Torrential Noise
1724 Records and the Asian Post-Rock Soundscape
Paper presented at the 6th Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies (IAPMS) conference, Communication University of China, Beijing, China, 9-10 June 2018.
Part I: Shoegazers
In the late 1980s, a new sound emerged from the seething ecosystem that is British popular music. Spearheaded by a band from Dublin called My Bloody Valentine, the sound was guitar-driven, heavily reliant on effects pedals producing sheets of delay and reverb, and not easy on the ears, even by usual rock standards: a 30-second passage of noise from one song that became part of the band’s live sets could stretch up to 40 minutes and up, creating an experience of sensory deprivation that drove fans to literally run from the room holding their ears. For those willing to ride out the storm, though, something miraculous happened, according to Mike McGonagil in his book for the 33 1/3 series on the band’s 1991 album Loveless:
Now, just as suddenly as it hit in the first place, something truly beautiful is happening. A playful array of overtones can be heard bouncing about on top of the dirge. Everything goes into slow motion. I am absolutely transported and it seems that this cloud of harmonics sweetly filling the room, these delightful ping-ponging notes, are perhaps the whole point of this exercise, what the band had been trying to get to all along. The band do not appear to have changed what they’re doing, they’re still furiously playing what appears to be one chord, all of them. . . . There is a shimmering, hallucinatory quality to these notes that dance atop the noise, and it’s hard to explain - nor have I found it to be captured on tape after scouring live shows. . . . It was brutally psychedelic, and more than mildly euphoric.
The sense of transcendence produced by My Bloody Valentine’s wall of sound was a life-changing experience for many who experienced it, inspiring a host of imitators. The music press of the time initially didn’t know what to make of it, but scenting a new trend, struggled to come up with labels to describe it; dreampop was one, coined by the band A.R. Kane, to describe the music’s exploration of the liminal zone between waking and sleeping; oceanic rock was better, coined by the grand master of rock descriptors, Simon Reynolds, in reference to how the music shattered the boundaries of the self, triggering altered states of consciousness. But the term that stuck, although used negatively at the time, was “shoegazer music,” variously attributed to the notion that bands on stage spent their time looking down either at song lyrics taped to the floor or their guitar pedals, or were just too shy and introverted to make eye contact with the audience. The early 1990s saw a growing number of young artists tagged as shoegazer bands both in the U.K. and the U.S. (Galaxie 500), in spite of their resistance to the label.
Several decades on, shoegaze has become just another exhibit in the museum of popular music, part of its ongoing institutionalization (and of course monetization) of its own past.
Reviewing UK indie label Cherry Red’s 2015 release of a 5-CD box set titled Still In A Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995, Simon Reynolds writes that the music of shoegaze “was designed to overwhelm in the live context, but in a way that was impersonal—as though the band were victims of the sound as much as the audience, or simply conduits for the torrential noise” (Reynolds 2016, my italics). The description also brings out how shoegaze can be seen as anticipating another musical movement that emerged in the 1990s, that Reynolds is also often credited with naming: post-rock.
