Following the success of the musical collaborations that ensued Christian Marclay’s Screenplay, Arthub has invited Yan Jun to curate an evening of noise in Shanghai.

The program titled “Inner Noise from New Asia” will use Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto, “The Art of Noises,” as a historical reference point and feature new work by contemporary performers from different parts of Asia, to provide a full spectrum of experience of this eclectic genre of music. “Inner Noise from New Asia” features live performances by Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, FEN and Shanghai’s Asthma Writers Union, and MTDM and is organized by Sub Jam, in association with RESO, and in collaboration with Performa09.

From Sub Jam: ” To human being, the history of listening noise is much longer than that of enjoying music. Noise companies life. And in this vast universe, there are plenty of noises which cannot be sensed by human beings. The Western civilization developed perfect music system. As a universe built by man itself, polyphony owns a developed order, like that in science and politics. But reason is not always the rule. Italian futurists said one hundred years ago, “Let’s break through the obnoxious shield of reason.” Several years later, Luigi Russolo published the Art of Noise and began creating music with everyday noise. In 1952, John Cage guided people hearing silence with 4’33’’, and in 1966, Max Neuhuas led people to pass through the downtown area, hearing the sound of the streets. In ancient Eastern Asia, people hold a tradition hearing the sounds in the nature because they believed that harmony should be reached between music, art and nature, and inner and outer world. They thought the sounds of wind, rain and dripping shared the same value to appreciate as music and all of them had inner connection. People have accepted the influence of the western civilization in order to pursue modernization in modern times. Conflicts and combination happen all the time between reason and perception, technology and custom. The noises of life change with the life itself and become something more strange, for example, the forming of the sound in urbanology from the reflection of the firecrackers in Spring Festival in the buildings.  When entering 21st century, people realized that noise is the reflection of the real world, and thus, stop arguing about it. The listening to and creation of noise are derived from that to and of the music and have reached where the music cannot reach, no matter it is the sensation and description of the outer world or the understanding of the inner one. ”

April 15, 8 pm at Yuyintang

731 Yan’an Xi Lu,
Changning
Entrance at Kaixuan Lu
延安西路1731号
入口在凯旋路

Yan Jun

Yan Jun, Beijing based sound artist and poet. as well as a music critic and organizer. Yan’s live performance engages space feedback, loop and voice/language to make hypnotic noise. He also use concepts of recycling, feedback and reduction to creates sound art work, which related to field recording, installation, image, video, publishing and multiple forms. He had performed and participated exhibitions internationally.
artist’s website

Otomo Yoshihide

Otomo Yoshihide is the one of the most acclaimed international experimental musicians. He is a guitarist, turntablist, electronics player and film music composer. He has also been active in jazz music field. With innumerable releases and concert around the world, he gains a great honor in contemporary music world.

Sachiko M

Sachiko M has been active as a sampler player since 1994. In 1998, in a drastic departure from those approaches, she originated the revolutionary method she uses to this day–manipulating the sampler’s internal test tones. With the 2000 release of Sine Wave Solo, her extreme solo recording consisting entirely of sine waves, Sachiko M suddenly became the focus of intense interest on the international scene. Sachiko M was awarded the Ars Electronica 2003 Golden Nica prize in the digital music category.
latest solo CD “salon de sachiko” [hitorri-111], sound installation “I’m Here”

Filament
(Otomo Yoshihide + Sachiko M)

Filament was formed in 1997. This unit was a product of the endless and thorough analyses and examinations of listening and pronunciation as a testing ground of post-electronics music. With Sachiko M’s original composition method as a core, it brings about sound experience that is totally different from music made by conventional “composition” or “improvisation,” going beyond the auditory limits ranging from faint to roaring sound. So far, it performed in more than ten countries in the world and often stirred argument.

FEN（Far East Network）
FEN is a totally new project by Otomo Yoshihide. Musicians of the similar kind who live in big cities in East Asia such as Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, and Seoul have had few opportunities to come together so far. These several years in the Internet age, however, they have got to know each other for the first time and now they realize that they are able to play together, though there is not always a place where they can meet together. “MIMI Festival,” an experimental music festival held annually in Marseille has provided them with an unexpected opportunity. In July this year, they will perform there after spending several days for rehearsals in Marseille. They themselves have no idea about what will be produced. What FEN aims to do is not to produce such and such music but what such a network can produce. Then you will see, with the start of this project, how musicians who have seldom met together living in different cities will develop their network, what they will produce, and what you will find out through their performance of the day staged for the first time in Japan.

Yuen Chee Wai

Yuen Chee Wai’s work explores how image, sound and text can occur spontaneously as symbiotic mental productions. Informed by philosophical interests, his explorations with noise is process-oriented as much as it sculpts both personal and public experiential terrains. Known for his drone/ambient/field recording approaches and live performances, the photographic elements in his installations reflect also on the theme of sound and silence as a visual lens. In encountering a surrounding soundscape, its objects and architecture, imprints of images recur on the mind’s eye, almost as if in stasis. Visual/verbal patterns or perimeters, their time sequences and frequencies become collapsible around memory, even the very attempt to recall a lost, unnamed, undeterminable subject. This thematic of speech and silence is often communicated through the conceptual structure and time-based orientation of his performances, where sound as medium offers up a shifting vacancy, a fleeting space of invisibility in which images, along with resistive moments of distortion and clarity, dense signals and thinning messages clash and collide - then quieten down, decayed and are gone.

Ryu Hankil

Born in 1975 in Seoul, South Korea. He was a keyboard player in two famous Korean indie pop groups, but eventually left the groups because he was tired of typical music making and sounds. At that time, he saw a concert by Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Axel Dörner, and Taku Unami in Seoul. He changed his musical instrument and concentrated more and more on improvised music and sound related works. Hankil has organised a monthly concert series called RELAY since 2005. He established his own publishing office called Manual, and releases improvised music and magazines.
artist’s website

MTDM

MTDM, it means “horse without legs” literally in Chinese. The band was founded in 2005 in Duesseldorf, Germany by 2 young artists, who commit themselves to the freedom of music and a pure spontaneous music. Similar to the Fluxus predecessors’ exploration into the cross-border arts, the practice of MTDM can be considered a tribute to the pioneers. MTDM seems to be synonymous with “good-for-nothing”. In almost all of the Western films, if the legs break, the horse will be killed by cowboys with no exception. The 2 members, Jun-Yuan and Yi Tao, both were born in the year of horse (in 1978). “Horse without legs”, the self-mocking name, implies exactly the profound thinking of the 2 artists on how to walk without legs.

Jun-Yuan Zhao: reeds, prepared instrument, object
Yi Tao: percussion, object

Asthma Writers Union

Asthma Writers Union comes from Shanghai, China. The only member is Mai Mai. Influenced by some noise and improvisational artist like Derek Baily & Fred Frith, he turned to explore free style improvisation after a shoegaze and dream-pop based album released by Miniless recordings. Although he is the core member of Muscle Snog, his sound in Asthma Writers Union is hugely differently from the band’s. Most of the sound comes from the guitar itself with little or no renderings of guitar effects by the help of different gadgets, tools and objects. Moreover, these sounds are very sensitive, dramatic and variable – they could suddenly change from kind of subtle and delicate drones into enormous and violent waves. He is also founder and organizer of a local organization called RESO (Reconstruct the Experimental Soundscape of Ourselves) which has held three live improvisational performance including artists from the US, the UK, Germany and China till now.