Yoan Gandin moved to China early on 2007, after a year he set Wangba Records loose on Beijing, successfully touring bands like Papier Tiger, and L’Ocelle Mare, among others. From Beijing he plans and controls different musical adventures around China. He is now getting ready to tour Troy Von Balthazar.
Yoan’s own musical trip began on his eleventh birthday when his uncle gave him a waterproof and yellow Sony Walkman. This object turned him into the music addict he is today. This is Yoan’s playlist with his favorite tunes, only with nine songs because he’s superstitious and not into the number “10″.
1. Radiohead “Airbag”
1. Radiohead “Airbag”
It’s just the first song of an album that is the one I’ve listened to the most. It was an intense period for me. At that time I saw so many gigs…good memories.
2. Miles Davis “All Blues”
2. Miles Davis “All Blues”
An intensive live act with his band and so creative. He founded this band after his collaboration with John Coltrane was finished. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Ron Carter were so young. Miles was 45 years old. I like it, a guy who wasn’t afraid to experiment with new things. This second quintet is his a reply to the free jazz movement and it was the first time in music history black musicians won a lot of money and negotiated their contracts. Modal Jazz is a real revolution not only for musical theory but for the music industry, too.
3. Mogwai “Kappa”
3. Mogwai “Kappa”
After their first album, when the media started to put a name on their music, Post-Rock, they recorded this one just to say: “No, this is only punk rock guys!” So they also put the name of a famous sportswear brand on this track.
4. Wild Children 野孩子 “Incantation 咒語”, Live in Shanghai
4. Wild Children 野孩子”Incantation 咒語”
The most important alt-folk band in China. They came from Lanzhou. The singer died a few months after this recording.
Last year, on tour with Xiao He, in Linz (somewhere in Austria) we listened to this album together a part of the the night, bet our vodka shots to know who will sleep in “the bed of Kurt Cobain”. Nirvana played at the same venue in 1992. It was a pretty kind of Incantation!
5. Django Reinhardt “Si Tu Savais”
5. Django Reinhardt “Si tu savais”
My mother was a gypsy, a Manouche, like Django.
6. Jeff Buckley “The Way of Lovers Do”
6. Jeff Buckley “The way of lovers do”
Jeff Buckley was the kind of artist you can’t forget if you saw him perform. After that, you needed to listen to his music regularly because he touched something essential.
In 1993, he hadn’t recorded Grace yet. He was just playing in this bar Sin-é for few fans.
This is a song written by Van Morrison.
7. Joseph Arthur “Mercedes”
7. Joseph Arthur “Mercerdes”
A song from his first album. I saw him in a little town in the west of France. Only 40 people were in the venue and there was a big storm outside, but he was amazing onstage. It was the first time I saw someone use footstep samples and overdubbing. And his songs were so sad. One of my best memories about music performance.
8. PJ Harvey “The Garden”
8. PJ Harvey “The Garden”
My favorite female songwriter from the indie rock scene.
9. Tortoise “The Equator”
9. Tortoise “The Equator”
They are the most inventive band I have ever heard. 100 original ideas per track!!!
Japanese people are like cats. I mean that in the best way possible.
MONO are a highly acclaimed, four-piece band from Japan. They have been around for 10 years. Their style follows a pretty uniform template: beautiful, long, repetitive, slow, quiet buildups to crazy climaxes that sound like how standing underneath a waterfall feels. It is a style that lulls you into a false sense of security, lurking until it lures you into utter abandon. For lack of a better term, MONO have generally been lumped into the Post-Rock genre, an ineffable classification most often associated with the Chicago group Tortoise. In order to better label their sound, we should not refer to MONO as Post-Rock anymore. Due to its esoteric quality their music should be hereafter referred to as Ghost-Rock.
MONO have created five full-length albums in ten years of existence; many of them recorded with the legendary Steve Albini, like their most recent, “Hymn to the Immortal Wind”. A full orchestra augments MONO’s sound on this effort. It is compelling, poised, nuanced, cinematic, majestic music. There are no lyrics to spoil the mystery. “Hymn to the Immortal Wind” is not for the faint of heart or those with short of attention spans. The album leads you on a journey, following a path parallel to a childhood duo on a sojourn into the land of death. It evokes the symbols of change, movement, and rebirth. However, the meaning of these symbols is left to you. The music unfolds like a slow ritual of pain, acknowledgment, and rebirth.
