Japanese folk experimentalist KASAI returns for his third release on Chinabot with the emoji-titled . Continuing his exuberant exploration of traditional minyo, he incorporates the ancient form into the experience of life and labour in contemporary Japan. “There are many celebratory labour songs in minyo,” says KASAI. “Influenced by these aspects, I created my own minyo.”

Drawing on the events of his daily life,  reflects KASAI’s own work as a care worker, garbage disposal worker, father and hobbyist farmer. His creative methods reflect this humanistic impulse, showcasing the voice as a centrepiece; , written and pronounced as Iori-ten, references the musical notation used where the singer’s part begins in some forms of traditional Japanese music.

His stripped-back rhythms are often characterized by hand clapping on odd-numbered beats, where the influence of gorge and bass music is felt alongside taiko drumming. “Rather than melody, I focus on the rhythm and momentum of the words as they areuttered,” he says. “It is more important about the voicing than singing.” He credits the radio broadcasts of the Riyo Mountains, a DJ duo who research Japanese folk music, for influencing his vocal delivery.

On the album’s final track, ゴモク積み唄, which translates as ‘Piling-up Garbage Song’, KASAI sings about the care and attention the garbage collector pays to his job, over a clanging, workmanlike beat and backup chants from his real-life garbage disposal workmates.

Rhyming “piling up garbage” with “accumulating virtue” in Buddhism, he playfully lauds the sparkling moral cleanliness of the binman. On the video for the song, he’s joined by his workmates as they dance joyfully together. While ironic (“needless to say, we work for wages,” KASAI says), the song and video are also a powerful celebration of the vital physicality and unity of manual labour, which is often rewarded with neither social status nor high pay, leaving the worker to hope for reward in the next life instead.

On , KASAI often pushes against the social forces that keeps this essential work undervalued. Fourth track シン・自由節, or ‘Truly Free Chant’, recruits Tokyo-based artist Clark Naito for an indictment of neoliberalism, touching on everything from market fundamentalism to small government and increasing privatization. A bouncing back-and-forth flow between the two recalls hip-hop as much as minyo.

The following tracks 地団駄 (Throw A Tantrum) and めでたいな (Auspicious) revisits this social critique through the lens of fatherhood. 地団駄 (Throw A Tantrum)’s stomping beat mimics a toddler’s tantrum: “His steps resembled a high-speed dance,” says KASAI, who pays tribute to young children’s passionate resistance, believing adults too can learn from this spirit.

めでたいな (Auspicious) reflects another lesson he has learned from caring for his small child, that of interdependence. “Humans as defined by neoliberalism are calledhomo economicus,” he says. “Homo Economicus is a strange being that seems to have grown out of the rock all by itself, like a mushroom. Homo Economicus is told on the assumption that this being is capable of making rational decisions about everything. The birth and upbringing of my child showed me how ridiculous that assumption is.”

Like many people of the current era, KASAI has lived in different places in his life, mainly in suburbs. He does not see himself rooted in a hyper-local folk culture as a minyo artist would have been a hundred years ago (as he puts it, “I am not a person who embodies the local vibes.”) Yet authentically recenters minyo into its birthplace: the material reality of ordinary life, its timeless hardships and joys, making it a rare look into the life of the contemporary working-class in Japan.

KASAI - 〽

Artist: V/A
Album: 5
Format: Digital / Tape
Cat.No: CHI042
Master: Justin Randel
Artwork: Saphy Vong
Release Date: 23rd November 2022

Celebrating five years of the experimental music label Chinabot, longtime collaborators and new acts join together for 5, Chinabot’s latest compilation release on cassette and digital.

The 12-track compilation features music from key artists who have defined Chinabot as a label, such as Jaeho Hwang, Sabiwa, Sarah Haras, Ayankoko, JPN Kasai and Pal Hwang Dan. The mix also looks to the future of the label with new artists Nanzhen Yang, Papaphilia, Chooc Ly and more.

Leaning into the label’s experimental tendencies, 5 journeys through fractured club tunes from Papaphilia, the experimental electronic project of queer Sri Lankan-Australian sound and visual artist Fjorn Bastos, hardcore rave from Jaeho Hwang, percussive broken beats and percussive broken beats and cinematic soundscapes from QwentyZ, and Beijing field recordings (described by the artist as “blurred memories”) from Nanzhen Yang. It continues the hyper-eclectic vision which has become synonymous with the label, which seeks to take risks and promote the work of exciting emerging producers. The record features Ondo footwork from JPN Kasai, who recently changed his artist name from Jap Kasai following the racist discrimination against a friend in Europe(“‘Jap’ is a derogatory term for Japanese people,” he says. “I used to dare to use it, but I have changed my mind. I don’t want to encourage discrimination against Japanese people.”) Like the compilation, his track, 早苗 唄 hayanae uta, is about the emergence of the new in this case, growth of rice shoots and the “happiness of harvest.”

