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@dj-dondondonki
another short experiment. trying to make a track that evokes the feeling of "restless".
this track feels like it should back one of those TikToks filmed at night in the suburbs / driving a sports car rly fast / kind of eerie empty streets + streetlights
a music / video collab i did with jackie.
this track came about because I was doing a lot of YouTube tutorials making "tropical house like Kygo" (part of a regimen I did where I tried to follow YouTube tutorials every day). one day I got bored with the tutorials and decided to make something free-form using techniques from the Kygo tutorials.
I decided to play ravel's "pavanne pour une infante defunte" on the piano, then added vocals (I found a YT video of a choral rendition of Ravel's piece). added synths, risers...and transitioned to a slow House beat using the chords from hans zimmer's "Time" (a chord progression I've always loved).
the whole track came together quickly, but I sat on it for a year because I could never figure out where I wanted the song to go after the first two minutes. then a couple months ago jackie said she wanted to do a video to one of my songs, and i played her a bunch of drafts. she chose this one, so i decided to just stick with the original two minutes and think of it as a "snippet" rather than, say, a house music track.
it was our first time making music/video together, and i was blown away by the video jackie made. somehow the scenes match the emotion of the music completely... i'm really surprised because jackie has never made a music video before, but i think she just has a natural eye for visual language and how to create a narrative from scenes. i really adore the finished piece -- i feel like the clips elevate the original track so much. i can't stop watching it lol.
i was frustrated earlier this year about not feeling emotionally connected to my work. i feel like this track is a rare piece where i immediately felt the track was expressing something very personal. largely because both pavanne and "Time", the main samples, are meaningful to me as pieces that have struck a chord in me from a young age.
something good about this track is how...intuitive it feels. not formulaic. i think it's telling that i made this track after 6 days of forcing myself to learn different formulas and make very formulaic, follow-this-guide music. this track was kind of a rebellion against that, it didn't come out of any kind of "formula practice" mindset but just intuition. i should probably try to work this way more often...
my main regret about this piece is not spending more time on it. listening back, i think i could have done a lot more with layers, subtle additions of tension in the intro, and then different rhythmic or energetic elements in the "house" part. but the problem is I don't think I have the know-how to do a lot of the things I can imagine wanting to do yet. i think i want to spend more time acquiring techniques to work with "energy" and abstract problems, e.g. "add more tension to this", "make this sound more urgent", "make the percussion sound more intricate". but this...this is more difficult to learn from YouTube tutorials...
lo-fi music snippet I made this week. I think of this track as a sequel to "night".
been wondering if i should make a lo-fi "EP" lately. i've been making music for a few years now and i feel like i "should" try to release an EP / thematically similar collection at this point?
I've been listening a lot to this lo-fi hip hop / electronic beats playlist I made 10 years ago because it was the first kind of music I really loved, that inspired me to try to produce electronic music of my own. going back to music from such a long time ago has been a way of reconnecting to "roots" i guess. in some ways cool because i feel like i can now make a lot of these sounds that i used to be obsessed with.
23musicroom disco party!!
had a super-rewarding time preparing this mix for an 80s Cantopop party with my DJ friends Michael and PianPian. it was my first time properly DJing a party at a public venue, and despite being really anxious the whole time leading up, the event really exceeded my expectations!
something that surprised me was how much i learned during the research and track collection process. i spent hours online listening to old Cantopop albums and reading about HK disco scene in the 70s, absorbing a lot of interesting trivia. I also spent a LOT of time practicing DJing at Bar3code and taking private lessons from my friend Mike. as a serial "oh well ima wing it" procrastinator, it was cool to put effort into preparing for a change (and all the practice paid off, because at the event Michael forgot to bring a headphone AUX converter!!! but luckily i could do all my cue points by memory because i'd practiced the set so many times).