MONO, like many Japanese artists and people, are in tune with the spirit world, the shadow lands. The Shinto faith has a myriad of kami, spirits that inhabit the world alongside living humans. These spirits can be benign or terrifying, sober or pranksterish. Inanimate objects over one hundred years of age can become kami, as can national heroes, the pitiable dead, rocks, rivers, mountains, and even the concept of growth (amongst other concepts). Their spirit pantheon stretches to 8 million. In Shinto, eight million means infinity.
That’s how we come back to cats. If you have been around cats, surely you know that cats are more attuned to the spirit world than other life forms. A cat can be sitting in a silent room and then stare intently at something. Well, nothing, really. They will freak out when there is seemingly nothing around them. This behavior is a universally shared phenomenon among cat owners. With a little help from MONO, I have now realized that it’s not nothing. It’s what many people cannot see or refuse to acknowledge, ghosts.
I have recently been re-reading Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” in conjunction with listening to “Hymn to the Immortal Wind”. It is a fine juxtaposition. “Kafka on the Shore” exudes an innate sadness that merges perfectly with MONO’s dirges. The two main characters in the book, Kafka Tamura and the man-child Nakata are both haunted by their childhoods, as well as by histories that might not have played out in this world. Kafka interacts with the 15 year-old ghost of a woman that may or may not be his mother, with whom he is also in love. Nakata speaks to cats, until they ultimately drive him to kill a man assuming the persona of Johnnie Walker, Kafka’s father, sending him on a journey. The two plotlines intertwine and by the end everything is changed.
“Eventually you fall asleep. And when you wake up…you are part of a brand new world.”
The magical realist style that Murakami employs is typical of Japanese art and lends itself to the impression that anything can happen if we are attuned to the world just beyond, the land of ghosts.
These spectral elements are also present in “Hymn to the Immortal Wind”. The opening track, “Ashes in the Snow”, introduces us to death as a dance that gradually reduces everything to dust, life’s common denominator. However, by the end of the song, the dust has coalesced into something else, a momentous transformation that leads to “Silent Flight, Sleeping Dawn”, the passage to the Shadow Lands. This is no place. We wander through the invisible everything searching for reclamation. We come to rest in a “Burial at Sea”. But then something happens that recalls us to our search. We “Follow the Map”, learning from souls “Pure as Snow”. We know that we have discovered something when dancing in a shaft of “Everlasting Light”. Finally, we are fortified, ready to wage the “Battle to Heaven”. And the outcome of this battle is…
You decide. Listen to “Hymn to the Immortal Wind” and you will inevitably fulfill the band’s stated goal, “to make people feel.” Experience MONO’s Ghost-Rock in person on November 27th at MAO Livehouse. It should be a momentous show. By the way, I have read that some of the members of MONO might sit down during the show and that they don’t speak to or acknowledge their audiences often. They are focused solely on the flawless execution of their art. So keep that in mind.
There’s so much music going on! Knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do could help you this weekend.
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Layabozi is a web magazine about music in Shanghai today, with a sprinkle of the extra-mural and a tart sassiness—without ever being cloying. We take our inspiration from the snack which is both exotic (to us) and down home, and from which we take our name: Spicy Duck Necks.
The songs posted in this website are for analysis purposes only. We, the contributors, love - deeply - music and we work to support the artists we love by promoting and purchasing their work; it is our policy only to post what we own or what the artists/owners have authorized us to publish. Through this site, we're simply sharing music with others hoping they will also support these artists and appreciate the quality of their work. We encourage everyone to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel deserve your money and energy. If you own the copyright to one of the songs posted on this website and would like it removed, please let us know we'll respond fast as a the wind. We do not keep an archive of our songs. And we do take obsessive care of our records, cassettes, cd's, dvd's, videos, books, autographs, photos and old tickets to concerts we loved.
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