Growth and experimentation remain key in the track from new Chinabot artist Papaphilia, who is due to release a full album next year. Inspired in part by the voracious learning of her newborn, ‘no path is forged over the abyss without meeting at the altar’ expresses the “leaps into the unknown that forging radical new meaning requires.”

The new compilation, with artwork by Saphy Vong, pays tribute to London’s experimental music scene, showcasing producers Chooc Ly, Yewen Jin and Nanzhen Yang who have performed at Chinabot’s events in the city over the years.

I Was Called

Jaeho Hwang - I Was Called

@Chinabot celebrates its fifth anniversary with a 12-track suite of experimental electronics. Hear @opsv's contribution now, with production by @kuyaneil

More info: https://djmag.com/listen/premiere-papaphilia-no-path-forged-over-abyss-without-meeting-altar

Premiere: Papaphilia ‘No Path Is Forged Over The Abyss Without Meeting At The Altar’

No time to wind down as we head into the winter season, this month and to close 2022 the show hosts https://soundcloud.com/chinabot. A label and collective opening the dialogue around Asian talent in the electronic sphere.

On warm up duties chromasy goes through some of their favourite Asian artists before CHINABOT take over the second hour for a label focus guest mix featuring tracks from their back catalogue and highlights from their most recent compilation.

Show page:
https://rtm.fm/listen/chromasy/chromasy-01-dec-22/

BuyMusic.Club playlist & show notes:
https://www.buymusic.club/list/chromasy-chromasy-chinabot-rtmfm-december-2022

TRACKLISTING:
Satoshi & Makoto - Closer [Safe Trip] (2020)
Seaming To - Edge [Lumin] (2012)
Lim Giong - Recite 念 [Pure Person Press] (2020)
edIT - Laundry [Planet Mu] (2004)
Nic Endo - The New Deal [Geist Records] (1999)
B E N N - Photon [POSTWORLD] (2022)
Hinako Omoroi - Ocean [Houndstooth] (2022)
Flora Yin​-​Wong - Tengu [Circadian Rhythms] (2019)
Lujiachi - Mantis [OverMyBody] (2022)
Yuting Wu - FTOCT-4450 [First Light Records] (2021)
J-SHADOW - Parallel Worlds [Keysound Recordings] (2022)
Jo Ngo - T e n s i o n [SYS Sister Sounds] (2022)
OFFFF - i [Self-released] (2022)
Hiro Kone - Disoccupation of the Sphere [Dais Records] (2018)
Naco - Yarth [85acid] (2022)
iLoop - Don't Break My Core [Shanshui] (2005) 
Cui - 夏 summer break [Abstrakt Reflections] (2022)
Uman Therma, Yeong Die & Yetsuby - 40404 [Computer Music Club] (2021)
-
----- CHINABOT -------
-- Label Focus Guest Mix ------
-
Nanzhen Yang - Associative Memory Errors
Sabiwa - prelude of hunting season
Yewen Jin - ICE
Laenz - 24/7
Sarah Haras - The Consequences of My Own Actions
QwentyZ - Annihilation
Yokubari - Buki vs Buki
Bo Sedkid - Paaththaya
Bo Sedkid - Kavvandha
Jaeho Hwang - I was called
At Her Open Door - Gleam
Chooc Ly - Exaltation Onirique
Ayankoko - Bopen
Papaphilia - no path is forged over the abyss without meeting at the altar
JPN KASAI - 早苗唄 hayanae uta
Pal Hwang Dan - Brooch Killer
Liew Niyomkarn - gathering existence
--

RTM.fm: chromasy + CHINABOT // December 2022

Artist: Emin Gök
Album: Silentio
Format: Digital / Tape
Cat.No: CHI045
Master: Jesse Skeens
Artwork: Cem Altınöz with special thanks to Ceren Beker
Release Date: 15th June 2023

Turkish experimental musician Emin Gök is releasing his first album on Chinabot. Silentio is a moving exploration of the encompassing, but intangible, nature of love in its many forms, and its own unique expression in Turkish musical tradition. Moving through Anatolian noise, abstract electronics, folk, experimentalism and field recordings, Silentio creates a surreal dreamscape of a deeply intimate personal and cultural heartland.