Jeanette Leech devotes most of an early chapter of her book Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock, to My Bloody Valentine, along with dreampop bands A.R. Kane and the Cocteau Twins. Post-rock is an altogether more expansive concept than shoegaze, though, and was in many ways more of an umbrella term for a wider range of musical styles that, as Leech details, are more connected by a common stance of dissatisfaction with what “rock” had come to signify by the early 1990s. The music that came to be classified as post-rock was exploratory, seeking to move beyond rock’s formulaic song structures and well-worn clichés and explore what other kinds of music could be made using its core instruments of guitar, bass, drums, and (sometimes) keyboards. Shoegaze was ultimately only part of this bigger picture: Leech’s history, which positions post-rock as a phenomenon that peaked during the period 1994-2002, encompasses a wide range of explorations on both sides of the Atlantic,
including U.K. bands like Fridge or Mogwai, Chicago’s Tortoise, Rejkjavik’s Sigur Rós, and the two bands that have become most synonymous with the post-rock label,
Austin, Texas’s Explosions In The Sky and Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor. While the stylistic diversity of such bands makes them hard to pin down aesthetically, one aspect they mostly share is their break with one of rock’s most cherished and enduring institutions: the vocalist. While vocals did still persist in shoegaze, typically in the ethereal vocals of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher, they were already starting to fade back into the cascading sheets of guitar noise. Post-rock largely dispenses with them altogether and is almost entirely instrumental, with the guitar taking center-stage. Rather than what we have come to expect in such cases—the virtuosic soloing and guitar-face histrionics of AC-DC and countless other bands—what happens instead is often surprisingly understated, at least initially, with an emphasis on drifting, atmospheric textures and contemplative introspection. Guitars are often bowed to produce extended, layered drones. References to quite different genres may come into the mix—unconventional time signatures, field recordings, modal jazz—as well as traditional and acoustic instruments: wind chimes, dulcimers, toy xylophones. Rhythm is also de-emphasized—and remember that this is the 1990s, the decade of dance music, hip-hop, and sampling cultures: while post-rock keeps the drum-kit, rhythm remains mostly acoustic and subordinated to the guitar, while sequenced or synthesized beats are largely absent. Keyboards should be (or at least sound) acoustic, with a preference for pedal-powered church organs. The classic verse-chorus song structures of rock are discarded, while their duration—typically somewhere between three and eight minutes—radically expanded: Tortoise’s “Djed” clocks in at almost 21 minutes, Godspeed You! Black Empereror’s “Providence” at 29 minutes, and Swans’ “The Knot” over 45 minutes; it’s routine for post-rock songs to exceed ten minutes. Given their often sprawling length, post-rock songs take on a symphonic grandeur, building from slow-burning openings to white-hot crescendos. This shift from brooding introspection to transcendent emotional intensity has become one of the aesthetic hallmarks of post-rock.
Part II: Wait, Isn’t This An Asian-Studies Conference?
While Jeanette Leech’s book provides the most comprehensive overview of the history of post-rock to date, it has two main problems. The first is that it limits its chronological time-frame mostly to the 1990s; the second is that with the possible exception of Sigur Rós’ made-up language Vonlenska (aka “Hopelandic”), it positions post-rock as an exclusively Anglophone movement.
Ethan Hayden devotes an entire chapter to Vonlenska in his 33 1/3 book on Sigur Rós’s album ( ) (2014). What it leaves out of the picture is both how post-rock has continued to evolve since the 1990s, a key dimension of which has been its globalization; and nowhere has this globalization been more evident than in Asia. Proto-post-rock band My Bloody Valentine have had a cult following in Asia for decades, while everyone here can probably think immediately of their favorite Asian shoegazer band.
The Japanese musician Cornelius’s albums of the mid-1990s are clearly inflected by listening to My Bloody Valentine, and other examples are not hard to find. From the late 1990s onwards, though, a new generation of Asian bands began to emerge whose sound developed out of a creative entanglement with many of the post-rock bands Jeanette Leech discusses: Japan’s Mono and downy formed in 1999 and 2000 respectively, China’s Wang Wen (惘闻) in 1999 and Hualun (花伦) in 2004, Thailand’s inspirative in 2007, South Korea’s Jambinai in 2009.
The best-known Chinese post-rock band internationally is Wang Wen (惘闻). Founded in Dalian in 1999, the quintet has since 2003 released ten albums to date, many of them on the German Pelagic label.
Wang Wen in many ways exemplifies the Eurasian cosmopolitanism that is one of the focal points of this conference: they have toured extensively in Europe, performed with Mogwai, collaborated with members of GY!BE, and co-released the vinyl album Split with the Swedish post-rock band Pg.Lost. In January 2018 they performed in Reykjavík, Iceland, and recorded their latest album at Sigur Rós’s Sundlaugin studio before embarking on a European tour (the videos in the margin were posted on the band’s blog at the time).
