Actually, this was my first gig in Taiwan. I had just arrived in Taipei for two days and by chance a friend of mine had just e-mailed me a link to this forum about Noise Music in Asia : Global Noise Online (by the way you should check this website if you want to know more about the China/HK/Taiwan noise scene and you're like me unable to read in Chinese). So as I see the concert is scheduled for 8 o'clock, I plan to arrive at 9... Bad luck, my habits from Paris just seem not to fit with the place, as I realize that I have already missed Lawrence English's performance, which opened this evening's series of concerts. First of my learnings : here concerts begin on time.


Wolfenstein



When I jump down the stairs, I try to make my way and take a seat on the floor. There's a religious silence, everyone is listening carefully to Wolfenstein's set. The music at the beginning is really hard to apprehend : cheap electronic keyboard sounds make weird melodies while some kind of rhythm seems to hesitate between turning into a regular beat or playing tricks to the listener. The result is that I find myself nodding with my head in rhythm, and then suddenly stop because I have simply lost the beat.
As there is no video outfit on this set, I find it the best way to listen is just to close my eyes and to let myself immerged into the music. I can't recall every part of the set, but the main impression is intense confusion : not confusion in the music, which is perfectly controlled, but in the listener, due to all these different fluxes of information combining with each other. I was particulary impressed by the end of the set, using samples of traditional chinese strings and percussions, to make it a kind of carnival-like feeling : you know when all those firecrackers blow around you and you don't even know if you like it or if it disturbs you, but that it doesn't even have any importance because it's just so intense. And then all this is suddenly interrupted with that 10 second sample of some kind of «horns of victory», which announce the end of the set. Waoh... Let's have a cigarette break to recover from this shock.


Tsai Hsinyuan



When I come back from my break, I get my second learning of the evening : there are no pauses between the concerts, so once again I lost a bit of the performance. This time, it's Tsai Hsinyuan, a young diplomee of 24 from Taiwan University of Fine Arts, and who, according from Recorderz' manager LiWei (you can read his review of the concert here and in English translation there) is the new blood of Taiwanese experimental noise scene. And actually I'm inclined to believe him, as the young lady made such an impressive performance. As I arrive in the room, late as usal, the part playing is a really noisy one. I wouldn't call it harsh noise, but I think it's just because the speakers could not play the music loud enough : if they had, I think we would all have been blown away by this aircraft-like massive soundstorm. But then this slow-moving soundscape turns into something more quiet, but still very tense, with a kind of bird-like hissing. The piece as a hole sounds really coherent, as it achieves to unify noisy and calm parts into a single intense and solemn atmosphere. All this sounds as if noise and minimalist music were two sides of a same medal (which I'm convinced of, by the way).
Actually, the music played by Tsai Hsinyuan uses a lot the possibilities offered by the left and right channels, so I cannot appreciate 100 percent the music, since I'm very close to a speaker and I hardly can hear what the other one plays at the other side of the room. I also discovered after the concert that Tsai Hsinyuan uses a hand controller with blinking diodes on it (see the pictures) connected to her computer through a MAX/MSP custom patch. But from where I was sitting, I just couldn't see it. So these few technical problems just make me impatient for seeing Hsinyuan's next performance.


DJ Dee and Lawrence English



I'll go a bit quicker on Hong Kong's DJ Dee's set with Lawrence English (owner of the highly recommandable Room 40 label), for the simple reason that I only have few memories of it. First, I still had this jetlag that had been lasting since my flying from France two days before ; second I fell in the silly «video trap», i.e. I've been absorbed by the TV screen and its half abstact-half figurative watercolour moving shapes during the whole set, so I realized after that I hadn't paid all the required attention to the music. And that's a shame because what I can see now from the videos (which are available here on Wolfenstein's blog) remind me of really nice things. But you had better make your own idea by yourself and go watch them. I'll still say a few words about this performance. In a first part, DJ Dee did a solo set. The musician from Hong Kong is actually a DJ, but not in the usual meaning of the word : he belongs to the breed of artists like Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide or DJ Spooky, DJs who try to explore all the possibilities of the turntables taken as an instrument in itself. His music ranges from ambiant to "bruitiste", and his set at Boven's achieved the same kind of crossover as Tsai Hsinyuan's between noise and minimalism. Actually, the video on Wolfenstein's blog gives a splendid illustration of this live set, with metallic sounds of bells inviting the audience to a deep meditation. Lawrence English's contribution in the second part of the set introduced some abstract and cold melodies in these desertic pictures. There's something fascinating about English's presence on stage : the guy gives a real powerful impression, rolling his shoulders while playing on his instruments, and the music he produces is just the opposite, so delicate and subtile. His minimalism "concret" just fitted perfectly with Dee's inputs of chaotic noise, adding to it a slight touch of poetry, and offering a perfect conclusion to this remarkable gig.

So if you can read chinese, you can go on Recorderz website to learn more about the artists who performed at this concert. Or else I really advise you, once again, to go to the Global Noise Online website.

PS : Thanks to LiWei for letting me using his photographs.