cassette; crustacés tapes; 2019
bandcamp
composed by yan jun; performed by nicholas bussmann, bonnie jones, zhu wenbo, torturing nurse, seijiro murayama, ryu hankil, sound of the mountain, sun wei
during 2016-2017 i have wrote some postcards to anne-f jacques of crustacés tapes, for exchanging tape releases from her label. i wrote down onomatopeia words of chinese characters to describe what i’ve been hearing during the time. i supposed she doesn’t read chinese then they would remain mysterious.
later anne-f suggested me to develop them into a work for crustacés tapes. with this honor and some suggestions i made scores from them. and the title is taken directly taken from it: postcards.
2016到2017年，我给螃蟹磁带的安娜-f.雅克寄了些明信片，用来交换她出版的磁带。我在明信片上写了些象声词，是当时听见的声音。我估计她不懂中文，所以它们就会保持一种神秘感。
后来安娜建议我把它们发展成一件作品，由螃蟹磁带来出版。在她的建议和这份荣幸之下，我做了几份曲谱。标题取得很直接：明信片。
1. nicholas bussmann – a1 04:09
2. bonnie jones – the fog 06:11
3. zhu wenbo – a3 has no title 07:54
4. torturing nurse – qzgghtzpl 08:22
5. seijiro murayama – holiday in paris 07:16
6. ryu hankil – b2 00:57
7. sound of the mountain – postcard piece #4 07:12
8. sun wei – i went to shuinianhe road by that night 08:22
review from the sound projector
review from vital weekly:
You can get releases by Crustaces Tapes by sending a gift or postcard to the label. Yan Jun sent
a couple of postcards over the years and these contained “onomatopoeia words of Chinese
characters to describe what I’ve been hearing during the time”. Now, these postcards are sent out,
again by Yan Jun, to musicians for a musical interpretation. The recipients are Nicholas Bussmann,
Bonnie Jones, Zhu Wenbo, Torturing Nurse, Seijiro Murayama, Ryu Hankil, Sound of the Mountain
and Sun Wei; so, effectively this is a compilation cassette. The cover is an example of a postcard
and it is interesting to hear the different interpretations. Some of these musicians are, like Yan Jun,
from China, so perhaps the cards made more sense to them. For some of these (Torturing Nurse
for instance), I expected a more noise-like approach but that didn’t happen. Also, not everyone is
in for a voice-based interpretation. Most of these pieces are a bit long, I thought, except Ryu
Hankil’s short exercise in percussion. All pieces dwell on a minimalist approach to whatever
sounds are used (instruments, voices, field recordings), slowly winding things down over six to
eight minutes. Everybody seems to be heavily into conceptualising the music and that is a great
thing. Everybody reads something different in the words of Yan Jun, and that makes up for one
nicely varied cassette and thus a fine compilation. (FdW)