Xu Shaoyang

 *60 copies limited edition* Xu Shaoyang makes music about the fragmented beauty of everyday life. Over the years, he has sustained a fresh spirit of amateurism by travelling and performing in many different parts of the world, occasionally as a member of the avant-pop group Maher Shalal Hash Baz. His songs are made of simple tunes, sometimes silly sometimes smart, sometimes delivered with a “backing band” of improvising musicians who he met and collected along the way. Sometimes the karaoke worked out musically, sometimes not.

In spring 2019, Xu Shaoyang took a trip to East Asia. He performed two gigs in Beijing and Taipei with two small ensembles of local musicians, both taking place in a pedestrian underpass. For this journey, Xu Shaoyang prepared a songbook of 30 tunes he conjured while putting his newborn child to sleep. “When you are putting a baby to sleep, you find yourself having no time to sleep, and that’s when the familiar tunes deep in your heart flow out naturally”, as he explained to the crowd in Taipei.

In both gigs, Xu Shaoyang sang these 30 songs with his microphone attached to a FM transmitter. Very different dynamics played out in the North and the South. In Beijing, Zhu Wenbo and Liu Lu smuggled their own composition game into the group jam: the two prepared 30 slips of paper with simple musical themes and instructions, randomly picking one each before a song was played, while a third musician, Ake, joined them with freeform improvisation. The Taipei backing band, consisting of Jyun-Ao Caesar and La-La Reich, improvised along simple principles provided by Xu, to explore the themes of expectations and failures.

This cassette provides a documentation of a rare musical journey connecting the two Chinese capitals. Performed live, Xu Shaoyang’s lullabies turned into childish plays of bouncy melodic chaos, unrefined, unsettled, and cheerfully unconcerned. These recordings smell of the sincere joy of collective music making, the joy of connection and communication as well as miscommunication.