PhilPaine.com

A large reper­toire of “new age” music has come out of Chi­na in the last few years. There, the term seems to mean more or less what “elec­tron­ica” means in North Amer­i­can par­liance. Some of it is equiv­a­lent to the sooth­ing stuff called “new age” here, but much of it is quite dif­fer­ent. You can find dance and tech­no mixed with Chi­nese pop vocals, both Asian and Euro­pean clas­si­cal ele­ments, and the kind of spooky elec­tronic stuff that used to come out of aca­d­e­mic music labs. Liu Xing (not to be con­fused with the young go mas­ter of the same name) is one of the big shots in this genre, and I’ve got two of his albums: Inde­fin­able, and To Do Noth­ing, as well as three pieces on com­pi­la­tions. Inde­fin­able def­i­nitely fits into the “spooky exper­i­men­tal” cat­e­gory. To Do Noth­ing is essen­tially a show­case for Liu per­form­ing on the zhon­gruan, a tra­di­tional stringed instru­ment. He is famous for his pro­fi­ciency on this instru­ment, and com­posed a con­certo for it, which I have not yet had the plea­sure of hear­ing. In this album, this instru­ment comes across like a sort of mel­low span­ish gui­tar as if Joaquin Rodri­go had some­how picked up sheet ­mu­sic of tra­di­tional Chi­nese melodies while stoned, and gone with the flow. The album’s title cut “To Do Noth­ing” is a good exam­ple. I liked best “Chaishi Fes­ti­val” which has a sort of Vaugh­an Williams feel­ing to it, although “Late Autumn Rain” came a close sec­ond. Some of the stray pieces I have, like “Still Clouds and a Soli­tary Crane”, and “Fad­ing Vil­lage”, which can be found on the com­pi­la­tion “Chi­na Chill” are imme­di­ately appeal­ing pop­u­lar music, with strong melodies etched out against sharp pizzi­cati. Both would be extreme­ly evoca­tive music in an appro­pri­ate movie. Liu was born in north­ern Manchuria, stud­ied and first flour­ished in Shang­hai, and made his first impact with a con­certo sub­ti­tled “mem­o­ries of Yun­nan”, which gives him about as broad spir­i­tual roots in Chi­na as any­one could man­age. He was one of pio­neers who strug­gled to open Chi­nese music to cos­mopoli­tan music, and is now giv­ing back as good as he got.