Tuesday 7 May 2024, 7.30pm
Another excellent bill from Chinabot, a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music, established in 2017.
Morgan is an organizer and experimental electronic musician who draws creative strength from the vast diasporas of his fellow southeast Asian kin.
Previously, Morgan co-curated Soy&synth, an experimental concert series with Indonesian collective Soydivision, co-releasing much of the output on their sister label L-KW alongside MidnightShift.
Morgan is also initiator of Latent Sonorities, a project with the House of Indonesian Cultures – Rumah Budaya Indonesia – Berlin (RBI) and Morphine Records Raum developing an open source sample pack and tuning files of Javanese gamelan instruments from RBI’s instrument collection. Its public release was accompanied by a concert series, DAW tools, album and guide for other artists and researchers working with sonic archives.
“Having grown up between Hawaii, Borneo and Southern California, I always felt ‘between’, a milieu of cultural and musical diffusion. Sundanese gamelan (with it’s arguably most famous song, ‘Sabilulungan’), the Beach Boys, pop melayu and eventually punk, industrial, noise before utterly relinquishing to the music of illegal raves of Southern California in the 90’s.
After being smuggled from Borneo to live in an unfinished plantation owner’s house in Hawaii, Morgan continued experiencing the dual-sonic realities of traditional Sundanese gamelan music, Malaysian pop with 'Western' songs from blues, pop, folk and other Americana. As English was the main language spoken wherever home was, many of the lyrics (and language) from Indonesian songs were lost in my family’s journey Eastward across (what is now) the United States towards Europe.
Picking up the sound cultures of techno, dub, punk and other club musics along the way, much of Morgan’s debut album Echoes released on Chinabot, is an attempt at recollecting a hybrid sonic language, an unattainable and elusive ‘home’.
Ayankoko is the solo musical effort of French-Laotian multi-instrumentalist and composer David Somphrachanh Vilayleck; a fusion of jazz, sound design, traditional, noise, ambient, computer music, and classical. He studied at the French conservatories of Perpignan and Strasbourg and has a PhD in jazz guitar, improvised music and composition. Vilayleck has been working for 20 years in the fields of jazz, dub and experimental music. Ayankoko is an ever-evolving project which questions the ear about sound perception, its raw nature, the definition of music and the concept of ugly-beauty. Ayankoko uses syncopation, abnormal time signatures, and polyrhythms to explore new conceptual frameworks and create an overwhelming feeling of weightlessness. On his new album ‘Kia Sao ກ້ຽວສາວ’, Ayankoko advances his technique, pushing it as far as he can, from complex abstraction to blissful bursts of melody. He's a co-founder of Chinabot, has released Kia Sao and Khmu Thidin on the label.
"Laotian outfit Ayankoko crafts an electrified molam track full of insane noodled wig out jamming." – The Quietus
“Ayankoko’s “beneath the stains” squeals and shrieks through scratchy glitches and signals that crackle on a ghostly transmission.” – The Wire Magazine
"Listening to Kia Sao ກ້ຽວສາວ, it’s easy to just take its scatterbrained electronic mayhem at face value and revel in Vilayleck’s endlessly spiraling melodies and floor-rattling rhythms; but such distraction also feels tantamount to what AYANKOKO attempts to expose here. Kia Sao ກ້ຽວສາວ’s avant-garde party of sped-up signal jamming and multi-colored noise sits atop a past whose horrors live on to this very day, making Kia Sao ກ້ຽວສາວ an incredibly contemporary illustration of what it is to be alive in our current age. As thrilling as it is to take in such a futuristic fusion of styles from all over the globe, AYANKOKO asks how we arrived at such a cacophonous, hypnotizing intersection of sound and whispers of the scars we’ve left in our wake." – Sam Goldner for Tiny Mixtapes
Jon Davies (b. 1988) is a musician based in Liverpool, born in Hong Kong and raised in Croydon, producing work under the name of Kepla. Since 2016 he has produced a number of records, including collaborative records with DeForrest Brown, Jr. aka Speaker Music, and experimental writer Nathan Jones. His last full length was a debut solo record titled Within The Gaze, A Shadhavar released by Alien Jams in 2019, described "as a thoroughly idiosyncratic journey into the depths of an alien psyche." The Album In Furnace was released on Chinabot in 2023.
His compositional techniques are based on field recording and collaging, granular resampling and generative composition, and most recently he has incorporated improvisations on acoustic instruments and synthesis.
"The mournful echoe of the instrument called the Suona, recently banned from funeral rites in rural China, when heard in the repurposed religious space of In Furnace, makes one of Kepla's most ditinctive and moving releases so far." – The Wire Magazine
https://alienjams.bandcamp.com/album/within-the-gaze-a-shadhavar
https://euphonicrhythms.bandcamp.com/track/the-crown-weaver
https://purpletapepedigree.bandcamp.com/album/the-wages-of-being-black-is-death
Zheng Hao and Ren Shang are two artists from China, currently-based in London, UK. Their music as Oishi is a playful, joyful, and at points absurdist exploration through musique concrete, diaristic field recordings and digitally augmented realities.
On their debut album, ‘once upon a time there was a mountain’ released by Bezirk, Oishi use warped tape loops, field recordings and digital manipulation to explore how everyday sounds can carry unexpected paths of expression and meaning. Evoking fictional vocabularies and car radios via motorbike rides down imagined mountains.
"Zheng Hao, on walking and recording duties, gave the tape to Oishi’s other half Ren Shang to manipulate, with Hao herself continuing this process via laptop. Side two is higher-key, the sound of mangling cassette tape (Hao is responsible this time, with Shang on laptop duty) battling for dominance with deep-toned generative noise effects and the smoothest country & western croons. The intent here was to achieve a ‘car radio out in the sticks’ effect, specifically the moments when it can’t pick it up properly, and if this preceding description doesn’t strike you as preposterous – or, even better, you’ve got time for sound art goofballs like Graham Lambkin or Gabi Losoncy – then Oishi might be for you." The Quietus
