American composer Ben Houge is a busy guy these days. After three years in Shanghai, playing sporadic shows with Shanghai's acclaimed noise and sound art collectives (NOIShanghai and RESO), and doing the odd gallery sound installation, he's left his job at video game company Ubisoft to pursue his own creative projects full time.

This Sunday, he will be performing at Yuyintang, along with a slew of other composers from the sound and noise art community in and out of Shanghai. "Silence or Silence or Brainwave Communication" will see performances by members of Top Floor Circus and Torturing Nurse, Brainwave Communication founder Hong Qile (from Fuzhou), Dai Cheng, Ben Houge, Hao He, and VJ Jin Ning.

SmartShanghai met up with Ben at the Beaver punk night to talk about video games, Christian rock, and experimental music.



Ben: Yeah, yeah. I left Ubisoft at the end of August. That was when I basically finished up my work on Endwar. I'd been planning to take time off for about two years, setting money aside, just so I could spend a year doing my own thing.

When I started working in video games I always though that I would work for The Man for a little while, and then at some point it would pay off and then I could take some time to be on my own. And I got the idea that it would be after this project, because Endwar was a really long project -- three and a half years.




Ben: Well, Endwar had some cool stuff going for it from the beginning. But I got into video games by nepotism -- my cousin was a producer at Sierra, and so that was my foot in the door. I started off on contract and then I took another contract to work on King's Quest...



Ben: Really?



Ben: Yeah, I worked on a version of Space Quest for console but it was canned. I worked on it for a year. So that was my first job out of college in Seattle. I worked in Seattle there for seven years. They offered me a full time job half way through working on King's Quest...



Ben: I came here with the job for Ubisoft four and a half years ago. The first game I worked on was the PlayStation 2 version of Brothers in Arms -- a World War II game that Ubisoft was publishing.



Ben: Well, I've always been an audio designer for games. At the beginning it was basically content creation. Editing digital audio -- that kind of stuff. So in the beginning like Leisure Suit Larry, I did a bit of everything: editing dialogue, lip syncing... I also wrote a little bit of music for Leisure Suit Larry -- some supplemental stuff. The main stuff was done by this guy in LA. But I guess you've heard my Leisure Suit Larry thing...



Ben: I guess it depends on when you catch me... I just played D22 (in Beijing) in January, so I usually what I've been doing is solo laptop gigs. But I try to be conscious of the fact -- like as someone who has attended a lot of solo laptop gigs -- I'm cognizant of the fact that it's really boring to watch someone on a laptop, so I try to do different things to show off what's happening to people.

So what I've been doing is using a graphical program -- it's a little bit like Reason -- and layering stuff like Gregorian chants, and it after a while melody becomes harmony, after enough layers... putting things on, taking things off, changing the mode. It's sort of mellow and ambient. And then there are pieces that are variations. Some are automatic. But for the automatic ones, like at the D22 show, I would leave the stage so people would know it's automatic.

But what I'm doing this Sunday is sort of a snapshot of a work in progress. It's a sound installation I'm working on in collaboration with Chen Hangfeng [Shanghai-based visual artist], who just had a show at Art Labor, for an installation for the Today Art Museum in Beijing.

It's based on the concept of a kaleidoscope, and so it's a program I'm writing that takes real time audio and chops it up in different ways to four "scenes." So I'll be previewing that work on Sunday.

[Ed's note: Check out Ben's blog post here for a more in-depth look at this project with Chen Hangfeng.]





Ben: When I was growing up I was listening to... well, I guess I always grew up around church music and stuff. Lutheran chorals... so I heard a lot of that stuff in Church and I was always singing in choirs. So those are my earliest musical experiences, and then I listened to a lot of Christian rock.



Ben: Not so much Stryper. Christian metal always seemed like it still had a bit of edge of satanic...



Ben: [Laughs.] I think Jars of Clay are a little after my time, but I listened the heck out of Petra.



Ben: There was a time when I owned every single Petra album, including their eponymous debut, which featured the only other guy in show business named Houge -- their lead singer, although he spelled it differently -- and then the second album "Come and Join Us" from ¡¯77, which had the original version of "God Gave Rock and Roll to You."



Ben: Really. I know KISS did a version of that too...



Ben: INXS.



Ben: [Laughs.] Yeah, I listened to a ton of INXS and Depeche Mode. Pet Shop Boys.

Actually in college my triumvirate were Prince, Elvis Costello, and Laurie Anderson.

And probably out of any of those guys, the guy with the most staying power is Prince... there was one point where I owned every Elvis Costello record, but the thing that bugs me about him is that he's done so many damn reissues.

Like how many times am I supposed to buy this record? I've got "Armed Forces" on cassette, and then some of them I've got the original CDs and then the vinyl reissues but now he's doing the damn Warner Brothers reissues and then the damn Universal reissues...



