from Field Music and Non​-​Music for Tian Ye

by LEAP

Cancer Cell Parade

Before new year’s, out of the blue, Zhu Wenbo commissioned me to do a recording about the fields, and I thought it was just in time to go back home to the mountains in Meizhou and record something. Arrived when it was already the evening of the Chinese New Year's Eve, ran into a row of gongs and drums on my way home, a traditional program of my hometown. So much so that every time I go back to the mountains my memory is always the banging sound. Every year it starts from seven or eight in the morning till one or two at night, some twenty old people and children form a band with the gongs. Sometimes they do it while swimming, with firecrackers also. It’s the annual hearing damage. The field is quiet, with drifting fog, but the people are particularly noisy, who are also part of nature. I slowed down the recording twice and put it in the sampler, and it sounded very much like hoeing again, all at once. It very much felt like working in a vegetable garden. There's a whistle with a filter tone and lfo that sounds like a bird, and the sound of a potted wheel. This is my version of a gong. I have many memories of the fields, the waves whirring, the birds chirping—like the sounds of gods. But the sound of gongs and drums, it's the memories of people, I guess.