Weekly Update: Out of Center

By , 2016年 3月 16日

Hmm… slim pickings this week. Unless you like the same rock bands and the same DJs you can see any other week, give or take. Hey, they’re nice. Very Beijing-centric. Digging a bit deeper, traveling a bit further out of our city-center comfort zones, here are a few happenings around town this week and early next:

Tomorrow afternoon (THU 3.17), Taikang Space in Caochangdi opens a new exhibit archiving the Shenyang underground rock scene from 1995-2002, that glorious period between the first florescence of yaogun and SARS shutting everything down for a hot minute. The exhibit, which consists of cassettes, videos, photos, publications, brochures, posters, invitations, and letters from the period, kicks off with a symposium entitled “Back to ‘Locality’: Rock Music, Art and Cultural Politics in the 1990s”, and you can bet there’s a lot more jargon where that came from:

Rock music as a genre emerged in China during the 1980s, asserting doubt and defiance towards banality and the bonds of tradition, and seeking to establish individualizing, self-confirming generational values. The history of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll has witnessed an era of brilliance and radical advances, albeit marked, in spatial coordinates, by uneven development and scattered centers of activity. Among these, Beijing, as the locus of economic, cultural and social circuits, undoubtedly comprises the most striking chapter in the legend of Chinese rock music. However, beyond this dominant, singular narrative, what are the possibilities to expand this story, to introduce alternative experiences and individual narratives? In response to this challenge, Bio-archiving: Underground Music in Shenyang 1995-2002 conducts a survey of the underground music scene in Shenyang from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. The result is a sample of the variety of occluded histories dispersed in secondary and tertiary cities, where these memories, once vivid, silently endure in long-forgotten venues, never catalogued in archives or recorded in publications.

Seems like a can’t-miss for would-be historiographers of this Chinese rock zeitgeist in which we live. Opening symposium, featuring guest speakers Li Juchuan, Jeph Lo, Ma Zhongren, Colin Chinnery, and Su Wenxiang, is tomorrow (TUE 3.17) from 2-4pm. Afterwards the show will remain on view until May 14.

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Next up on our list of out-of-center activities: Jason Kahn, performing in the living room of some apartment in Hepingli on Saturday March 19. Kahn’s in town putting together Drifting, a field recording-based sound art exhibit he describes as ‘part sound-journal, part investigation into our awareness of the sounds around us’. Drifting opens at Meridian Space on April 10 (full info here), but in the mean time Kahn will be playing one of Yan Jun‘s roving living room concerts. Yan and Kahn will perform a vocal duet. For reference, here’s Kahn doing a similar performance with Alice Hu-Sheng Chang:

Also joining the living room show on Saturday are Yan Yulong and A Ke performing a violin duet, and Kang He doing a fiction reading. RSVP quickly to attend, only 10 spots left as of this writing.

Kahn will perform again with Yan Jun on March 30 at Fruityspace along with Li Song, Tadashi Usami, and Zhu Wenbo — more info on that one later.

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Last one for today is at School Bar, because we haven’t been there yet this year and we can’t keep avoiding it forever. On Tuesday, March 22 School hosts Geneva-based artists Denis Rollet and JMO (Julie Semoroz). Rollet will present a sound installation / live set “full of electronic devices, often homemade, and Hi-fi material.” Go prepared for deep listening. Sample here. Semoroz will perform a field recording-based set “deal[ing] with melancholy, metaphysical poetry, language and its manipulations, improvisation, and all types of alternative approaches.” Something like this:

The duo were supposed to perform at Meridian on Monday, but Meridian’s cleared their live performance docket until April… I also heard that Rollet and JMO have a show set up at Penghao Theater off Nanluoguxiang, but I can’t find anything about that online. Maybe show up there and try your luck if you prefer Penghao’s less fermented atmosphere.

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Looking a bit further down the calendar, pangbianr has two gigs lined up for early April featuring legendary Chicago footwork innovator RP Boo, London-based electronic experimentalist Helm (PAN), and NYC modular synth sorcerer M Dwinell. Find the full info on those shows here and tune back in next week for more.

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