended I picked up a CD. I like to support the scene and it's all that much easier when a CD goes for $2.50. It's a good album, but maybe I'd prefer a bootleg of the concert. I did like the weird blue-and-red album art, predominated by knives and qipaos.

Finally, on the way back I walked through the French Concession. It's nice, I wish I lived there!