When talking about the music of the Dong ethnic minority, most people familiar with it will mainly know “big songs,” or popular standards. However, Dong music is more complex than this. In fact, Dong music can be traced back more than 2,500 years, to the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods in Chinese history — a turbulent period of China’s deep past that produced Confucianism. Dong song is characterized by multiple voices forming complex choruses. It is a polyphonic form of music, rare not only in China but across East Asia. To this day, Dong music remains a rich field of study for academics and anthropologists.

DONG 1 is a new album by GOOOOOSE, the solo project of Duck Fight Goose founder Han Han. The album is built largely of field recordings of Dong music and natural sounds gathered during the 2016 Spring Festival, when Han Han took part in a collaboration with fashion label Zuczug and culture brand SounDate. As part of this project, Han Han collected field recordings in Xiao Huang Village, a Dong community in remote Guizhou province that has long been considered the home of the Kam Grand Choir. After gathering source material in Xiao Huang, Han Han returned home to Shanghai and fed his field recordings into his studio, supplementing the raw sounds of the Guizhou countryside with synthesizers and software effects, transforming them into a series of new musical ideas — DONG 1 is the first release in this series.

DONG 1 is not an attempt to document a piece of intangible cultural heritage, nor to re-interpret traditional Dong music with modern instrumentation. As Han Han observed during his time in Guizhou, the intrusion of modernity has become an irreversible force in these small villages: “I think what we can do is not pretend that we can help the villagers return to an agrarian society, and not act as collective unconscious spectators…” Han Han set certain rules for himself in producing the album, strictly controlling the number of samples, and synthesizing from the simplest sounds possible in constructing a coherent whole.

On DONG 1, the listener can hear the distant, distorted sound of Dong communities collected from the villages and roads Han Han traveled. There are also natural sounds organically included in the mix — water, wind, casual chats held over a slow day of fishing. It’s worth mentioning that Han Han did not manipulate the original recorded material — rather, he fine-tuned the synthesized elements of the album in real time, retaining and even highlighting the rhythmic frequencies of the Dong music, adjusting his own frequencies to accommodate slight variations in pitch and tone. This kind of sound phenomenon can be heard in many traditional folk musics, and has also been applied to a wide range of modern music. Even the lyrics of Dong music relate intimately to the flow of time — “We are both getting old and love is no more relevant for our age. You forgot what happened to us easily, but I still remember…” one singer can be heard intoning on DONG 1, with another declaring, “Eighteen is the age of blossoming, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Wrapped by Han Han in a pulsing electronic cocoon, this beautiful Dong music flows and blurs further, to an unknown future destination.


 
Artist statement:

Back in 2016 I didn’t think it would take me so long to compose all the music based on the recorded materials, and among all the things that postponed the process, I think the most important one is that I kept learning and experimenting with new methods of sound synthesis and other musical techniques through both my music production and performances during the last two years.

Apart from that, there is also one thing that kept haunting me whenever I was about to start to make something: none of us in the team wanted the final record to be another “world music” album, partly because we recorded everything live instead of putting the local performers in a modern recording studio to achieve a “hi-fi” sound . We would rather the result be relevant to the time we are living in. In other words, I feel and believe that there are already too many products available for consumers to fulfil their imaginations of a pure, unpolluted, exotic land lying deep in the “Far East.”

During the time that we stayed in the village, I felt that the loss of cultural legacy and unique identities is inevitable all over the world, especially in China. Everywhere is becoming a subdivision of the same place, a victim of high-speed change facilitated by the internet and smartphones. It’s hyper-surreal for me to either make music trying to grasp the last preserved soundscapes of the minority culture, or to grab a guitar to go along with the recordings and make it sound mellow and folky. We think the end result of the Dong series should somehow resonate with our times, and hopefully it will generate some cultural and anthropological significance in the near future.

Bearing these thoughts in mind, I chose Max/MSP and Ableton Live as my software, and various synthesizers (mainly my modular system, a Moog Voyager and several others) as the hardware. These tools formed a creative environment that I’m familiar with, and I believe they also represent the most current music production tools. Thankfully, both Zuczug and SounDate gave me a lot of freedom in creating these pieces. They knew from the very beginning that the album would be subjective rather than documentary or “objective.” We all believe that once the observer is present, the captured materials will necessarily contain information from all participants, both substantially and emotionally.

