*** JUE Festival continues to dominate the calendar for the immediate future, after a strong opening weekend and a packed Creative Market yesterday afternoon. Top names this week are Roc Nation's Jay Electronica + Miss Ko ("the Missy Elliot of Taiwan", don't ya know) on Tuesday at Yugong, enigmatic chanteuse Émilie Simon (best known for her work scoring that penguin movie) on Friday at Yugong, and catastrophe-sound blaster Kevin Martin, aka THE BUG, on Friday at Dada. My pick of the three is the latter, but my ears are pretty fucked up so I need to listen to music with my body. As such, my opinion's biased. Anyway I already drooled all over that one in last week's column; more on The Bug here. Once again, here are a few deeper cuts within the JUE lineup. Faraway sounds, dug up, repackaged, and imported to represent distant, abstract places right here in Beijing. Sound maps: *** First one's on tonight, a crossover event uniting JUE and the Bookworm Literary Festival, which also kicked off over the weekend. (Side note: SmBJ chatted with local blogger / lit fest coordinator Anthony Tao on Friday; scope that here). Tonight is a Translation Slam, Music Edition, with the music provided by Dawanggang's Song Yuzhe, and the Translation Slam provided by a duo of "anglo and sinophile nerds" trading "serious semantics." I don't fully understand how this will work in real life. Organizers say "the mesmerizing and mournful folk singer Song Yuzhe will grace The Bookworm stage, leaving two translators to compare, contrast, and clash over the nuances of his poetic songs." Speaking about birds… Birds don't need to think where they are flying to. Sometimes flying over the cliffs, sometimes scraping the crest of the waves… picking a straw of grass on the cliff, drinking a sip of water on the wave-crest , having a rest on the golden temple roof, singing out over the head of the vagabond. The birds flying upstream gather in high places, the birds flying downstream gather in low places. Only the cuckoo flies in the middle. "OH SNAP SON! DID HE MEAN CUCKOO AS THE NAME OF A BIRD OR AS ONOMATOPOEIA?!" I guess? Sorry. I'm also a word nerd. Anyway, Song Yuzhe's music is indeed poetic, unique, beautiful. He's one of the legitimate originals on the Beijing folk scene, bringing field recordings and sonic influences back from annual pilgrimages to Tibet to construct a delicate woven aural palette, studded with epigrammatic lyrics resembling Daoist idioms or Buddhist koans. He often plays with an ensemble (as Dawanggang), incorporating elements of Tibetan, Mongolian, and classical Chinese music, creating a soundtrack to an imaginary, pan-Central Asian landscape that only exists in the maestro's mind. Solo, Yuzhe's performance is a more intimate, string-and-voice arrangement. Should be an edifying night of top-shelf folk music, assuming those semantic dialogues don't rage too far out of hand... 80rmb, 8pm start *** Next up, continuing the theme of imported sounds: Awesome Tapes from Africa on Thursday at Dada. The host's introduction from this Boiler Room radio set he did in 2013 paints the picture much more eloquently than I could: "In session this afternoon we have Awesome Tapes from Africa, aka this man Brian, and a little crew. Um, yeah, Brian runs the blog, Awesome Tapes from Africa, he basically travels around Africa and picks up these cassette tapes, and then posts them up on the blog. And it's also now a record label?... So he's playing off of this tape deck, which I think is a first in the Boiler Room..." Yeah, so: Awesome Tapes From Africa is a rad blog started by a guy from Illinois called Brian Shimkovitz, who traveled to Ghana on a research project in 2002, and subsequently became obsessed with the continent's vast, disconnected tape culture. The blog was his first attempt to systematically archive this music, ripping the defiantly physical cassette format into digital facsimile and uploading it for the world outside Africa to hear. That's blown up into a full-time gig, which sees Brian traveling the world, DJing the cassettes he's found (Dada staff had to track down the last few working tape decks in Beijing to rent for this show), and talking about the cultural idiosyncrasies of the African independent music scene. As you might imagine, there's been some backlash against a white American guy traveling the world playing African people's music for money. Shimkovitz has published a rebuttal for UK magazine The Wire, food for thought: The difficulty of most African regional musics in making it to neighbouring countries (let alone a record shop in Nebraska) has as much to do with the stunted system of physical distribution as it does with differences in language and creative sensibilities among varying culture groups. Bola, a musician from northern Ghana whose record just came out on ATFA, has had to take the bus down-country eight hours or more to singlehandedly distribute his music to shops that might consider carrying music sung in a language of a faraway region. Even if language wasn’t a stumbling block, there is no real national music distribution company in Ghana to handle such pursuits. It is done piecemeal for the most part, by individual musicians and their colleagues... I want to find a way to give a nominal fee to each artist whose tracks have been downloaded on ATFA. Anyone who has been to Africa knows this is nearly, if not entirely, impossible. In the meantime, should we, due to post-colonial guilt, not include African music in the global process of discovery taking place on screens and MP3 players around the world? Those who have never travelled to Africa feel rightly concerned about technology-fuelled (un)fairness... As ATFA grows into something larger, I grapple with the future of marketing the current and back catalogue of sublime sounds in a fair way, without losing the power within that physical piece of vinyl or plastic cassette. No easy answer there. That said, I'm personally very intrigued at the prospect of hearing these artifacts of a regional musical tradition to which I would otherwise have no access, short of physically traveling to Ghana. Which I can't afford. Thursday, March 19 @ Dada, 50rmb at the door. *** Finally: Brooklyn trio Sontag Shogun show up in Beijing for a gig on Saturday night at Zajia Lab, which I guess is nominally attached to JUE Festival. This one's being put on by Zoomin' Night organizer Zhu Wenbo. Sontag Shogun's somniferous piano + field recording compositions are right up his alley. The band describes their own music as "analog sound treatments and nostalgic solo piano compositions in harmony to depict abstract places in our memory." Judge for yourself via their 2014 LP, tale: In Beijing, Sontag Shogun's lost place soundscapes will be supplemented by the ponderous, barely-there electronic minimalism of duo Liu Xinyu and Yan Yulong. These two — the core members of Chui Wan — have been working on this project for a few years now, and just output an album on Yan Jun's Sub Jam label. Awaking: That's Saturday, March 21 at Zajia Lab. Judging by the hand-written "For Rent" sign hanging outside Zajia currently, looks like our favorite converted Daoist noise temple is not long for this world. Get it while you can. *** RECAP: Song Yuzhe = MON March 16 @ The Bookworm Awesome Tapes From Africa = THU March 19 @ Dada Sontag Shogun = SAT March 21 @ Zajia