at the event itself, all three of us were caught off guard by a) how many people showed up and b) how energetic and enthusiastic the crowd was. i've been at a lot of dead/low energy nights at taipei clubs so i was expecting a few friends sitting around drinking, but by the second hour the dance floor was packed with people dancing all out to michael's 80s remixes. truly a beautiful sight :')
i was overwhelmed w happiness but also severely anxious because i realized there's so much pressure as a DJ when you're facing an actual hyped crowd that wants to dance to bangers. there's a special kind of dread that is the feeling when everybody expects you to play banger after banger and all you prepared is.... obcure weird vintage guqing / violin / percussion tracks. that's when i realized i need to expand my personal track collection a LOT more so i can be prepared for this kind of crazy dancefloor situation. i did end up playing 張雨生 - 我要和天一樣高 which people (surprisingly) LOVED and someone came up to me to thank me at the end of the night for playing it. and then i totally didn't know how to follow that track lol.
all of the energy, happy faces, sweaty bodies really reminded me what DJing is all about and WHY I DO MUSIC which was refreshing and emotional for me. it's for other people!! it's for connection!! it's to make people smile and move their bodies, yes, and it's not just diddly doop bop bop on the computer! even if it is that, 99% of the time, 1% of the time it can be ecstatic and physical and pure happiness.
hoping to do more of these types of events in the year to come and learn more about DJing. and in the meantime just download a ton of music to my hard drive every minute of every day lol.
Last weekend was the Ludum Dare game jam (a 72-hour competition to make a video game). my friend souren invited me to compose for their team.
since we had such little time, i had to make sample tracks based off very little info -- just the game concept "amoebas moving around swallowing things" and this image:
i ended up making 3 sample tracks, and the team chose one to turn into the final game theme song. it was a super fun experience! reminded me that creating art is...300x more fun for me when I do it for other people, for a purpose that's bigger than just me self-expressing into the void. it motivates me to have the rigorous structure of a composing assignment with a tight timeline.
the chosen soundtrack song "amoebish" was v minimal, with 3 tracks only. one of them, the pad sound, is just one 4 bar loop over and over. then i played the other two sounds out on the MIDI keyboard -- the piano sound i literally played, changing the chords around based on random intuition. then i "played" the chirping beep sounds by playing the same 2 bar notes but changing around the automation (Delay knob, echo knob, etc.) based on how it might sound with the other two tracks. it was fun to "play" these two tracks on the MIDI keyboard, like I was accompanying/jamming with myself.
experimenting with making some "moodier" or more "emotional" work.
could you tell I was in a dark place while making this lol.
It's still not super intuitive to me trying to convey my actual emotions in electronic production. maybe because i grew up playing the piano, piano improvisation feels like a natural way to explore nuanced emotions -- chords, specifically, feel very emotionally coded to me.
electronic stuff still feels a bit more removed, like doing a science experiment.
finally finished this remix of TRACE's track "cool woman" -- here it is.
i have mixed feelings about this track now that it's been out for a week. on the one hand, it's the most "advanced" track i've ever put out in terms of production... technique? i used a bunch of "tricks" i've never tried before -- resampling vocals to play a countermelody, using an afrobeat rhythm instead of the typical four-on-the-floor kick clap kick clap house rhythm. and there's a bridge section without drums in the middle, which is a first for me. i even bothered to do the minimum amount of pre-processing on the vocals to strip out backing instruments, which i never bothered to do on any of my previous remixes.
on the other hand, at times while i was making this track i felt like i took a very... programmer coding-kind of approach where i knew what i "should do" to build a good sounding dance track and i was just applying steps robotically. i struggle a lot with this when producing music because, as a full-time software engineer, my working mindset easily slips into a "apply this, rinse, repeat" Bob the Builder mentality where i no longer feel like there's any soul or feeling in the music-making anymore.
i recently found this cool experimental album on a podcast that reminds me of the early beats/electronica stuff that i liked when i was first learning about electronic music. i was often sad back then and i leaned towards more complex ambient music that felt like it reflected my inner feelings.
i think i want my music to sound more... emotional? some of my favorite early electronic music is not just dance beats but kind of... wretched ambient-ish stuff, beats that evoke a very specific type of emotion or moody/dark atmosphere. stuff like shlohmo, nuages, burial, mister lies, the album leaf, xxyyxx.
i think i'd like to move away from following YouTube tutorials and spend some time thinking/reading about my influences and trying different techniques of making music that force me to convey more emotions and complexity, even if it means i don't produce as much polished work for a little bit.
