Music
Parlovr China Tour Vlog 4
by AUX staff
June 21, 2010
It's hard to imagine living one's entire life without seeing a clear sky, but it seems like that might be the case for a lot of young people living in inland China. Maybe it was just the season. Most likely, though, it was all the cars and bikes and probably factories (which I didn't see much of).
MUSIC: PK14, ‘Behind All Ruptures’
LAST VID’S MUSIC: Hang Gai, ‘Me and My Banjo’ (sorry – forgot to mention!)
It’s hard to imagine living one’s entire life without seeing a clear sky, but it seems like that might be the case for a lot of young people living in inland China. Maybe it was just the season. Most likely, though, it was all the cars and bikes and probably factories (which I didn’t see much of).
Like the class divide across the country, the modes of transportation are crazily disparate. We took a mega-futuristic bullet train that was flying across the country at 480km/hr as well as some of the most comfortable airlines I’ve ever flown in. And then, there are all the motorized rickshaws and endless electric scooters, bicycles, etc.
All the traveling sadly made it hard to catch any sites. I mean, we were in Beijing but didn’t have time to see the Great Wall. Shitty regrets. Jeremy was diligent enough to set aside enough to time to make it to the Forbidden Palace, Tianamen Square and a Temple in Beijing, but Louis and I indulged in beer and making this video. (Making these videos on a shitty slow outdated laptop on software that my computer isn’t even compatible with makes these videos the random choppy mess that they are).
Perhaps one of the awesomest things we got to do so far was a filmed acoustic performance for MOGO, an kinda online Chinese ‘MTV’ web show. Here we met Kenny, a rad dude from the Bronx who moved to China over two decades ago, doing all kinds of things including heading up this site. It’s here that we discovered Hang Gai, the band whose music we used for the last video. Kenny explained that it’s easier for the general Chinese public to warm up to rock ‘n roll and indie/noise if it’s played acoustically, which is why they get bands of all sorts to do shows in this same format. We played 5 new tunes, some of which may or may not get to be heard any other time. We’ll let you know when they’re up.
Music for this vid is from PK 14 (‘Behind All Ruptures’). This is Ciga’s (our tour manager) favorite band and it’s easy to see why. The guys voice has all these weirdly cool inflections and I asked Ciga if this had to do with the tonality of Mandarin. She says that there’d be no other way that he could sing the songs and that the melodies are partly determined by certain ways of lifting and dropping the words.
Peace out and we’ll have a roundup from Shanghai and our last show in Hong Kong in the next entry.
XOXOX!
– Alex
