So I've been very busy recently with my family visiting me in China, working a silly amount and attempting not too liquify in the extreme Chinese heat and humidity. What I have been doing however is listening to lots of music, as per usual. I thought I'd ease myself back into blogging a bit by just telling what's been on the headphones recently and a little bit about some of my favourite artists. A new member of staff recently started working at our school, a chap named Ethan from Perth who, it turns out, loves garage and punk music. This pleased me immensely as he introduced me to a shed (or a garage?) full of trashy guitar music. I use trashy in the most complimentary terms possible-I mean that DIY lo-fi sound you get in garage music (not of the UKG variety-rather that of the punky ilk), the sound that says,"we love making this shit and we'll do it even if the extent of our materials are a garage and some fourth hand instruments". The fact is I'm sure a lot of these artists eventually had pretty good equipment, but they held onto that raw sound I love so much. The artists include everything from Blondie to Joy Division to Ian Dury and the Blockheads to X-Ray Specs. "Stop", you might say, "that's not really garage and punk!", well whilst I agree in theory I believe they all have that DIY feel, lending a real inventiveness to their sound and they therefore exude artistic integrity-making their sound however they can for whatever small income it might produce. The band that have most piqued my interest are probably The Deviants, they are incredibly inventive and their music seems to vary from the pretty punky to stuff verging on poetry to the downright experimental. I've also enjoyed MC5, representing Detroit and showing off quite how eclectic one city's music can be, from motown (named after Detroit I believe, it being motor city) to the invention of techno to blues to the hard rocking guitar sound of MC5 themselves, and embryonic punk of a sort, way before the Sex Pistols. They had it: the DIY ethic, the radical political affiliations and the devil may care approach to authority; but never mind that, the main thing is that there music makes you want to bounce around like an ADD afflicted pogo stick. There's lots of other stuff too, but more on that later, probably in more detail.
What else have I been listening too? Well, I received a lovely birthday present from my girlfriend Celia of erhu （二胡）music. This instrument usually has two strings and no fingerboard as such and is played like a violin or cello. It is held in the position of a cello, but is about the size of a violin and, like most bowed instruments, if it's played well it is manna for the ears, if it's played badly it sounds like feline mass murder in a bag. You often see old blind men playing it by the road in China, being one of their only possible job prospects besides being a blind masseur, and their performances are at best variable. However, listening to this CD I was inspired, a truly beautiful sound filled my house with it's tremulous delicacy, and the CD also had a good variation between the orchestral and the more folky. According to Wikipedia the erhu was conceived well over a thousand years ago and was made of a combination of materials that could be obtained along the silk road. The strings themselves were in earlier times usually made of wound silk, viewing the instrument, like so many things in China, starts winding you into the immense history of this huge country, pulling you along the old silk road and imagining the wranglings that went on to make these beautiful instruments. At this point I feel myself getting inexorably pulled into a Sebaldian psychogeographical mental ramble, which I would love to further entertain, but unfortunately another cultural aspect of this land now forces me to leave my explorations-the intense work ethic. Thanks for reading, it's good to be back on the blog, I'll be writing more about Chinese music soon.
An example of The Deviants-although as I said their sound is very varied.
Here is some MC5, a sound a little like Iggy and the Stooges I guess, if you like them check out New York Dolls as well.
Some rather lovely erhu music, with some other Chinese musical accompaniment.
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