The scene is set by opening track Mima, a textural combination of ambient electronics and field recordings, with flashes of Turkish strings, through which an uncanny tension grows. On the track In Circles, he is joined by Ramiz Ali, whose saxophone winds like smoke though Gök’s rhythmic, hypnotic dirge. Ode to a Belly Dancer turns the traditional energetic belly dancing track upside down, driven by seething, bubbling textures and syncopated rhythms into an anxious frenzy.

The dreamlike synchronicity felt in the album extends to its creation. Gök had just ended a relationship and was in “complete, wholesome anguish… composed of absence; hence Silentio/Silence,” he explains. Then, in a dream, he saw a baglama, a traditional Turkish and Middle Eastern lute, burning in the woods. He’d been using the instrument after this breakup to provide the basis for what would later become “Silentio,” with the baglama often distorted in production as if it was burning.

“The image had a certain viral effect on me,” he says. “It multiplied and grew.” He decided to ceremonially burn his own baglama in the woods with two friends, one of whom took the photo seen on the album’s cover. “It was a joyful, blissful and even exhilarating experience,” he says.

A couple of months later, working as an assistant sound engineer with a documentary crew, he found himself travelling to Eastern Anatolia in order to meet traditional baglama practitioners who belong to a school of mystical Islamic tradition called Alevism.. “At Alevi villages playing baglama or being a virtuoso is not simply a manner of skill but also a path: music, art, worship, ritual, they are not different things but they together can be seen as one unified action for the constitution of a good life; a wholesome one that is worth living,” Emin explains.

In this cultural practice, he found echoes of his own experience contemplating love through the baglama, but one that begged him to see his experience through a collective, universal lens. “There is usually a particular name attached to the individual names of these Alevi musicians and public figures: Aşık, meaning “the one in love” he says. “This ‘Love’ for them, first and foremost, is the love of god that is manifested through the creations of god.”

“The baglama, thus burns for the anguish of the lost love and lost opportunity but also burns for every other kind of anguish everywhere else, be it imposed by state or nature or oneself or the other,” Gok says. “The baglama, by being burned, becomes fire and like every fire, it has the capacity to destroy if you don’t handle it well, even extending to catastrophic scales. If handled well with care and expertise and patience, it can also be an essential source of warmth, a place where we gather around in circles, feed each other, share and tell stories. This is the story I am telling.” 
credits
releases June 15, 2023

Written, composed, arranged, performed and produced by Emin Gök

Special features:

Evrim Özşuca - Vocals (Zaman)
Ramiz Ali - Saxophone (In Circles)


Mix - Emin Gök, Jesse Skeens, Yiğit Soner
Mastering - Jesse Skeens

Silentio

Ode To A Bellydancer

Emin Go​̈​k - Ode To A Belly Dancer

Kyoto’s @kasaikasaikasai blends elements of Japanese folk music with footwork-inspired beats and glitching sound designs on his new album for @chinabot

More info: https://djmag.com/listen/premiere-kasai-sansajie

Premiere: KASAI ‘サンサ節’

Recorded during a heatwave in a deconsecrated chapel and composed over a slow and sporadic process, Kepla’s new album In Furnace captures the uncanny feeling of living at the end of the world. Through drawing us into a place of stifling heat against the coolness of stone, with a broken church organ among Jon Davies’ multi-instrumental approach, it reflects on places that have been lost and gathered new meaning.

In July 2021, Jon arranged a weeklong residency at Capel-y-Graig, a chapel-turned-artspace in the Welsh hamlet of Furnace. He went there to experiment with field recordings, experiment with cello and piano, and learn the Suona, a traditional double-reeded musical instrument made popular in China, as well as to gather recordings ready for resampling.

Following the residency it became evident that instead of reprocessing recordings, preserving the unique reverberation of the chapel, its surroundings and the extreme climate would become the album’s focal point. These contested objects - a chapel that no longer functions for organised religion; an instrument unmoored from its ritual function - exist during a time where ecological collapse is no longer in the distant future.

The conception of In Furnace began by obtaining and learning to play the suona soon after seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1989 film A City of Sadness, the first major film to depict the February 28 incident in Taiwan, a 1947 anti-government uprising that was brutally suppressed.

After a recent family trip to Taipei, Jon felt a cultural estrangement from his Hong Kong/Taiwanese heritage, where political suppression is once again a rising concern. The Suona represents a key ceremonial function across the Asian diaspora, although they have been recently banned from funeral rites in rural areas of China due to apparent public disruption.

