ed peto

The Chinese independent music scene can be a hard nut to crack. Non-Chinese-speaking music fans have to be much more determinedly hands on in their approach than elsewhere in the world. Indecipherable band names, poorly recorded and hard-to-find albums and lack of English media coverage are just some of the barriers-to-entry, testing even the most resilient of music fans.

New podcast ‘Pissing On The Bamboo Curtain’ will be a real godsend to anyone looking at making sense of this exciting little scene. Podcasters Ian Sherman (who also happens to be Music Editor for Beijing Time Out) and Kyle Schaefer’s high-brow, yet somehow low-brow, ramblings will also be a godsend to anyone who enjoys apocrypha, obscure references and general verbosity.

Kyle Schaefer and Ian Sherman

These guys know their stuff. They play good tunes as well. Here are links to the first two gloriously amateurish installments, hosted on the Tagteam Records site:

Sept ‘07

Oct ‘07

I took it upon myself to send a few questions their way - pulling back the curtain on Pissing On The Bamboo Curtain, if you will. They replied in a typically wordy and waggish fashion. Good stuff. Read on…

Ed Peto: DESCRIBE THE OTHER PERSON’S BACKGROUND A LITTLE BIT. WHAT QUALIFIES HIM TO COMMENT ON THE BEIJING MUSIC SCENE?

Ian Sherman: I always imagine him [Kyle] coming from a place where it’s always dusk, people are polite but wary and there’s always a cooler full of beer on the back porch. It’s essential that there is a back porch. Kyle has a history as a DJ on late night college radio where, as far as I understand, he would mix Ministry with Diamanda Galas and Star Wars samples and no one would give a shit, ‘cos no was listening, except whatever girl he happened to be corrupting at that point. Said girl would think that he was the greatest thing since the cheese grater and would no doubt demonstrate her admiration for him through the medium of repulsive carnal depravities. He is very good at radio/podcast stuff, even though he puts on a special ‘voice’ for broadcasting; In real life he has a voice like Betty Boop’s castrato cousin. Still, he actually thinks about what he says before he says it, unlike my impetuous self.

[Kyle] has been intimately connected with Tag Team for a few years now. He goes to a lot of shows - not as many as me, but then he’s an indolent fucker. Most important, I suppose, is that he, like me, wants to and we have both been here an awfully long time so, in our own small way, we’ve been witness to the development of the Beijing scene. That’s it.

N.B. The ‘Bamboo Curtain’ podcast is not exclusively about Beijing. We’ll play any Chinese music, no matter where it comes from. We’ll be starting a Beijing specific podcast within the next few months (it won’t be on the Tag Team site but elsewhere)

Kyle Schaefer: Well, aside from his professional credentials, Sherman is one of those people with an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of rock ephemera. I’m not sure if that ‘qualifies’ him to do anything (I don’t think we had to take a test or anything), but it’s nice to be able to find out who the back-up cymbalist was in the original line up of the Yardbirds and if there is any truth to the rumor that he made a series of novelty records with tape loops of whale song (Ian says no). As far as being an able commenter on the developments of independent music here in China… Ian’s an avid, enthusiastic and informed gig-goer, which is more than I can say for most.

EP: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONAL TASTES IN MUSIC?

IS: I know its a fatuous thing to say, but I simply like good music. Alright, I’ll try again. My ‘comfort blanket’ music is Van Morrison. The man can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. But much like the religion it borders on, that’s a personal thing and not really something that comes up all that often. I like slow and loud music: Mogwai, Godspeed, MBV etc. Or I like shit with a lot of guitar. Distortion please - lots of fucking distortion. I generally look for a melody - it can be as fucked up as you like, just as long as its there. Or I like good old fashioned power pop. Or I like Acid Rock. Or the holy trinity of 70s metal (Zep, Purp and, to a lesser extent, Sab). Or Ennio Morricone. Or mid-60s psych. I find most recent British music uninteresting - either prematurely ponderous or glorified stodgy pub rock. Enough, I hate being pinned down on this, it may well change tomorrow. Extremely broadly, though - I’m an indie kid.

