Global Sonic Culture
Sound Arts Visiting Practitioner Lecture Series-Yan Jun
Yan Jun, sound artist and improviser. Well known as music critic, poet and organizer in Chinas sub-culture scene for many years. Born in Lanzhou in 1973 he now lives and works in Beijing where he founded Sub Jam and KwanYin labels, and Tie Guan Yin (free-form electro-acoustic improvised project). Aside from runing the Waterland Kwanyin weekly event for experimental, improvised music and sound art, he has so far found time to published 5 essay and 3 poetry collections about Chinese new music.
Screenplay by Marclay- live performance with musicians Elliott Sharp, Wu Na, Bruce Gremo, Wang Li Chuan, Ben Houge, Yan Jun and Top Floor Circus.
Screenplay is a video score in which found film footage is combined with computer animation to create a visual projection to be interpreted by musicians. Using video projection to convey instructions to musicians, he composed a silent collage of found film footage partially layered with computer graphics to provide a framework in which live music can develop.
Listening to your work, I get a sense that persistence and feedback play a major role in your sound art practice. What are the motivations behind approaching sound in this way? Are they political, personal or purely aesthetic?
I’m not good of playing anything. Instruments, [computer] programmes, voice, anything. That’s my education and that’s me. I started to make music when I was thirty years old and I was busy organising [concerts] as well. No time to learn to play ‘music’.
Feedback is the thing I finally found easy. You don’t put your beautiful ego and virtuoso skill into an object. It’s there already. And I don’t know how to start and end musically. It’s better to let things be persistent. I think the best music sounds like field recording (and the worst field recording sounds like music).
Do you have a favourite frequency, or a method, to which you find yourself returning to again and again? If yes, why?
15800 Hz. It’s the frequency my feedback system always produces. I can’t chose it. I like it as it comes to me. And it’s audible while some people aren’t aware. It’s radically sharp and small and intense. Once my friend complained that it’s more painful than Merzbow. I was very happy because Merzbow is not radical – but he is sweet and beautiful – and I was enjoying the radical aspect of so-called noise music.
What relationship, if any, does your sound work have to gesture? (I’m thinking here not only of theatrical, performative or practical gestures, but symbolic ones too, such as your attempts to blow up cheap speakers.)
Gestures are performative. Political gestures, linguistic gestures, ritual gestures… I enjoy them and I also enjoy breaking them. For instance, stopping and turning before a motive grows fully. Or telling people it was fake, what I just did a second ago. Or just say “but”. If I go too seriously, I would make a joke to myself, which takes things to another level of seriousness. The symbolic world is basically built by gestures. To play the role of the human is to play with gestures. However, for play, it is more passionate if we are aware it’s a game. Artists should devote themselves to games instead of illusion.
Yan Jun said Chinese sound art would be develop better in the future as its involution 内卷 and it would be more and more open to the world. But maybe like a dozen years latter, firstly the lockdown policy is really influencing china in art and music. Secondly, when he was starting improvising in Beijing, it seemed people were less openly to admit there was a kind of contemporary art, and they felt it was like a joke because he was using his body do some silly movements and playing a lot of noise.