The most significant development in Asian post-rock over the past decade has been that scenes that initially developed largely independently of one another in major cities have become increasingly aware of one another, leading to the emergence of a transnational soundscape across the Asian region that has been gaining increasing attention from Western post-rock fans. A key role in this process has been played by the Beijing-based netlabel 1724 Records, founded by Lei Niu in June 2006 to release the début album by the band 48V, South.
Over the past twelve years, 1724 has organized over 500 performances by post-rock bands all over China and released 44 albums by over a dozen other post-rock bands both from Beijing (Sparrow (文雀乐队), Pentatonic, Glow Curve) and other Chinese cities (48V from Chengdu, The Grinding Ear from Shijiazhuang (石家庄) in Hebei (von Schaper 2012), Summer Fades Away from Changsha (Hunan), Amber (琥珀) from Xi’an, Init from Yunnan). In 2012 1724’s second Beijing Post-Rock Festival at Mako Live house in Beijing began to pick up local online press (Peng 2012, Tung 2012). As well as making Beijing the hub of a nascent Chinese post-rock scene, 1724 has been instrumental in promoting it worldwide: as Lei Niu (who goes by the moniker road) explained in an interview for the Rockinchina website, digital promotion and distribution have been central to the label’s strategy from the start: of course there is a website, a YouTube channel, and a Facebook page, while releases are hosted on Bandcamp.
In 2012 Lei released a free sampler titled Beijing Post-Rock on Bandcamp, Last.fm and the Taiwan-based digital music site indievox, further enhancing the label’s international visibility. As its international recognition has grown, 1724 has more recently begun adding non-Chinese artists to its roster,
including Japan’s saisa, San Jose-based Asian-American band In Lights, and Polish band Keira Is You. Another indication of the emergence of an Asian post-rock soundscape has been the growing regularity of collaborative events, such as Thai post-rock band inspirative’s visit to Beijing in 2016, or Wang Wen’s visit to Tokyo last year for the After Hours festival hosted by Mono. The time may be approaching for the first 1724 Records World Tour.
How Asian post-rock differs from its Western counterpart is of course a key question, that I can barely begin to scratch the surface of here. A more interesting one, though, is how bands within the Asian scene itself are responding to each another, leading to the emergence of an autonomous sound independent of reference to its Western counterpart. Of particular note here is post-rock’s predilection for unconventional and acoustic instruments. In the case of Asian post-rock, this involves acoustic instruments from the different musical traditions of China, South Korea, or Japan. Korea’s Jambinai have been in the forefront here, combining modern rock instruments with traditional ones from Korean gugak such as the pi’ri, haegeum, or geomungo. (Similar examples can likely be found in Chinese post-rock bands but I haven’t had chance to research this yet.) Musical structures and pentatonic scales are another obvious area for further exploration.
III. What’s With All The Guys?
Perhaps the largest question looming over the preceding discussion, is simply why post-rock music has found such a responsive audience among contemporary Asian youth; as well as, more specifically, why its appeal—as has also been the case in the West—has extended overwhelmingly to men rather than women. Perhaps there is something about the particular structure of feeling that post-rock taps into among Asian male youth that resonates with a general mood of uncertainty and melancholy arising from the rapid social and cultural changes with the onset of economic globalization. But I realize I’m drifting here into embarrassingly speculative territory, and can only defer to the audience’s greater expertise on such questions, so this may be a suitable place to conclude my discussion.
What’s clear is that post-rock scenes in the Asia region today are cohering into a transnational soundscape, which is also gaining a growing audience of Western fans (myself included). There is still much work to be done for music scholars to understand the many ramifications of the developments I have outlined, and its longer-term significance in the historical development of Asian popular music is at this point too soon to estimate. In the meantime, we can at least have the pleasure of enjoying the often transcendent beauty of the music itself.
References
Tung, Liz. 2012. Wangwen and the Post-Rock Explosion
Von Schaper, Max-Leonhard [Azchael].