Ben: Okay, I'd been here about a year and I though I would give myself a year to get my bearings a see what was going on... but after a year I wanted to get something going.

In Seattle, I was putting on shows, and it was the thing I missed the most and was the hardest thing to give up when moving to Shanghai. In Seattle, I had two good friends and we were working on providing a forum for composers working in the city. It didn't have all that much of an agenda. It was basically just for people to present their music.

If you look back at people like John Cage, or anyone back to Beethoven, if they wanted to do a show they would put it on them own damn selves. And any point from Haydn on... you know. My friend used to say that any composer has a really strong entrepreneurial streak. You can't wait for people to come to you -- you've got to work it.

So anyways, I'd been here for a year and hadn't really done anything, but I got an email from a friend of a friend of a friend who wanted to do a Chinese tour, and so I arranged this show for Audrey Chen, based out of Baltimore. She does stuff on cello. She was playing with this Japanese guy, Tatsuya Nakatani out of New York, who was also a percussionist, and they were coming through. Also, they were doing a NOIShanghai show with Torturing Nurse, and so I put together one for them at Harley's. So that was my first one. We didn't make a ton of money, but I had a bunch of co-workers that came...

And the next night they were playing at Live Bar with Torturing Nurse, and that was the first time I saw Torturing Nurse. The next night everyone went to Hangzhou, and that was the first time I met a lot of those guys. So then I played a couple of NOIShanghai gigs, and I guess RESO kind of came out of that as well.





Ben: Well, sometimes attendance still isn't great. Junky [from Torturing Nurse], is actually one of my good-influence friends. He's always doing stuff, putting stuff out. He stays home, doesn't drink too much...

The band has changed over the years. They first started as a four-piece, with Junky as the founder guy. They've had various members from other Shanghai bands play with them [Banana Monkey, 33 Island], and then people split off and Torturing Nurse were a duo. Actually, I thought that's when they produced some of their strongest stuff.



Ben: Yeah, you saw some of those? I went down to the place they were rehearsing at, and it was like there was a real inquisitiveness and artistic research to what they were doing. With turntables and stuff. At one point Junky was playing this metal disc to make noise out of the needle. But they're pretty stable in their three-piece configuration now.



Ben: Yeah. I'm not too fussed about it really. I guess a lot of people get ambivalent about genre titles, but I think there is something very valuable about the "experimental" impetus. You know. John Cage said that an experimental action is an action with an outcome that cannot be predicted. So it's like a leap of faith really. I often don't think it's the most useful descriptor, but I don't really mind it...



Ben: I think it's a question of context. Everything has some sort of context. The thing that bugs me is that in visual art, people are like "it's so weird, I love it", but when it comes to music, people are like "it's so weird, I hate it"... When you're working with sounds and music, people don't come with the same sense of sympathy that they would for visual art. They don't search for something new.

And for my shows I'm trying to give something for the audience to grab onto but I hope they are receptive to something new as well. So it's sympathy from both sides. Sympathy is the key... people have to be open.

Did I mention that City Weekend thinks I'm Ben Huang? In my event listing?



Ben: I think you can't avoid having a conversation with whoever is making music around you and with your influences, whether you try to engage that or not. I don't know. I had a professor -- a particularly curmudgeonly professor -- one time I tried to defend something as "experimental" and he said, "well, that's great but what kind of experiment is it? Is it a junior high school experiment? Or is it going to lead to something?"

I think it's not necessarily a binary thing to write for these people or these people. I think audiences morph. It's not like these are the educated people and these are the uneducated people. You get into something... and then it changes.

I think really the idea of artistic research is important. You can't be second-guessing yourself in terms of trying to guess how people are going to take what you're doing. I think it's more like, "what's the next step of what I'm trying to do." You know, sometimes it will lead you down some narrow corridor and no one's going to follow you. Then you have to go back to the last fork in the road and try a different direction.

I think the only sensible path is to try to do something you think is good. Maybe it will resonate and maybe it won't...

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Don't miss Ben this Sunday at Yuyintang at "Silence or Silence or Brainwave Communication."

He's also performing again one week later, the next Sunday at Yuyintang with Japanese/Korean space pop duo 10. We featured 10 in a previous MP3 Monday, which you can look at here. This second show will double as the CD release party for Ben's first CD ever, "3 Heart-Shaped Cookies." This performance will highlight his "pop catalogue," covering a songwriting span of about 15 years.

Here's an abundance of linkage action for you to sift through:

This is Ben Houge's main page with news, media, audio samples, write-ups of older pieces and more.

This is his blog, which features writings about the Shanghai sound and visual arts, among other things.

This is the Facebook event page with the links to all the performers on the web for the concert this Sunday.

This is Torturing Nurse.

This is Gregory A. Perez's photos of that one Torturing Nurse show that was unsane.

This is 10, who Ben will be performing with exactly one week after.

And click right here to get some Ben Houge downloads.

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