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. 

Concerts at the UCCA Showcase Young Chinese Composers

 

Chen Bingye performs a piece at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art at the first in a series featuring young composers (Photo courtesy UCCA).

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 4, 2013

 

BEIJING — In January, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) began a series of concerts in association with “ON | OFF”, an exhibition of 50 works that has filled the cavernous arts center. The next two concerts will take place in the coming two months.

Born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the musicians involved in this concert series grew up in a new era of consumerism, wider access to information and a more international art scene. 

Eli Marshall, the American composer curating the concert series, told ARTINFO, “I am programming all three of these concerts away from traditional chamber music and toward more integrated forms which are sometimes seen as more fringe: percussion, electronic-acoustic, and traditional Chinese instruments.”

The first installment, “Sound | Space Percussion Dramas by the 70|80 Generation of Composers” which took place in January for a crowd of about 200, focused on percussion. It brought together works some of China’s rising composers, as well as one of the country’s most acclaimed, 2011 Rome Prize-winner Liang Lei who now lives in the US.

Marshall explained that he wanted to show that “composers can do much, even without definite-pitched instruments.” Percussion plays an important role in Chinese drama, narrative storytelling and Chinese opera. Here, the compositions were in varied ways inspired by this dramatic inheritance. 

Liang’s contribution, “Dialectal Percussions,” which the composer wrote nearly ten years ago, was performed to a background of shadow projections that moved along the tall factory walls. Based on the sounds of the loal Beijing dialect and the expressive narratives traditionally performed in the city, dramatic lighting is obligatory here, as is a theatrical delivery from the percussionist. The poised musician’s movements slowed and started in ways that sometimes brought dancing to mind. 

Another highlight of the show was Chen Bingye’s “Improvisation,” played for the first time time here in Beijing. A young professor at the Central Conservatory in China and ten years Lei’s junior, Chen played her own composition on a single bass drum for nearly ten minutes. She manipulated nearly every section of the drum to evoke a wide variety of sounds, mostly using brushes.  

The next concert in the series, though, will leave percussion to concentrate on experimental electronic music. Video works and recorded pieces will be presented together, in a show that will feature "noise" figures like Yan Yulong of Chui Wan and Zhang Shouwang of Carsick Cars. 

The final concert, Marshall tells us, “will consist of a large ensemble of traditional instruments performing newly-commissioned works by a wide range of composers of this generation.” If there is enough funding, they even plan to release an album with this last concert. 

  

See VIDEO of UCCA's Philip Tinari introducing "ON/OFF" to ARTINFO.

Originally posted in Artinfo China.