Soundtrack to the Chinese Nightmare: Beijing’s FM3 Return With New Album Ting Shuo

FM3 have been an integral part of Beijing’s electronic music community since the late 90s. Although Ting Shuo is the first studio release from Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian in about a decade, they remain active playing gigs around Europe and Asia, and developing those cute little Buddha Machines. We were thrilled to discover that they haven’t hung up their patch cables yet and continue to keep it real in their recording studio, making deep, elegant music.

After first listening to Ting Shuo, I realized why critics always use contradictory adjectives like "poetic noise," or "confrontationally tranquil," to describe their sound. While maintaining an often ambient approach in their compositions, there’s a variety of ominous textures that appear throughout the album and manipulate your emotional response. This is done mainly through the slow sculpting of sounds and never relying on one mode or motif to project their shadowy ambient visions.

Ting Shuo, isn’t quite Music for Airports, but rather a soundtrack for haunted CBD high rises filled with troubled minds and corrupt opportunists. There is an extreme complex interplay between the electronic and acoustic elements, like an occasional piano or violin that elegantly weaves between the surrounding synthesizers, only to drop into a deep suffocating void of silence.


 

Ting Shuo 《 听说 》 by FM3

There are tracks like "Hei Guan," where this device is used beautifully. It kind of sounds like you’re trapped in a sensory deprivation tank with a gigantic whale singing along to the minute sounds of your central nervous system. While the track "Fo Wu," is much more cinematic with a slightly Klaus Schulze-style synthesizer sequence, that wouldn’t sound out of place in a cathedral for some sort of space age religion or a made for TV true crime reenactment. What is the point of this type of exploratory music if it doesn’t ignite the imagination to visualize these types of wonderfully absurd situations?  

Visit fm3buddhamachine for more information on Ting Shuo and the band or you can catch FM3 live tonight (Oct 24) at Dada or tomorrow (Oct 25) at Yugong Yishan as part of Sinotronic's third BEME. 

Photo: FM3