I was getting very stuck the other day with a house track I'm working on and decided to try to get some inspiration/learning in by following a YouTube tutorial.
So I watched this one by OVERSAMPLED about making "vibey Lofi house (VERY CHILL)" and tried to follow his steps to make my own, very similar house track.
I like doing exercises like these because it takes all the hard thinking out of composing -- what sound should I add next, how should I structure the song, etc. -- and you can learn little tricks by imitating someone else. Some things I learned from this exercise:
-delaying the off-beat hihats in house music by just a fraction to produce that swing feel
-using chopped up bits of snare samples to produce little subtle rimshot sounds in the percussion
-first time using SERUM the ableton plugin as a synth instrument, I like how you can customize the sound waves and it comes with a kit of sounds ready-made for dance music
-placing a continuous, low-volume riser sample in the background during energetic parts to add a white-noise, hi-frequency texture to the song. subtle, but it adds some texture and energy. I sidechained it to the kick so it would have a kind of upbeat swing to it.
Some things I'm still struggling to figure out:
-how to get a really good grand piano sound for house music. that "lo-fi" quality to the piano that so many house tracks have -- I'm currently using a combo of Chorus, EQing, Compressor, Reverb and tweaking settings on the Ableton default grand sound. but it still doesn't sound the way I want. but I'm hesitating to shell out money for the plugin that he uses in this video (SAUCE for ableton) so I might have to spend more time making an effects rack for this.
-really getting into the synthesizer and customizing the synth waves and sounds to be exactly what I want. still a bit intimidated by the huge SERUM dashboard and relying on the presets they give me. I'd like to be able to customize the synths to be very particular (and add automation) since synths are so crucial in dance music.
was sitting around at home w vincent yesterday, complaining how edm tracks are so formulaic (intro, build, drop, repeat). and i said "i bet i can make an edm track in one hour". and he was like "do it then".
so i did -- it was harder than i thought lol. i was able to make the skeleton track in an hour (chords, lyrics HAHA, recorded badly on my phone, adding different corny builds like the clap clap clap clap clap-clap-clap-clap). the surprising challenging part though was the beat drop...
it turns out it's not enough just to make things LOUD during an edm beat drop??? there's a certain.. climatic [ !! !! !!] in an edm beat drop that makes the crowd start jumping up and down. i couldn't figure it out in the one hour and it was bothering me.
that night after vincent left i stayed up a couple more hours going over the track, thinking about EDM beat drops. i finally rented SERUM the ableton synth plug-in (i think i do need more sophisticated, customizable synths for dance music and edm at this point).
after a few failed attempts i feel like i figured out a decent sound-ing drop for this track. some elements that went into it:
-using more customized, thick "edm"-y sounds from SERUM and Splice
-THICK low-frequency activity. i have the kick going every down beat and a heavy, growl-y bass on every upbeat, so basically every eighth note during the drop has a lot of low-frequency sound. then have a sharper bass doing rhythmic stuff, so basically 3 really aggressive low sounds going at once.
-aggressive impact sounds for the drop itself (glass breaking etc).
