cd; 300 limit; ftarri; 2020
bandcamp; 微店
Yan Jun: voice
Jean-Luc Guionnet: alto saxophone
Matija Schellander: contrabass
Seijiro Murayama: snare drum, voice
This is a live recording. But this is not a document of a live concert.
You are not able to see the shadows of pedestrians on the window. You don’t know how deep the long rectangular space behind the 3 of us is. (Indeed there is a 4th, walking to the end of it, sometimes disappearing.) You don’t have the same high ceiling above the audience and ourselves. But you have your stereo speakers or headphones (or your stupid smartphone, in the most unfortunate case). And you are in your familiar environment, only to be interfered by our music. This recording was recorded by two mics pointed onto 2 of us (the 3rd was in between the focuses, and the 4th was walking and disappearing). What you heard is much different from the live situation. It’s been made for you, by the art of technology.
We haven’t brought a balance to you, nor to the live audiences. In each of the concerts we did during the tour, one of us was appearing or disappearing far from the rest. This made the spaces divert from common sense. In the concert of this recording we also abandoned the speakers. So, it was more imbalanced. Maybe the small could be big, and the far could be close when you re-appropriated them. But we don’t know. We don’t have a yardstick to measure them.
Alongside music, friends and food, we met a fake police officer one day during the tour. He appeared with one metal badge. The 2 Asian faces of our group were stopped.
“Passport!”
“Passport? No way!”
One of them was very suspicious of it so he raised his voice to call the two European faces to come over. Now we had 4 faces surrounding the fake police. One suspicious, 1 confused, 1 smiling and 1 curious. The fake police officer didn’t expect this. He couldn’t finish his routine. Finally he couldn’t hold back his giggle and left. Afterwards we saw a shadow behind him. It was a young woman who was waiting for a chance to discover someone’s wallet. We didn’t expect this. She left as well, like an echo of sound.
Something unexpected for everyone. Something imbalanced. Something dramatically, un-dramatic. Some environment noise bouncing and flowing in the big hall of a train station… this is a scene in my memory to the soundtrack of our music.
– Yan Jun, Beijing May 2020