press
Beijing-based Sun Yizhou works with electricity. Mains hum, unplugged cables, feedback and the latent static and whines of audio technology. Befitting its name, Super Dry presents his haptic embrace of noisy currents in their most undistilled form. Full of dynamics and movement, he finds acres of variation and possibility in a restricted tool kit. On ‘2’, he almost makes electrical feedback sing. Its music built from circuits, but Sun doesn’t let those circuits rest. He grabs hold of the current and makes it dance. Once your ears adjust to the coarseness, it’s exhilarating. -Daryl Worthington (The Quietus)
Sun Yizhou/Yan Jun - the first day of the history [Infant Tree; Cassette; UK; 2023]
“Sounds are experienced internally, as the translation of acoustic waves into nerve signals… they do not leave any trace in the world” writes Manon Burz-Labrande in her introduction to ‘Spectral Sounds’, a collection of ghost stories where sound, or its absence, plays a prominent role. “There is no proof that one heard a strange noise. It is quite literally, all in our heads.” On the first day of the history, Sun Yizhou and Yan Jun toy with sound’s separation from trace. Scraping metal, buzzing groans, and distant knocks. Disorientingly proximate rustles and incessant typing. Some sounds in the pair’s palette seem familiar, perhaps from things we’d find in our own home, but ripped out of context they’re allowed to become something else. The Beijing-based duo’s compositions aren’t especially spooky, but they invite us to hear differently. Not to hear unexplained sounds, but to listen to sound without needing an explanation of the source. It’s adjacent to foley that’s escaped the work of having to give voice to visuals. But that’s just bolting on a familiar name to try and place the duo’s unique practice. An auditory world where the incidental can be vibrant. -Daryl Worthington (The Quietus)
Noise floor [Bluescreen; CDR; Shanghai; 2022]
»It may sound boring, but I like it«, kommentiert der in Beijing lebende Klangkünstler Sun Yizhou sein im Selbstverlag veröffentlichtes Album »Noise Floor«. Wie diese Wertung zustande kommt, wird schnell klar: Die acht Stücke bestehen auf Aufnahmen des Grundrauschens seines Studioequipments, fünf davon im tiefen und drei im hohen Frequenzbereich: tuckerndes Brummen hier, fauchendes weißes Rauschen dort. Doch ist das natürlich überhaupt nicht langweilig, denn durch die Hervorhebung der eigentlich unintendierten Kollateralgeräusche verstärkt deren sonderbare, kontingente Dynamiken – ohne jemals endgültig deren Ursprung zu offenbaren. Das ist ziemlich faszinierend und also extrem spannend. (field notes | Zeitgenössische Musik in Berlin)
In any discussion of studio mixing and mastering, the minimization of a recording’s noise floor, the inherent noise in cables, audio interfaces, mixers and the hum of AC current always comes up as a topic of paramount importance. A number of musicians have embraced no-input mixing boards which route the output of a mixing board back into its inputs to create, modulate and control feedback. But Beijing-based Sun Yizhou takes things a step further, instead zeroing in on the self-noise of the mixing board itself. The buzz of dirty current, the hiss of aging cables and connections, the crackle of circuits, the sonic crud of phantom +48V power become the sources for this beguiling recording. Over the course of eight tracks, using nothing more than a mixing board, monitors and microphones, Sun isolates the auditory detritus of rumbles, rasps, static, sizzles and crackles. With basic application of equalization and compression, he teases out the subtle nuances of source noise, revealing the timbral qualities of their base vibrations. For the first five tracks, simply titled ‘L-1” through “L-5,” Sun aims his attention at the bass part of the recordings, capturing the oscillations, grit and reverberations of the lower frequencies. The final three tracks, “H-1” through “H-3” focus on accentuating the eddying glitch of upper frequencies and their spattering motes of phonons, ending the final cut with a sharp snap to silence. In that intense focus on the auditory fundamentals, Sun bares a bristling sound world, rich with variegated, organically morphing subtleties. -Michael Rosenstein (dustedmagazine.tumblr.com)
Sun Yizhou/Zhu Wenbo - Find An Ant [Steep Gloss; Cassette; UK; 2022]
Find An Ant documents a live performance from Beijing based Sun Yizhou and Zhu Wenbo, the former playing turntable (with no records) and electronics, the latter on tabletop guitar (no plucking), transducers and speakers. As the liner notes explain, this improvisation took place “back to back”, with neither player knowing what the other would be using before the event. Such an approach, I’d imagine, pushes a focus towards sounds themselves rather than being distracted by the objects and gestures that created them. Similarly for the listener, the recording triggers a different way of listening. Electrical noise, whistling high-pitches and transfixing overlaps of scrapes and rustles emerge, linking together in transfixing patterns. The sounds they create become triggers for the imagination. Midway through comes a rattle which triggers mental images of a poorly secured gate swinging in the wind. Feedback starts to sound eerily like wildlife. The tape is filled with precarious interactions, you can hear that the duo have to leave space, balancing hearing what the other is contributing while offering a response. It’s the polar opposite of talking over each other, and it’s wonderful to witness, even from a Walkman in East London a continent and several months away from when the original event took place. -Daryl Worthington for Spool's Out (The Quietus)