At the same time, I also made some rules for myself during the compositional process, in order to eliminate the infinite possibilities related to modern production tools. First, I tried my best to use as few external samples as possible. Second, no synthesizer presets were used — all sounds were strictly synthesized from a basic sine wave. Third, no re-tuning tools were used on the original materials, the pitches are all intact. Instead, I made some customized Max/MSP patches to control all the other sounds dynamically, because the pitch of the choir is always changing, almost like there is a slight amount of modulation applied to the pitch of the total piece. Finally, I restricted myself from “inventing” emotional flows through arrangement techniques — it’s very strange for me to “arrange” an extra story if the original material doesn’t have one.

Another very important thing to mention is that, during the process of recording the original material, the sound of the choir constantly reminded me of musical pieces by La Monte Young and some modern Drone music, especially the almost mysterious beat frequencies generated by the choir singers, which is quite different from modern choirs. If I have to choose a way to describe it, for me it sounds like the pitch was collectively slightly modulated by a smooth bipolar noise, and the modulation depth was a bit more than trained musicians, but way better than the average person. At some point, they all seem to be able to naturally sing in harmony with the others, almost like a flocking system — while individual birds fly at random speeds and in random directions, as a whole the flock always forms certain discrete shapes. The fact that Cheng Qiaoqiao of SounDate gave me translations of the choir’s lyrics also helped me quite a lot during the creative process. The lyrics were as inspirational as the original recordings to me.

I hope the conflicts and harmonies in these pieces can offer a different perspective of looking at minority cultures in modern China. I’ve always believed that the best way to spread and preserve a specific culture in a timeless and broad sense is to continually reinterpret it over time, and to invite new interpretations by outsiders with diverse cultural identities.

- Han Han / GOOOOOSE


 
Track list, lyrics and notes:

1. Same Clouds
no lyrics.
notes: local clouds, granular synthesis, musique concrète

2. Fish Catching
no lyrics.
notes: The field recording is from a quite old native guy catching fish in front of us and chatting. Around 2:40 he caught the fish, and then he asked us to have dinner in his house later. We said sorry, we cannot make it that day, we have to go to the city. All pianos are tuned in real time by a Max/MSP patch.

3. Guitar
lyrics: woman - although I knew we won’t be together, I just can’t stop thinking about you. man - That’s a lie. Why don’t you want to be with me? Is it that you are bored, or you heard something from the others?
note: The “jumpy” sample is made by samples from the original materials, with decay and attack real-time modulated by a random source. This piece was recorded on the road, after we encountered a local couple heading somewhere for a performance with their guitar, there was a car passing by us around 3:25. One side of the road is a beautiful and deep valley, some wind.

4. Time Scale
lyrics: I’m thinking about you every day. I haven’t seen you for seven days already, it makes me feel really bad.
note: When we first arrived at the village, although almost everything was modernized — TV, smartphone, plastic bags — I noticed that there was one thing still very different, which is the sense of time of the local people. “Morning” might mean around 1 or 2pm in the afternoon, and night ends early. When I was making this track, I kept thinking about the way they feel about time, and how different it is than the way I feel about it. I’ll never know. The bcakground “choir” sound was made by cutting small parts from original recordings.

5. Oblivion
lyrics: we are both getting old and love is no more relevant for our age. You forgot what happened to us easily, but I still remember.
note: I just feel this should be a more intense track, combining elements from the past.

6. Young Liquid
LYRICS: Eighteen is the age of blossoming, there’s nothing to worry about.
NOTE: There are quite a lot of creeks and rivers in the area — I’ve always felt that flowing water is a good metaphor for time. Actually, to some extent I feel the lyrics of the choir are all about time, which to me is something that keeps flowing relentlessly. In this song I put the vocals on one side of the piece, leaving several beating, cross-modulated waveforms cycling in the center of the stereo image.


Album Credits:

Field Recording: Xu Siwei
Main contact for lyric translation: Cheng Qiaoqiao
Arrangement, mixing and mastering: Han Han (Gooooose) @ Sequencer Electronics Studio
Project Director: Wu Shanmin (33), Cheng Qiaoqiao

June 2018, Shanghai