-drop out all piano/pad/atmospheric/white noise tracks for the length of the drop, creating a kind of emptiness / jaggedness and more blank space to emphasize the sharpness of the synths
-aggressive and catchy high-frequency synths playing an addictive but simple lick that revolves around/teases one note (the high D) but rhythmically vibes with the bass line to give an overall really dance-y, movement-y feeling
-very wide, sharp white-noisey risers on the offbeat instead of hihats (because that's the only type of hi-frequency "percussion" that can really occupy space next to the super assertive high synths)
somehow, i started out making this EDM song ironically and then...it became really fun and interesting?? maybe i've just been shitting on edm all this time because i'm a music snob and edm is actually good?
it was refreshing to go into this "as a joke" with no expectations. i took way more risks and just had overall so much fun. pretty much adding anything i thought would sound good?? which is what making music should be, but it made me realize i've adopted such a perfectionistic/self-critical mentality with these 2 house tracks i've been stuck on lately. too concerned with "what is the right way to do house" and obsessed with finding the perfect sound, the best way to do every detail, that i've stopped having fun with them. this was a good wake-up call for me
clip from our band Animal Garden's debut show at clash in june
watching this makes me :)
a heartfelt n wholesome night :')
seeing all our friends gathered together and happy
like yaxuan said, "it felt like a wedding".
a little slice-of-life video made of clips I took from my last week living in kunming with 奶奶爷爷
the initial idea for this actually came from messing around in ableton one night -- i played the first bell sounds on an arpeggiator and thought it sounded dreamy and nostalgic "like the memory of a simple but perfect day". then started adding synths to give it kind of a 80s, nostalgic, Cocteau Twins coloring. the melody was pretty simple, I wanted to keep the track lo-fi and unadorned.
then i started filming little clips of daily life to match the theme "a perfect day" -- just little ordinary moments i wanted to keep and treasure. for editing i used VITA (recommended by amy) and was inspired by amy's previous videos to keep the audio from the original recordings playing over the music in the final cut. kind of messy but authentic-feeling -- i love the little bits of dialogue from my grandma.
the overall feeling i wanted to convey was just a simple, ordinary day with people you love. but the kind of day where you're trying to remember everything, trying to make it last forever.
girly rave in chengdu
went to a rave last weekend in chengdu.
it was fun!
i think it really hit home for me there how closed off from the outside (Western) world China has really become. in Taipei, techno events are usually at least half white Western expats (mostly European guys and rly young exchange students). this chengdu rave was like...almost all Chinese (mostly Szechuanese judging from dialect). except one German girl (why is there always a German?? any rave anywhere in the world???).
it was refreshing, actually, to be at a techno event where the vibe was not mid European guys holding drinks and their overdressed Taiwanese gfs vaping. it reminded me of my first rave, in nyc - a queer rave with a lot of open gay-ness, lesbians, trans people clearly there for the celebration of queerness as much as for the music. at this chengdu event there were a ton of lesbians. a lot of women in general actually -- more women than men, and both the DJs playing that night were women.
(reminded me of something my cousin said: apparently Szechuan is the province in China where women have the highest societal status and comparative equality to men, a factor that influenced Luis Vuitton's decision to open their China flagship in Chengdu??)
the vibe was very house party-esque -- felt like a close-knit community who knew each other well. a lot of ppl were there just to hang out rather than to dance/get wasted. little clusters of friend groups posted up outside the venue all night, gossiping n smoking n hugging n talking each other through gay heartbreak </3 .
i danced a lot and then wanted to chat w people but nobody really approached me :( i even did the thing where i bummed cigarettes as a way to enter a conversation but it did not work, people just gave me a cigarette silently lol. that's something i'm still not used to - the general standoffishness of Asian people at nightclubs. not that i find Americans at raves especially friendly, but i do think American raves (esp very gay ones) have more of a loose, chummy intimate feel -- you can randomly start dancing w strangers, vibing, hugging, whatever -- whereas Asians definitely respect each others' personal space on the dancefloor. it's something i miss a lot about nyc tbh.
the space was super small - two rooms, the smaller room was like the size of my living room in taipei. they had a brazilian DJ playing there and a cute cooler w juice boxes and chrysanthemum tea, etc. the bigger room had a local Chengdu DJ, an older lady, chainsmoking n getting rly drunk and the crowd was going HARD for her. like screaming for their favorite tracks and they were rly rly dancing. apparently they dance till sunrise at these things. there's no official end time it's just when ppl get too tired, usually 6 or 7am.
