Outdustry | 格外音乐

flyer by been

颜峻的私人客厅巡游刚刚结束，近三个月里，他在不同的私人空间一共顺利地完成了九场演出，参于过的人应该深有体会。在场的观众较容易全心的观看，更自然的静心聆听，更是少了在公共场所的嘈杂且避开了烟酒等社交工具所带来的浓浓气味，或许猜这就是客厅巡演的初衷。

Veteran sound artist Yan Jun has just finished a three-month-long tour of living rooms in Beijing, altogether encompassing nine unique performances, each leaving a deep impression on the people who participated. No noisy distractions of public spaces, no bar, no loud socializing… the audience of each private performance was allowed to simply listen and meditate in a closed domestic space. This was the goal of the tour.

闯入一个陌生的空间，坐等发声，眼神取代了语言交流，信息介于扩声器的频响范围之内，中途或者失去耐性，或者进入睡眠，甚或中枢兴奋，这都没有关系，没有人打算干扰你的自由，这本身即是一场声音触发性的行动。

Enter a strange room, sit and wait for the sound, communicate with eyes instead of spoken language. Information is mediated by the frequency ranges of the microphone, personal feedback. During the performance maybe you lose patience, maybe you fall asleep… it doesn’t matter. No one obstructs your freedom. In itself, the performance is about sound triggering personal reactions.

这次我们邀请颜峻在OUTDUSTRY办公室露天的小院里演出，并不是客厅巡演主题，而是于他私人客厅巡游之后的个人专场演出，但同样是走入一个他从未到的空间，给我们的耳朵制造不同的听觉体验。

Now Outdustry invites Yan Jun to perform at our headquarters, a small outdoor courtyard. It won’t be quite the same experience as a living room. It’s more like a normal performance, a follow-up, but similar in the sense that the artist will be improvising for the first time in a new space, and will give our ears a new sense and experience of hearing.

2011年10月14号，7点

Oct 14th, 2011, 7:00pm

北京东城区八宝坑胡同6号 [地图]

No.6 Babaokeng hutong,dongcheng district [map]

门票30元（免费的啤酒）

ticket: 30 RMB (free beer)

about the artist:

YAN JUN: yanjun.org

颜峻，声音工作者，文字工作者。

1973年出生于兰州。中文系毕业。住在北京。

作为即兴演奏者，近期现场使用反馈噪音，听多于演奏，乐器则处于控制和无法控制之间。创作亦涉及田野录音及相关声音艺术，人声，写作，出版。

撒把芥末/观音唱片发起者。2005年发明了实验音乐活动“水陆观音”和Mini Midi音乐节。

现为FEN（Fareast Network，大友良英，柳汉吉，袁志伟，颜峻）乐队成员。

曾在中港台及各国演出展览，2011年受亚洲文化协会资助在纽约驻村。

Yan Jun, working with sound and language.

Born in Lanzhou in 1973. Based in Beijing. B.A. of Chinese Literature.

As an improviser he uses feedback noise in recent concerts. He also does field recording, site-specific sound art, voice and writing.

Founder of Sub Jam/Kwanyin Records, which coordinated the weekly Waterland Kwanyin event series (2005-2010) and annual festival Mini Midi (since 2005).

Member of FEN (Fareast Network, Otomo Yoshihide, Ryu Hankil, Yuen Cheewai and Yan Jun).

He has performed extensively in China and internationally, enjoying support from the Asian Cultural Council as a resident musician in New York in 2011.

几段视听 mp3 and video: myspace.com/yanjunyanjun

一个新集体博客，以及电台 a new group blog and online radio station: miji.subjam.org

联系 contact: subjam at gmail dot com

A few months ago, as part of their Maximum Exposure edition (Sept 26th 2009), Billboard magazine sat down with Outdustry’s Ed Peto to find out 5 good ways to build a bit of presence for your artist in China. Here, printed in full, is the resulting piece by Jonathan Landreth.

