Breaking Barriers Of Solitude: “Sonic Cure”

The evening started in a home in Beijing. Sound artist Feng Hao shuffled into the frame with an electric guitar, a large painting hung over a desk behind him. His touch was gentle in the beginning, stroking and tickling his instrument. The nearly inaudible performance gradually unfolded into a crescendo of cacophony. In the final minutes, a sense of calmness evolved as the sounds ebbed away. It was as if, for a moment, viewers had witnessed Feng’s inner thoughts, far from the troubled world beyond his room. 

Next on the bill, situated in the echoing ambiance of an empty space in Shanghai, was Xia Yuyan. With her pipa, she followed the structure prompted by Feng; her improvisations also build in intensity, at times adapting her traditional instrument to imitate the twelve-bar chord progression of American blues guitars before sliding into the nonmetric manner of Arabic ouds.

The scene shifted dramatically for multimedia artists Pang Kuan and Feng Mengbo. In Feng’s dimly lit, cluttered Beijing studio laced with neon colored lights, analog synths pressed against the walls emitted sci-fi atmospherics, until the duo launched into a generic techno groove. Pang, in his persona as the robot Two Chamber Quarters as a nod to the post-Internet era, bestowed a playful alien presence in illuminated headgear and cybertronic gloves. The performance was interrupted with banter from You Yang, co-curator of “Voluntary Garden,” who appeared in a split screen under pulsating titles commanding “put on a mask” and “don’t go out,” while augmenting his face with a virtual mask and hat. You’s intervention prompted a change of pace; the second half of the video commenced with a relaxed jam of distorted guitar and electric drums, concluding with a ballad sung at the piano.

Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, in New York, picked up on the mood with small movements, amplifying the sounds. In a black and white video, his instruments, and some organic props, were strewn around his studio. With the camera mostly zoomed in to his hands, he stooped and squatted, making tinkles and clicks by picking up stones, handling them with casual introspection, and brushing them against gongs and Nepalese singing bowls. Leaving a resonant drone sustained in the air, he crossed the room to improvise on piano, guitar, and synthesizer, producing truncated phrases, single notes, or sonic details that merged with the background noise. 

Zhang Meng, donning sunglasses, continued the droning soundscape in Shanghai. His recital with the traditional Chinese reed instrument, sheng, staged in front of shelves of CDs and filmed from a low angle, recalls a skype call. Zhang extended the tones of the sheng with sustain and delay; the music lingered even after he stopped playing, producing an enchanted effect as he paused to listen to the digital echo of his previous phrase. 

The penultimate act was Liu Yucao and Guo Yazhi’s rock improvisations in Boston with an adapted suona, and the final digital manipulations by Huang Jin in Beijing. These were staged in practice rooms or studios, lacking the one-to-one intimacy engendered by a camera in a tight space, and were performed with focused absorption craving the counterpoint of a live audience. Despite this, “Sonic Cure” was a hospitable intervention by artists welcoming the remote and socially isolated audience into their creative spaces. “Voluntary Garden,” in conflating performers of radically diverse genres, treasures their communality in a displaced setting. The online concert extended and diffused this effect, bringing together musicians and viewers who had never met face-to-face, exalting the potential of exchange in a world fearful of contagion.