The production of In Furnace marks a personal departure from Kepla’s debut album Within The Gaze, A Shadhavar, embracing musicality through performance and exploring complex harmony. From the opening of the record’s microtonal melody and spectral frequencies, to the album’s closing piece ‘Sanctifier,’ a one-take improvisation based on one of Olivier Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, the underlying suspense throughout the record is maintained by its tonal ambiguity. Built on the organ’s wheezing and breathy chord cycles, ‘Time In Furnace’ gives the album its tensest moment, underpinned by a forebodingly glacial Suona counterpoint.

Another inspiration for In Furnace is the filmic sculpting of time and subjectivity, in particular juxtaposing ‘real’ with ‘imagined’ spaces, alluding to a sense of storytelling. ‘Horse Ladder’ is the clearest example, setting the scene of Jon practising cello in the chapel against the distant crackles outside; the piece concludes with dramatic percussion accompanied by creeping strings (featuring Simon Barr from anarchist black metal group Dawn Ray’d) in a totally different sonic environment. Similarly, ‘A Clearing, Spectre In Autumn’ transports the listener from meditative drones to a brittle hum punctuated by synthetic feedback, both atmospheres reciprocating unease to each other.

“I’m trying to give some sort of sensitivity to a lot of stories that I’m tangentially related to, but I feel alienated from them. As an artist with both Chinese and Welsh backgrounds, but having grown up in South London, these cultures are currently estranged,” Jon says. “The suona is (hopefully) an instrument not just for playing music but as an activated artefact to reacquainting myself to something lost. Similarly, the Capel is a space that demands to be activated by sound, with its incredible acoustics, as well as the organ with only one fully functioning lung.” In Furnace pulls the ever more common feelings of cultural and ecological disintegration together into a haunting, textural elegy.

In Furnace

Kepla - Spectre In Summer

Artist: Memeshift
Album: Echoes
Format: Digital / Tape
Cat.No: CHI048
Master: Justin Randel
Artwork: Dhomas Kampretz Yudhistira
Design: Saphy Vong, Morgan Sully
Release Date: 19 April 2022

Echoes, Chinabot’s first release with Morgan Sully of Memeshift, takes us from Borneo to Berlin, collapsing decades and continents through electronic experimentation and personal recordings. Through the process, he asks if it is possible to reconfigure a cohesive sense of home from the diverse elements of a diasporic experience.

Echoes’ fifth track, Balikpapan, takes its name from one of Sully’s first homes, a city on the eastern coast of Borneo that Sully fled with his family as a six-year-old in 1986. When his American father couldn't pay the bribe asked by corrupt local officials to validate their exit visas, his family hired a smuggler to ferry them by sampan from Batam Island across the Strait of Singapore. Under the cover of darkness, after the gunboats passed, they found themselves on a secluded beach in Malaysia, the first leg of a journey that took young Sully to many homes between Hawaii and (eventually) Southern California.

Balikpapan was started shortly before returning to the city, some 35 years after he left, and features a field recording of insects from a mangrove swamp near his former school. Pulsing with humid, clicking beats, and laced with haunting synths, Balikpapan transports us into the physical environment, as well conjuring an emotional landscape filled with a complicated nostalgia.

The journey through time and memory is revisited in Sad Sunda, which samples a cassette of ‘pop sunda’, a form of popular music that blends western pop and traditional instrumentation from Java, that his mother brought with the family to Hawaii when they fled Borneo. Composed on an Elektron Octatrack over three decades later, Sully cut the samples into small snippets and randomly resequenced them. The percussion is from Roland CR-78 samples and drum loops pitched down and resampled in the Octatrack; through the frenetic club beats, we hear his current life in Berlin, where he now lives, bleeds into the music of his past.

His migratory experience is apparent in Sully’s music influences, which he names as “Sundanese gamelan, the Beach Boys, pop melayu and eventually punk, industrial, and noise before utterly relinquishing to the music of clandestine raves of Southern California in the late 90s.” For Echoes, Sully synthesises all these through his DIY electronic lens, finding both a sense of playfulness and a melancholia. “Echoes is an attempt at recollecting a hybrid sonic language, an unattainable and elusive ‘home’,” Sully says.

The album ends with a trip to his mother’s actual home. The churning, meditative Mom_s Kettle was recorded in his mother’s California apartment in 2021, as she was recovering from an anti-Asian hate attack that hospitalized her, part of a wave of violence that had become a second, shadow pandemic throughout the United States during the Covid pandemic.

