Sunday 4 August 2024, No Performance 不演了 at You and Me Festival 2nd (day 3)
In the name of notional conformity to something like basic editorial standards, The Sine Revue discloses that reference to a very important element of No Performance’s performance is almost entirely absent from our correspondent’s review. The concert was one of many that made up the eight-day music extravaganza You and Me Festival 2nd, held at Rongyaodongfang Table Tennis Club, Xiaodian Village, Jinzhan Township, Chaoyang District, Beijing.
It is not particularly unusual for me to forget things as they are happening. Now as I begin writing only a day later, the remembering is already embarrassingly difficult, especially the the composition of memories that never properly existed as such. I knew that evening that I had to write about this music. I suppose I didn’t actually know that; instead I made such a promise to myself. What No Performance set in motion came very close to what we might tentatively call an aestheticised experience of being that has been held dear by your humble correspondent for, well, a very long time now.
Is it because I simply have not made any great effort, historically speaking, to seek out the low frequency presented in relatively pure form, that it fills me with delight on those rare occasions I have the fortune to encounter it? Or would the fascinating effect it has on me be undiminished, were I feasting upon it daily? Whatever the case may be, in order to better appreciate the splendour of the amplified bass frequencies that were coming ultimately from two laptops on the stage, I beat a retreat away from the gathering crowd at the front corner of the great hall and removed myself to the mostly empty rear third of the room. Mostly empty, except of course for the elderly Japanese trio who are there every night at the very back, sitting on the couches or the wicker chairs, cushions enigmatically hot, quietly quietly listening to every single act. On the way, I walked past Du Yinuo the sound engineer. He made large backwards paces in response to my approach, which made it seem as though he were playing a game with me. As it happens, he was playing with the sound, much in the same way I was about to, deliberately roaming now here now there in the dimly lit ocean of sound.
The sound was at its most loud and enveloping right in the corner. There were sometimes-dead-spots, further away from the walls. I can’t remember now, and I wasn’t thinking about this question at the time, whether the laptop signal amplified through the PA was a single sine wave, or something more complex which nevertheless had that quality which produces a similar psycho-spatial distribution. At a remove of three metres or so from the doorway to the foyer, behind the heavy curtains draping the walls, the very same bass tone distorted and became dislocated, fluttering in from the adjoining space, intermingled with the sound of people mingling. Although piloting myself about in this way was a pleasure in and of itself, the experience of the sound transcended the variations corresponding to the spatial coordinates of the listener: at all times, in between my ears, spinning around the centre to complete the approximation of a sphere, an auto-entrancing inner-cranium physicality. I couldn’t help feeling rude as I avoided continuing conversations struck up by the odd friendly face who came to say hello. I can only hope something in the queer desperation driving my concentration was apparent enough to not be mistaken for something like antipathy.
It’s hard to say when exactly, but it hadn’t been very long before the sound of that light disembodied chatter, this time coming from within the hall, having met a certain volume threshold, made itself available to the senses. It floated overhead and I did my best to float along with it, though never remaining for more than a few moments, the anonymous murmur, super-stratum of the collective, purified by the grace of the low frequencies undulating through the room, godly voices which drifted in and out of my attention inside the intangible haze of pure horizon, mass of spectres whose constituents are heard only in spiralling decay, never in their incipience nor conclusion; communion abstracted, the play of listless semi-engagement, listless yet commanding non-cardinal progress towards that subdued ecstasy which registers only faintly, river of thread upon thread whose every flowing strand takes with it a line of the ear's attention, thanks only to the severance achieved by the undercurrent, washing away as it were what we might have recognised as the roots, the otherwise symbolic order tethering the vaporous canopy to its origins, yet only thus does the above appear at all, form whose shape is un-intelligibility itself, distended infinite mediated by the black surface and all that is underneath, shimmering expanse the colour of abyssal crystal, temporary habitat sealing the surface beyond which the ghosts of voices dance our lives.