Kyle’s inner goth is barely hidden, but he manages to function nonetheless. He and I have rather different but quite complementary tastes in music. He’s kind of hard to nail down - just when I think I have him pegged as a machine-music person (which he is, very), he’s an archetypal yank indie kid, and then he’s a punk, but wait… now he’s into weird shit like hyper hardcore. I think we share a love of mesolithic riffheavy sludge rock, but I could be wrong. I have a fairly extensive, not to mention anal, knowlege of the dark nooks and crannies of music - past and current - but when we DJ together, I spend most of the night in a state of awe at the endless succession of wonderful obscurities (to me) he pulls out of nowhere. Bastard. It’s an education with Kyle.

KS: I cut my teeth on horrible noise. Shuddering distortion is my bread and butter. I’m also rather fond of gloomy things and absolutely anything synthetic. Ian is bit like the rainy-day craft drawer, all these bits and bobs and glue-on wiggly eyes. Just a little something of everything. He’ll probably say ’shoe-gaze’ after agonizing for a few hours, but the man can comfortably shift from Van Morrison to Norwegian death-twee.

EP: HOW DID THE PODCAST IDEA COME ABOUT?

IS: Well, I think I once heard a podcast back in 2002 and thought ‘fuck I could do that’. Of course, I couldn’t - not without someone who actually could. One of us bought it up last year, I think, and nothing happened. But I have these rare, and really rather shocking, spurts of decisiveness. Every morning I wake up, stare into space and let my mind fill with brilliant plans, then I’ll have my weetabix and fall asleep on the sofa. Occasionally, though, I’ll actually follow through on these plans. This would be one of those instances. It’s all a question of presentation really. If you go to the pub and float the idea of a podcast, it’ll get kicked around the table for a bit and then the conversation’ll get back to Kagler’s latest distribution deal; but if you stride in purposefully and slam an actual plan down on the table, it’ll happen.

KS: It was Ian’s idea. He started bugging me and I went along with it. I’m a remarkably passive person. I’d had a similar idea for Tagteam, that we should do a podcast of b-sides and live stuff and interviews to coincide with new releases. Everybody thought it was a good idea but I couldn’t manage the motivation to actually produce it. When Ian said we should do a music thing I jumped on his wagon (Seriously, he has a wagon).

EP: WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE WITH THIS PODCAST?

IS: Less time asleep on the sofa. Oh… and demos, lots and lots of demos. Basically, shitloads of free stuff. Maybe a girlfriend as well. Doesn’t seem too much to ask.

KS: The usual: Global Domination of Popular Culture. But I’d settle for getting Ian a date.

EP: DESCRIBE THE PREPARATION THAT GOES INTO EACH SHOW AND HOW YOU GO ABOUT RECORDING IT.

IS: To be honest not much. We both negotiate with each other about time and place of recording (probably the most complicated part of the whole process), show up. There’s a slight internal struggle - whereas I would be happier with an hour long podcast, Kyle is more of a short and sweet kind of bloke. He tends to win because otherwise he gets all passive aggressive and I am powerless in the face of a steath sulk. We each bring three or four tunes with us and erm… that’s about it. We don’t necessarily know anything about the music the other wants to play. I’m happy with that. I’ll like to learn and be suprised and that’s mainly what keeps me interested, that and the sound of my voice. I don’t really want to do that much preparation or, god forbid, rehearsal. That just sucks the life out of a cast. We’ve had complaints from would-be-management that we should have a big meeting before hand and share all information. Those people can eat my shit, in the best possible way.

Generally, we’ll waste all the best banter just talking to each other as we set up. The mikes are switched on and then… well, as is easy to tell, then we just make it up as we go. I like it that way, but inevitably we will get more organised and professional as time goes on.

For source material, I’ve got a pretty good pipeline for new demos and albums, but I tend to spend a lot of time scouring the interwebs for good stuff that I may have missed over the past few years. Kyle has this enourmous library of older Chinese music from his days in the wilderness when that’s all there was. As for newer stuff, he probably gets most of it from me - that’s how cool I am.

