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Here’s how the All Music Guide defines industrial music: a blend of avant-garde electronics experiments and punk provocation. Here’s another line, from the same source: “the most abrasive and aggressive fusion of rock and electronic music.”
OK, ready for an illustration? This is what industrial music from Beijing sounds like.
Its music that just keeps screaming at you louder and louder, until it decides to abate. This is the Chinese duo White. Shou Wang, is the male member of White. He’s tuned into the New York noise scene, bands like Sonic Youth. Shenggy is the female half of the duo.
White: Shou Wang and Shenggy. Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennywongxo
Bargeld: “I was formally introduced first to Shenggy, and she has a Neubauten tattoo on her hand. So she was very happy to meet me.”
Shenggy: “I think this is for us really an amazing experience. We’re both influenced, deeply influenced by Einstürzende Neubauten, so also can get chance to be produced by Blixa. So we learnt a lot.”
Blixa is married to a Chinese woman. He’d spent a lot of time in Beijing in the 90s. And he saw a city whose culture like that of Berlin in the 70s, was growing rapidly.
That got him trolling the small clubs in Beijing where a few avant-garde musicians found their audiences. Finally, Blixa held an informal audition.
Bargeld: “I did rent a recording studio in Beijing. A leftover recording studio from I think the times of the Japanese occupation, I think an old Japanese radio station. And in there I did a week of recordings with these three different bands. And it turned out that the only thing I liked was White.”
Blixa Bargeld and White worked well together. Shenggy says her group didn’t come up with the concept of industrial music. But they gave it something Blixa hadn’t heard before.
Shenggy: “The root is not from us. But we can have like some influence from the land, like the environment we’re growing up. For example, in Beijing is quite an industrial city. So this is kind of our feeling influence-wise.”
And it was that connection — that punk provocation — that turned on Blixa Bargeld.
Bargeld: “It is not so much a style as an artistically decision. It is more that what you do comes out of your own life situation.”
Here’s an example of that life situation: a riff on the new Chinese capitalism. This is one of White’s shorter tracks, a sort of industrial music jingle. It’s called “Beijing Beer.”
This is the kind of music — if you will — a lot of people in China never hear, and never will hear. Again producer Blixa Bargeld.
Bargeld: “White is in that sense is not a group, and they don’t have a-nother album out. They are happy if they get this album out. And they only got it out because I helped them in doing it. There are no record companies in China. There is only the state record company. There is a huge underground. But there is no infrastructure.”
And as for Shenggy and Shou Wang…they just want to get a few people in China to think differently about music.
Shenggy: “I never think like White can get some fame, this kind of thing. But I really want to say White can influence some people and encourage them to play some kind of music.”
For The World, I’m Marco Werman.
CD Information:
Artist: White
Title: White
Release Date: 2009, January 10
Label: Maybe Mars Records
Catalog No.: MM8.1
ISRC: CN-A08-08-321-00
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