the one thing i disliked was how much ppl were smoking. they smoke A LOT here, like ppl were chainsmoking like crazy while dancing inside this tiny closed room, it was SOUPY w secondhand smoke. i was coughing the day after and i feel like it's still in my lungs now :'((( why do chinese ppl have to smoke so much???
i've been thinking about raving in general lately n my relationship to it -- there was a time like two years ago when i first started clubbing, when i really thought dancing n clubbing could be like...my meaning in life LOL. my salvation. i was inspired by david mancuso in the 70s, the infamous utopian loft parties, the subversive gay/black subculture that gave rise to techno, and i was hosting these cute!! DIY!! basement parties w my friends thinking that possibly RAVE COULD SAVE THE WORLD. or at least save...people like me? lesbian misfits seeking art n community??
these days i feel like so much older. like idk. maybe dancing n loud techno n drugs is just...dancing n techno n drugs?? you go out enough and everything starts to feel the same, the crowd around you gets younger and younger, you recognize the same characters on the dancefloor no matter where in the world it is.
i think i'm getting to a stage where i either need more out of clubbing (like, i'm craving a clubbing/dancing experience that's more overtly community-based and warm and intentionally uplifting) or maybe, clubbing is no longer satisfying my need for... whatever, a creative/energetic outlet, a sense of vibing and celebration with others.
(also: see this masterpiece of music journalism that describes the clubbing scene in chengdu)
"porous" album review
I once read a nonfiction book that described how early daoist priests would cure people who were sick / in a coma. apparently when you’re in a coma your spirit is trapped in the spirit world. So the priests would do astral projection, meditate for days n their spirit leaves their body to go to this other dimension. In this other dimension it’s very mountainous, thick jungle, misty, fog, malicious spirits that the priests have to fight in order to retrieve the trapped spirit of the sick person. And this would be a huge ordeal for the priest, deep diving sometimes for days in the other dimension. When they got back they would be completely exhausted, would write down the features / landmarks they traversed to map out the terrain for other priests.
I thought of the daoist priests again listening to “porous” for the first time. the album is a meditation and a journey: it feels like you’re leaving ur physical body in this dimension to go to another one, each track is an intricate mapping of this other place: the topography, treacherous upwards/downwards paths and misty parts, the changing altitudes and alternating lights / darks of moving quickly through. so many organic samples in these tracks — sounds taken from this world, but manipulated just beyond recognition, it makes you feel like you’re in a world slightly different from this one but also familiar.
I’ve been playing TUNIC, the game Janice and terence scored, and definitely hear? (imagine?) some video-game-like-elements in this album. Compared to other electronica, the tracks in “porous” feel more… ~~landscaped~~ they feel like a traversal over actual physical terrain. even within a single track there’s often two or three terrain changes, dramatic shifts in colors and shading (“radial chatter” esp). It reminds me of the sweeping dramatic landscape changes in TUNIC from level to level. like a game, or a mission, the whole album feels driven — bullet train music, highway in the dark music.
other thoughts:
“water bodies” — so alive. music that should play inside that Tokyo art museum exhibit where they make everyone take off their socks and walk around in the dark in knee deep water “sensing” things
“fluoresce” — this gives me hope for the genre of “New” “Asian” “Club” music. as in, chinese instruments can be used in a way that doesn't feel gimmicky in club music. such a journey in this song. I think Janice should make a liquid dance/rave album w/ this song as the starting track and then play the whole thing at FINAL
“ghost money” - the most otherworldly on the album. this track does not go where I expect.