The track relies on deeply personal, diaristic textures. “The sound of my mom's kettle which starts off the track, was recorded on my iPhone while I searched for talismans to bring to my mom in the hospital,” says Sully. “The pointillist melodies came later in Berlin from a recording session with my friend, while the granulated percussion originates from heavily compressed recordings of the recorder shuffling in my bag.” In a final personal touch, the colours of his mother’s hand-made dayak Borneo beadwork inform the Echoes album cover, embodying the spirit of the record – a creative force that blossoms despite aggression and displacement.

Echoes

Balikpapan

Memeshift - Balikpapan

✤ Industrial No Wave Tokyo duo IN THE SUN mixing saxophone, electronics and Taiko drums, present their first release on @CHINABOT ✤

✷ "Dawn" was inspired by the musical traditions and wild mountain landscapes of composer TIDEPOOL’s childhood in rural Japan. Layers of ethereal synthesizers and wailing saxophones by Kim Pueru evoke the mist and the granite of mountains are beaten with rhythms that hit like shattering rocks.

✷ TIDEPOOL describes the record as an “epic poem.” This is evident on Twilight, where urgent synths and nimble percussion make you wonder what Akira would have looked like set in on a mountain range instead of in Tokyo.

✷ "Dawn" remains extremely contemporary, with swirling rhythms of singeli, juke, footwork, gabber, and minimal to create an evil cacophony. The album also nods to the GORGE movement, which is experiencing a resurgence in Japan.

Bandcamp

[Swine Premiere] IN THE SUN - Insecurity (Chinabot)

Artist: Dayoung
EP: Latency
Format: Digital
Cat.No: CHI052
Master: Justin Randel
Artwork: Dayoung
Release Date: 25 October 2024

Baroque meets industrial techno on Latency, the latest EP from Seoul-based DJ and musician Dayoung. Through the pounding rhythms of taiko drums and dark swirling electronica, she creates a melancholic soundtrack to an existential crisis on the dancefloor.

Latency, her first release on Chinabot, comes after a period of self-realisation for Dayoung. “I aim to express emotions such anxiety and uneasiness into experimental, deconstructed sounds that are still more or less describable in dance-floor grammar,” she says. “Strong sounds and textures are a kind of release for me. Subversive music is an outlet. It screams out things I can't say in words.”

 

Building from the creeping, liquid sadness of the opening tracks, Strong/Weak, Dangerous fills in a slow BPM with distorted samples, including her own whispering voice, to create a stuttering whirlwind of repressed angst. “Sometimes you want to say something but it’s just not easy due to circumstances, and I wanted to reflect on this kind of situation,” Dayoung says.

 

On the next track, Disturbing Choir, heavy kicks and breakbeats turn the drama up a notch, driven by stacked melodies that interlace like a choir. An ominous feeling grows throughout the record, which ends with Expired, built around a Latin American tresillo rhythm bulked out with heavy bass and kicks. Leaving the listener with a sense of unease, it is characteristic of Dayoung’s refusal to provide any simple conclusions, preferring instead to draw us into the mist of the emotional moment.

Dayoung is a DJ and promoter based in Seoul who plays heavy bass, reggaeton, UK bass, breakbeat and more. She is also a member of the art collective Lost Air which archives and researches the underground electronic music scenes of (mostly) Seoul. In 2023, she launched a new Seoul-based collective, Fragmented Service, with fellow musician and DJ Jaeho Hwang. She has played with and supported artists like Dis Fig, Flora Yin Wong, NET GALA, and Salamanda. At the moment she is the promoter of her own party series [Girls Gone Wild] and is a monthly roster member of Visla.fm radio.

Latency

Disturbing Choir

Pre-order: https://chinabot.bandcamp.com/album/latency

Baroque meets industrial techno on 'Latency', the latest EP from Seoul-based DJ and musician Dayoung via CHINABOT.

"I'm somehow attracted to the Japanese Taiko drums a lot," Dayoung says on the track 'Comes And Goes'. "I guess it’s just Asian drum sounds in general that get me interested. In my opinion, they go quite well with other factors of electronic music, so I wanted to do a lot of experiments with the drums. It’s an all-in-one drum track - several sirens are used to keep the audience alerted. A change in the BPM in the middle was a factor I used to keep the drama inside."

More exclusive music

Premiere: Dayoung 'Comes And Goes'

地団駄

シン・自由節 feat. クラーク内藤

いたわり節

土踏み唄

じゃんこじゃんこ

Chinabot is a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music.

地団駄

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