Rampant piracy and a lack of transparency have long complicated efforts by record labels to do business in China. Still, for those willing to be flexible and patient, the Middle Kingdom could still prove to be a useful laboratory for new business models.

Relative to it’s potential, China’s music market remains microscopic. Recorded music sales totalled just $82 million in 2008, up 8% from a year earlier, according to IFPI data. But digital sales, which accounted for 62% of total music sales, provide a glimmer of hope, having surged 45% last year to $50.4 million.

Ed Peto, founder of the music business consultancy Outdustry in Beijing, believes artists must adopt a 360 degree approach to China. The man on the ground for the Beggars Group of labels, Peto works to tap a network of promoters, critics, DJs and Web entrepreneurs to position acts aiming to connect with Chinese music fans. Asked to identify the best means to promote music in China, Peto cautions that no single platform would suffice, given the China market’s fast pace: “The menu could change at any minute,” he says.

1. Land a billing at Beijing’s premiere live music event, the Modern Sky Music Festival

Founded in 2007 by Modern Sky record label boss Shen Lihui, past festival headliners included U.S. rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs and local heroes Carsick Cars. This year’s event will be held Oct 4-7 at Beijing’s Chaoyang Park and will feature a roster including British Sea Power, the Buzzcocks, the Futureheads and Shonen Knife. Peto says Modern Sky is better organized than previous Chinese rock festivals, boasting sponsorship support, a wider range of bands and a more professional staff. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a really significant step up,” he says. Peto also suggests licensing a record to a local label first then using the fest to promote it. And don’t go shouting about politics like Bjork did about Tibet in 2008. “That incident did a disservice to everyone working hard for incremental change in music in China,” he says. “It is getting better, but she set things back five years.”

(Update: It is worth noting that Modern Sky Festival ran into some….’trouble’ this year, after the article was published. The week before the event, the organisers were told that none of the international bands would be allowed to play)

2. Hire an intern to start a discussion thread about a single or album on Douban.com

Douban.com is the most transparent, frank, witty and active collection of critical writing about music, books and films in the Chinese blogosphere. Knowledgeable music editor Xu Bo is also the guitarist for one of the capital’s top bands, the post-folk punk quartet P.K.14.

Peto says 80% of the traffic to Outdustry’s online community/record label site MicroMu comes from Douban. “It is the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “It’s what Myspace China wishes it could be.”

3. Make friends with Kelly ‘ZhaZha’ Cha

Cha is an influential TV/radio host educated partly in the United States whose shows on Hunan Satellite Television (“Midnight Mindtwist”), China Radio International’s Easy FM and the video channel of popular Web portal Sina.com (“The ZhaZhaClub Show”) expose fans to imported music by playing songs and discussing lyrics in English and Chinese. “She’s like a champion for Western music across a number of platforms in China,” Peto says.

4. License music to R2G

R2G is a Beijing-based online music distribution platform whose custom-built software detects illegal electronic listings of songs, then uses documentation of those posts (and the courts, if necessary) to negotiate legitimate royalty payments for future downloads from Web sites. Privately owned R2G takes a cut of the payments and thus far appears to have survived China’s Wild West environment by focusing on songs downloaded and used as ringtones and ringback tones by the nation’s 430 million cell phone subscribers. Peto calls R2G “the most transparent and Western-friendly of the music distribution sites in China”.

5. Upload a video to Youku

Youku is China’s largest online video portal. As with YouTube, a channel can be set up for free, pages customized and videos uploaded. “It is definitely worth adding Chinese and English subtitles,” Peto says. “Lyrics are very important to Chinese people, and having the translation there really adds value as the video also becomes an educational tool.” By posting a video, Chinese music fans can better appreciate a band’s over-all presentation, he says, noting that “where your music might not be particularly culturally applicable, your video might pique interest, be plucked from obscurity by the editorial team or community and hit a a feature page.”

Billboard article used with permission of Nielsen Business Media, Inc.

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