Interview: Zhang Shouwang on Carsick Cars, the UCCA Electric Music Concert, and His Generation

    Split musical personalities: Zhang Shouwang in Beijing (Photo courtesy Renhang)

by Clare Pennington

Published: March 2, 2013

 

BEIJING — Zhang Shouwang, founder of what is perhaps China’s most popular indie band, Carsick Cars, was writing and performing music for his other band, White, before Carsick Cars ever played to a livehouse.

“For White I was writing music for massed guitars with six or seven different guitarists,” Zhang told ARTINFO. “One of the cool things always about the music scene in Beijing is that many of us are able to work on different kinds of music [at the same time] and there is no pressure to make only one kind of music.”

With this in mind, Zhang will be performing at the second Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) “ON | OFF” concert on Monday, focusing on experimental electric music, along with Eli Marshall and Chui Wan frontman Yan Yulong, “who is one of my favorite of the younger musicians in Beijing,” said Zhang.

But at the same time Zhang is also planning to tour in China and abroad with both of his bands this year, and is working on a new Carsick Cars album (“We will work with a producer from one of my favorite bands in the world but Maybe Mars has asked us not to say his name yet because we are still organizing it,” said Zhang).

Apart from the UCCA show, Zhang also has plenty of other personal projects on the side. “I still do many shows with Carsick Cars and White, but also I do many experimental solo and collaboration shows at places like XP,” he said.

Until he was 17, when he heard a Velvet Underground album for the first time, Zhang didn’t think much about music. “Photography was more interesting for me,” he said. At univeristy, he studied what he refers to as “some kind of technology” for two years before dropping out to concentrate on his music.

“Most of what I heard was either music from TV or pop music, and some of it I really liked, like Michael Jackson, but it was not really something I thought belonged to me. It was for old people, or for people who lived abroad.”

Velvet Underground was not only beautiful in Zhang’s opinion, but it “also sounded like music that young people in Beijing could make. So that was when I thought that I can make music too that isn't a patriotic song or a love song or something like that.”

Without having had formal training (the musician has done a lot of self-teaching and reading over the years), Zhang sometimes composes for classical music ensembles. He shrugs this off, though, when asked about how he got into this and what he thinks of classical music. “I don't really think that music has different kinds. If you like to make music you try to make music that seems exciting to you and you use different ways to make it. A chamber ensemble is different from a rock band and so it is like making a sound with a different instrument.” The idea of thinking in terms of strict differentiations between genres  just “isn’t interesting.”

Zhang admires and has played with the American composer Glenn Branca, and considering his experimentation with drone guitar and harmonic series this doesn’t come as a surprise. “I even played with him for his 10th Symphony in New York and met some of his friends, who showed me more music,” said Zhang.

The upcoming UCCA concert will also seek to experiment with harmonics through the electric guitar, Eli Marshall told ARTINFO in another interview. Working with various artists in a plethora of styles, there is a sense of constant learning that eminates from the now-established musician.

This concert series runs in parallel to the “ON | OFF” art exhibition, and focuses on the post-Mao generation of artists. Zhang said of this focus that his parents’ and grandparents’ generation could not pass down the values they held close to his own contemporaries because their own experience was and is so different. “So we didn't know what to do. We didn't have anything that we liked that we could work with. That made us try to make something for ourselves, I think,” said Zhang.

“If you hear our music you don't say that it is normal Chinese music or normal foreign music,” Zhang opined.  It is “Beijing music of our generation.”

The “ON | OFF: SWITCH”  electronic music concert is on at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art  at 6pm on March 3.

Originally posted in Artinfo China.