Sun Yizhou/Zhu Wenbo - Responses [Zappak;CD; Tokyo; 2022]
The other new release is by two musicians from China, one of whom are also new to me. Sun Yizhou plays a no-input preamp, and Zhu Wenbo plays the clarinet (E, L), toy piano (C, M), cassette player (C, H), transducers (D, H), microphone (D), snare drum (D, H), guitar (H). he letters refer to the tracks. Six in total, each about seven minutes. Yizhou uses mostly electronic devices, and Wenbo is all about instruments, composition, and improvisation. He has some music on various compilations by Ftarri. Their music was recorded in Wenbo’s living room, but they weren’t playing together. In turn, each recorded a solo session as a response to the previous. Yizhou selected and stuck them together as duo pieces, and Wenbo did the final mix. That is quite a different way of working. You can wonder what the difference is between playing improvised music together or one after another, certainly when the results are as alien as they are on this CD. At times it seems as if none of this really works, with sounds baring not much of a relation. But there is also a mysterious component to this music. Hissing, plinking, plonking, I marvelled at the strangeness of all of this. At times, it has nothing to do with improvisation, but it seems to be all about the concept. In that respect, the concept of playing these pieces not together but in a call-and-response way proves to be very effective. I see this working as a method by other people and different instruments. -Frans de Waard (vitalweekly.net/1358)
When I listen to abstract improvised music like this, I often find myself wondering exactly what’s going on or what it is that I’m hearing. I’m not usually looking for an accurate answer, just one that can help me understand and appreciate the music. When I was listening to the fifth track of this album, I found that Sun Yizhou and Zhu Wenbo had come together in a nice electroacoustic harmony, I felt a sense of oneness. I wondered how they accomplished this – I saw that Zhu Wenbo had played a cassette player on this track, so I thought that perhaps he had recorded Sun Yizhou’s performance and was now playing it back alongside it. I found this to be an interesting answer that my brain came up with, because I was already aware that it couldn’t possibly be the case.
Responses wasn’t recorded live, they took turns. The recording session went like this: one of them performed a brief improvisation, and then the other one performed their own improvisation in response to that, and then the other one performed their own improvisation in response to that one, and etc. Each improvisation was about seven minutes, so one by each performer was selected and they were then layered to make each of this album’s six tracks. This duo isn’t the first to do a “blind improvisation duo” by pairing up recordings, but their response-based system pushes their sound a bit closer, but also further, from a traditional live recording.
In a live performance, the musicians usually respond to each other. A sound made by Performer A might trigger a sound in Performer B. Performers pay attention to each other’s performances so they can complement one another and co-steer the performance, it’s a non-stop conversation of gestures and responses. A blind duo can be interesting because it detaches from that – it features two performers both doing their own thing, responding to nothing, so rather than coming together as a conversation it comes together as two overlaid monologues. Responses manages to find a third perspective though, or perhaps somewhere in between. In Responses, each performer listens to their pair’s entire performance before giving theirs, allowing them to respond to the performance as a whole rather than to individual moments of it.
There is no live musical communication between performers here. There can’t be, it would be a temporal impossibility. Instead, there’s understanding in between them. The performers take their time to listen and appreciate their partner’s music while they consider their own performance and how they should respond, rather than using their partners sounds as instant musical prompts. Instead of being a conversation of sounds, it’s an interaction made from mutual understanding of each other’s personalities and aesthetic practices, and instead of live reactions, it’s thoughtful responses compressed together in time.
One important piece of information regarding this recording practice was left out though – it’s not stated in which order any of this was recorded, so the listener is unaware which performer is responding to which. The only solution that has made sense to me is to assume another impossibility – both performers are responding to each other, they’re both the second performer. In each of these tracks they come together so comfortably that I really don’t have a better guess. I think that a lot of what makes their recordings fuse so well is that that shared understanding that came from this recording project goes beyond the responses – a knowledge of their partner’s previous performance grants some clairvoyance into their next performance by offering an understanding of their way of working as well as their way of responding. In this sense, there kind of is a communication between performers like there would be in a live setting, it’s just been stretched and dissected.
