Taking “tian ye—the field” as a theme, I invited friends from different musical and artistic backgrounds to participate in an online compilation. Their production methods are not limited to field recordings, but can be expanded to any related “field.”
What exactly does the Chinese word tian ye mean? I only started to examine this question when I had to explain the word to a French person who spoke decent Chinese. The first character tian denotes the countryside, rural areas, farming, cultivated land, and crops that struggle to survive without humans to take care of them. The second character ye means wilderness, barbarism, wild beasts, magnificent mountains, and the fears that are difficult to overcome. What is tian ye when the field and the wild are conjoined? Perhaps the characters’ real meaning lies in the land, the vegetation, and the forms of existence, including sounds, that appear to be in the immediate vicinity of human labor, about to connect with us, while still maintaining their distance.
As a musician, producer, and events organizer, I’m not an expert on field recordings or “field music.” To me, field recordings are more of a tool, like an electric guitar, rather than a genre or a style. But I’d like to share two of my experiences. One occurred on a night in July 2016, after a performance at the Gebi Bar in Yiwu. Led by local friends, a large group of young people to a long walk along the highway to a reservoir by the mountains. It was dark and muggy, and the insects were screaming in a distance. They were all southern bugs, and their sounds were very unfamiliar to me, which reminded me of synthesizers—those analogue oscillators with simple filters and envelopes. The sound field was immense, with infinite repetition mixed with random alterations. I thought, this really was a dream for modular synthesizer players.
The other was during this year’s Spring Festival in a village on the outskirts of Beijing. In a room where the heating was converted from coal to electricity, one could hear the sound from the pipes in quiet hours. It was somewhere between the sound of flowing water, repeating endlessly, a hoarse throaty call and the sound of metal rubbing against metal. No one knew where this sound came from. Perhaps no one noticed it. I put my phone on different parts of the heater in an attempt to record the sound, but without much success. So, can it be considered a field recording in the narrow sense—like the "natural sounds" recorded on a mechanical device in the forest or by the ocean? In this rural hut with its converted power source, the connection between this mysterious sound and the earth was much closer than I could have imagined.
These are some of the thoughts I had about music and sound in tian ye—the field. And while those thoughts left behind notions like “city,” “system,” and “standardization,” to drift towards the land, nature, and wild life, the sounds that I remember remain artificial: they come from cultivated fields, not the real wilderness. It is in the distance between these two seemingly opposing notions that I see the unique beauty of these music and sounds.
However, this is only my personal understanding of tian ye. After the coronavirus outbreak, it is likely that some of us have considered the subject in a different light. What could possibly come out of the field? I thought of the wild boar running on the highway in Wuhan when the city was locked-down at the beginning of the outbreak, a video of which went viral in that peculiar time. There was something beautiful about the boar, perhaps because we were not at all surprised to see it.
The playlist is organized and presented by Zhu Wenbo
Zhu Wenbo is involved in various music projects, including text-based compositions, improvisations, bands, events, and publications, with a focus on “music that is unlike music.” Zhu runs the cassette label Zoomin’ Night.
Paolo Gàiba Riva - Does a noise-pollution-free place exist?
Tessa Zettel - Chasing Pyrocumulonimbus Clouds, Blue Mountains
Li Song - Metronome 1
Aoi Tagami - The Fire of New morning
Xiang - Flit
Ake - Windmill-Car
He You & Yang Ke’er - From the First to the Sixth Floor
Lu Bai - Food Reigns Supreme
Shen Zhi - Dada Turnip
He Xuanni - Cancer Cell Parade
Guibog & ju - 0613_Yemare_e3
Mikey Erg, Meat Wave, Ratboys, Adult Mom and more cover Wilco on this collaborative release benefiting AIDS Foundation of Chicago. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 16, 2019