KS: We spend about two weeks putting off actually seeing one another. Then we sort of rush around and try to get mics hooked into computers. We’re sorting out the technical stuff as we go (we’ve learned that mics need to be turned on, etc.) We assemble all the music and trade off on selections, generally pontificate a bit and then cut it together on Ian’s laptop. It takes about six hours longer than it needs to, but most of the fun is actually making the damn things. I try to forget about it as soon as we finish and start thinking about the next one.

EP: D-22’s MICHAEL PETTIS HAS BEEN QUOTED AS SAYING THAT “2007 WILL BE THE YEAR BEIJING BROKE”. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT?

IS: Sheesh. How many thousand words do you want on that? Pettis would say that. I think the argument is moot. Pointless. If he means ‘break’ as in San Francisco ‘67, New York ‘78, Chicago ‘86 or Seattle ‘91 then no. Who cares whether Beijing ‘breaks’ internationally - what is important is that Beijing in 2007 finally had a great scene that you could talk about without having to couch it in terms of regional context. A scene is made up of bands. Bands break, cities do not. Bollocks to that. Pettis’ hyperbole is unfair. Plenty of bands ‘broke’ in Beijing in 2007, but not in the way he means it. No one sold out Madison Square Gardens or had Rolling Stone blowing coke up their arse, but finally bands that we know and love started putting out decent records and non-derivative bands were on the rise in 2007 - Hedgehog, Guai Li, etc - spun out of nowhere and didn’t really sound like ONE BAND, which has blighted the beijing scene in the past. The dynamic changed. Typically Beijing bands who blazed live put out shit, unrepresentative albums that turned everyone off. This year not only have excellent live bands been putting out excellent discs (cf. Hedgehog), but even bands who want to make me kill myself when I see them live have put out great - and I mean great - fucking albums (cf. Carsick Cars and Queen Sea Big Shark). That is the way it should be. Bands, if they have to chose, should suck live, not in the studio.

2007 has been enormous for the Beijing scene, as m’collegue Kyle says; ‘all of a sudden you turn around and you’re in a city with good bands’. Credit where credit is due - a lot of this has been down to Pettis and D-22. At a press conference this summer, Jason Magnus, mediocrity-loving honcho of the Beijing Pop Festival, used the expression ‘a D22 band’. At that one instant not only was the expression rendered incredibly passe, but also pervasive. D22 was set up to encourage and propogate a scene and by criminy that’s exactly what they’ve done.

KS: I think that’s total bullshit and probably true. The environment for music and musicians has been relentlessly improving since Wham! played Beijing in 1984 and I think it’s impossible not to feel like we are reaching some sort of critical musical mass here, but people said the same thing in ‘87 and ‘97 and they might still be saying it in 2027. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves and, frankly, M. Pettis has more invested in the local scene than most. What’s been different this year is the number of promising new bands and albums and the amount of international press Beijing is starting to receive. (White) people are finally really taking an interest in Chinese music, and in 50 years when music historians start digging through the documentation, the paper trail may certainly look like it all started now. However, until Chinese musicians start forging truly unique musical paths that ignite something in the collective imagination, Beijing’s just another big city with a great local scene. I also feel, quite firmly, that if Beijing breaks it will be beholden on us to fix it pretty quick.

EP: WHICH BANDS ARE YOU CURRENTLY MOST EXCITED ABOUT?

IS: Every single band in beijing, because most of them are so nearly there… except Mafeisan.

KS: Fistpig, The Boyfriends of Nancy Drew, Sudden Infant Sex Syndrome, The Prone Position… which aren’t real bands but I’m going to make some t-shirts anyway and I’ve got a rad stencil for Fistpig I made to put on all my notebooks and my Trapper Keeper. Seriously, do people still get ‘excited’ about bands? Ian and I will choose the exact same ones anyway… Guaili, Muscle Snog out of Shanghai, basically everything we put on the podcast, or I wouldn’t put it on.

© Ed Peto 2007

Posted in Interview, Music Scene - China, Published Work - Puddlegum