On each of the six tracks, Sun Yizhou plays the no-input preamp. Even moreso than other no-input and feedback musicians, he plays with an extremely limited palette primarily consisting of pitched statics, electric bumps and line noise – but to me he feels fully in control of these sounds, like the small palette and limited options of the instrument allow him to perfectly refine his sounds. They’re splendid performances of soft noise, threatening but not aggressive. This precise style of playing also creates some uniformity between the tracks which makes the various responses interesting to compare – both because they let Zhu Wenbo try responding to similar sounds in several ways, and because they let Sun Yizhou respond to several different sounds in similar ways.
Zhu Wenbo plays a few different instruments depending on the track, including clarinet, toy piano, transducers and more, but somehow his performances never feel so different from each other. I think this is because every one, despite being performed differently, was a response to the same performer using the same instrument – on every instrument he picks up, Zhu Wenbo tries his best to channel Sun Yizhou’s no-input preamp, and it works! It’s remarkable to hear a clarinet or a snare drum so naturally sit alongside improvised electric fuzz, but every time they feel like multiple elements of the same musical system, like they really do belong together.
Responses is an album that I’ve enjoyed a little more every time I listen to it. It’s refreshing to hear two musicians understanding and appreciating each other so well, and to start their music project from that. It makes for music that contains a lot of both personalities without feeling self-indulgent. However, I wonder how much of this mutual understanding is inside my own head – can’t the human brain see any two things together and imagine them as connected? Isn’t it natural to look for coherence when none exist? Can’t it see chaos and perceive unity, or hear two overlaid recordings as one? Possibly, but none of those questions make me appreciate this music less because I do feel oneness here, and in my ears these performers come together like two peas in a pod, like a chemical reaction where two bodies are fused and a single electroacoustic spirit, held together by their mutual understanding, is formed. -Connor Kurtz (harmonicseries.org)
Focus [Hard Return; Digital; UK; 2022]
The two tracks are roughly the same length and structure. Both are current noise generated by my touching a 3.5mm audio cable tip with right hand, maintaining two separate hand gestures (pinching and clutching) and holding it largely still. I had quite a cup of hot water before recording clutching, in which the intermittent mid-range frequencies were the sweat in my clenched hand, the shivering touched by the static had me moved a few times.
My idea is to stretch out a point of focus, psychedelically. The current swells and overloads in time, tightens. Something long and simple. -Sun Yizhou
Ern(e)st is Ernesto Longobardi - an Italian sound artist. 'MUSEUM' is one 20-minute long piece of exquisite abstract sound art. Using field recordings taken from a visual-art museum in the centre of Italy on a sunny and desolate afternoon, Longobardi has created a subtle and alluring work of calm splendour.
In this composition, Longobardi explores the material aspects that redefine space and environment as a living acoustic sound environment, which in this case is the interior of a visual-art museum with few visitors around. In this recording you will hear natural reverberations of the surrounding space, fleeting moments of ethereal ambience, the distant murmur of human voices, fuzzy static noise, swirling shimmery drones, shaking, shuffling, indistinguishable scratching and other miscellaneous sonic abstractions. Another brilliant Falt release which I'd highly recommend checking out. -Fletin (Audio Crackle Non-Music)
Heresy [Karma Detonation Tapes; Cassette; Taipei; 2022]
The titles of these two-part pieces – “Mistake”, “Disruption” – speak to the record’s primary interests: not the perfect realisation of a vision, but the stuff spilled between the aim and the outcome. The sound of miscalibration, of excess, of error. The only sound sources are no-input pre-amp and radio, the former forcefully bent to produce splutters and hums, the latter probing the wasteland between stations. Raw electronic noises appear, modulate and abruptly stop as if succumbing to broken cabling, the edges perforated by crackling and plosives that pock the pipes of low drone and radio signal-sweep squeal.
Key to the sensation of Heresy is that Yizhou resists the allure of compositional structure, never expanding on a given idea or locking into a discernible rhythm. As a result it feels structurally flat, lacking in beginnings or endings, cycling through innumerable combinations of low stuttering and high whining, or one or the other, whiling away time in a waiting room for nowhere. Duration thus feels somewhat arbitrary, and the conclusion of each piece might as well be the product of a powercut – intervening forces from the outside – rather than an act of Yizhou’s volition. It’s the greyscale excavation of shape and intent, leaving only the buzzing, hissing emanations of the functionally sabotaged and the peripherally astray. -Jack Chuter (attnmagazine.co.uk)