“143” - falling into a hole, which is accidentally the portal to another world, terrifying black hole singularity, but then on the other side it’s actually like a chill alien waiting room w all kinds of aliens patiently waiting
“radial chatter” - made me think of Burial, made me emotional
(not related to the album): it’s been perspective-shifting to meet janice and terence this year in Taipei. to meet composers, not just composers, but artists working at such a high level of maturity/seriousness has given me a kind of inward permission to “try” taking composing seriously.
I mean I've always composed but it’s felt like what I do in Ableton is not "as real". when i go to jazz jams i feel like i'm real, i'm part of a community, people know my name and i know my place and i can see myself advancing. that's satisfying. while composing feels like a shout into the void. but more and more these days i feel like i'm creatively drawn to composing, even if it's a lonely practice. and now...i know there's like, two other people in the void, they are real, i can see them!! it's exciting to see other people in the void. i feel like maybe it's okay to be there.
雷佳 performs 人世间 (ending credits song from the CCTV drama of the same name)
I find this song so moving. it's been playing a lot in our house bc my grandparents watch the CCTV drama channel every afternoon. idk. every time I come back here 回昆明 I feel incredibly emotional, a soft-boiled egg of emotion. everything wobbles me to the brink of tears. my grandparents sleeping. eating breakfast together. sitting with them on this couch watching a tv drama end credits.
something about the layers of time here. how every time I return so much has changed, so much is different. my childhood summers here in 外婆家, on 黃土破, which has been sold now. and my mother's childhood in that same house, and my grandparents youth in 林江里, which was torn down decades ago, but they still describe every day, all of it existing here in overlapping depths.
it's a city that doesn't exist for me in the present. I'm never interested in doing new things here. going back here is a remembrance, a mourning, a reaching back in time. each time we visit we're not moving forward, just taking a snapshot in time to remember for the next going-back. even the relatives who still live here, seeing them through a lens of ache / past-ness because the last time we spoke was so long ago, because they are so old, and so kind to me, because all they talk about is memories, because the next time I see them (or if I / am lucky to) will be in so many years.
草木会发芽 孩子会长大
歲月的列車 不為誰 停下
命運的站台 悲歡離合 都是剎那
人像雪花一樣 飛很高 又融化
“Friday Night” w Eric 謝青燁
Finally, finally FINALLY finished mixing and mastering this single that I wrote with my friend Eric. We started making this track last May, and it’s by far the longest-running project I’ve ever worked on, with the most total tracks (almost 150 tracks!!!!!!! counting vocal tracks we ended up not using!!).
TBH I’m really sick of this song at this point having listened to it like 100 times today during mixing and mastering. Overall am satisfied w it but kind of shocked at how labor-intensive it was compared to other tracks I’ve made solo.
It was an interesting process working with a professional singer for the first time. I met Eric last fall shortly after moving to Taipei, at one of his shows at A Penny University (where I ended up played my first live show with Alice, coincidentally). It was kind of a meet-cute, he was performing solo and spontaneously asked if there were any other musicians in the crowd, and I came up and started jamming with him on the piano. A 溫馨的夜晚.
We talked a bit after that and decided to try collab-ing. I was a little intimidated given that he’s a “real singer” and has like…300,000 plays on Spotify and I… don’t even have a Spotify page. Mostly I decided to do it because Eric is a really genuine, kind person and I enjoyed spending time with him. He was one of the most open and warm people I’d met on the Taipei music scene at that point — there was just something very good-hearted about him that I liked.
The idea for the song came from four chords that I played on the piano, and then Eric riffed into the mic over the chords. It became clear early on that Eric is a super-talented singer with a lot of ideas, but struggled to discern which melodic lines were worth keeping. I ended up writing a pretty simple hook for the song, that repeats in the beginning and chorus.
Something I struggled with during the song-writing process was a lack of constructive feedback (I felt). A lot of our sessions were like, me saying “What if we do this ? (Use EQing to do a vocal fade in here, do a dreamy sort of interlude section, do a dance beat drop)” and then Eric agreeing with it and then me kind of executing it very roughly. Then I would go home and basically spend hours re-writing what I did in session, while Eric would go home and record a bunch of vocals and perfect the lyrics. Since our roles were so separate, I didn’t feel like I was creatively “pushed” a lot during the songwriting process to go to my own limits, musically. At the end it felt like I was just… building a scaffolding of acceptable sound around his vocals??
I was also a bit disappointed that when it came to experimental direction, Eric was definitely more conservative. His ultimate goal with this song is to enter Taiwan songwriting contests and win prize money, so in front of his mind was the judges. We ended up cutting some ~~very slightly~~ experimental things like a spoken word section in the interlude and a chipmunk voice backing track in the beginning. He didn’t think the judges would really “get” it or, for that matter, the average Taiwanese listener.
Definitely a learning experience to work with a more “mainstream” artist, though (and to learn that I am indeed, firmly, by disposition an “indie” artist). Cutting and mixing r&b vocals is so hard!!! I hate mixing and mastering!!!!
I’m curious how this song does “commercially” or whatever. Eric and his agent / boyfriend seem to think it will do very well. If it does as well as they say it will be the first song I’ve ever written that makes money, so that will be cool, I guess.
Anyways relieved to be done with this! And excited to get back to doing my weird experimental vibe-y electronic stuff hehehe.
Had a dismal time today talking to a rapper / videographer / music business manager in Kunming, China. We were seated next to each other at dinner because he’s the son of my mom’s 閨蜜，who was 請我們吃飯. Their son, the rapper, dropped out of school at 15 to pursue music and I initially thought we’d have a lot in common because we both do music.
I couldn’t have been more wrong lol. It was…shocking talking to him realizing that this person’s sole motive in doing music is to make money. And he thinks artists who aren’t constantly planning a trajectory to profit more from their music and get more famous are wasting their time. He talked the whole time about how I need to expand my audience as a producer, start growing an audience, start doing Twitch streams etc. and then collaborate with people with more clout to become more famous. He didn’t listen to any of my music lol or ask me what artists / music I like. When he found out Daniel plays the violin he immediately said we should become a YouTuber sister / brother duo who plays live instruments over electronic beats like FKJ bc FKJ concert tickets sell for a lot $$$$.
Not that there was anything wrong about what he said (I do want to grow my audience and I actually love FKJ and want to be him) but I’d never met anyone who was so razor-focused on the business of music and not on …well… music. As an art form. As in, what music is good. What music makes me feel. What artists do I like for their MUSIC rather than for their innovative brand / business model that is feasible to emulate.
Anyways, some other takeaways from talking to this guy:
China has “no cool underground clubs” except a few started by ppl who went abroad and came back and invite mostly foreign artists to play (idk about veracity of this)
Yunnan/Xi An/Nanjing are actually considered thriving places for underground music.
But the most culturally exciting place for underground stuff rn is Chengdu
China is sealed off from the outside world musically, 99% of Chinese people only listen to music made in mainland China and Taiwan. E.g. very few rappers listen to Western rap, it’s extremely insular
Musicians make almost no money in China. Even ones who sell out concerts performing multiple nights for 300+ people. Can often then lose money from those concerts.
Similarly DJs make almost no money
The top income sources of successful musicians (the top 1%) is from 1. Doing ads/product promotion w high end companies and 2. Large scale music festivals
video for "day" is out!!! amy really went the extra mile with animations on this one ^___^ it's about "creativity" / "life of the creative mind" / "a day in the spinning heart" hehe
it's been super fun collabing with amy and thinking of my music as soundtrack. i added in little office machine sounds at different parts of the track to accompany her captions.
i've been surprised how much fun collabing w amy on these two videos has been. coLorS!! aniMatIOn!! combining 2 works of 2 different mediums to form something greater than its parts!!!!
my other collabs have always been w other musicians and while fun, i've often run into a collision/mismatch in visions and a need to compromise. whereas with amy's videos it feels like her work enhances and accompanies mine and vice versa, rather than the creative process being a negotiation.