Red Scarf Discuss Combining Chinese Tradition With the Avant-Garde Ahead of May 20 Yue Space Show

Will Griffith | May 18, 2018 4:39 pm | Add a comment | 620 reads

A minute into their new single "Freak Show (畸形秀)" and you’ll know whether or not Red Scarf is for you. It’s a deep dive into the mouth of madness as a high-pitched souna leads the charge into a fierce battle of drums and guitar, as the sound transforms into a symphony of metal-tinged breakdowns and free jazz roar before the unexpected buzz of a synthesizer drowns out the mayhem. It’s pretty bonkers. And I absolutely love it.

One of Beijing’s gnarliest avant-garde outfits, Red Scarf return this weekend to unleash their latest album They Know We Know They Are Lying on Bad Head Records, a sub-label of Modern Sky Records specifically made for its more mischievous musicians. Made of a trio of madmen who deconstruct, reassemble, and then decimate genre after genre, their sets are a tension-filled, technically awe-inspiring, and wildly fun take on rock, free jazz, and noise. I shot the band a few questions before their release show on Sunday, May 20, at Yue Space.

There’s no easy to describe your music, but it’s clear each of you come from distinguished, technically proficient musical backgrounds. Could you describe the background of each of your members and explain how the three of you finally got together?
All three of us are from Northern China. Li Xing, the guitarist, and Deng Boyu, the drummer, are from Hohhot and Baotou in Inner Mongolia. The saxophone player Lao Dan is from Dandong, a border city between China and North Korea. Li Xing and Deng Boyu have been deeply influenced by rock music and were also classically trained in jazz. Lao Dan began learning the bamboo flute, a traditional Chinese instrument, at a very early age, and also played the saxophone. Around 2012, we all participated in the production and recording of some world music as well as a few experimental projects, but we realized soon that it was so boring and left us empty to create this kind of music. Imposing meaning, not at all what we wanted to do, and in addition was in no way related to our lives. By the end of 2014, Li Xing and Lao Dan made a noise/improvisational album together called Killing Killing Killing. It was more like performance art and it broke us out of our surrounding environment. Xiaoyu heard it and immediately connected to it. Thus, Red Scarf was born.

What stands out most to me is the array of genres sucked into your vortex of musical mayhem. Is there a method to your madness?
Yeah, it is insane, and we want to make no secret of what we have experienced, learned, and been told – whether good or bad, we wanna truly represented them. These contradictions all come from our environment. A few days ago I thought of a word to describe it – "exam-oriented rock 应试摇滚".

The name of your upcoming album is They Know We Know They Are Lying. What or who exactly are you referring to?
It refers to all hypocritical, decadent, authoritarian, and arbitrary stuff. It’s inaccurate to think that it is specifically referring to a system because everything is related and does not belong to a single occurrence.

It sounds like you guys are having a lot of fun at shows and on record – something I wish more musicians in your scene should strive for. Could you describe your sense of humor? And what’s your stance on the avant-garde and experimental music scene in Beijing and the rest of China?
There are few opportunities for us to rehearse together. We focus on rehearsing passages with a theme. Improvisational passages will be left to the mood of everyone on the day of the performance. The same for our recordings. The album was recorded in only two days. All of the recordings were recorded as synchronous sound and no metronome was used. We think that if the overall emotion is correct then everything is fine, and we do not modify the flaws. For us, the flaws will make the recording more resistance to listening. The names of the tracks usually appear at a moment when we are arranging a certain phrase or tone, combined with some bad ideas, then the names just show up in our mind.

Does art need to ask questions constantly? Are we standing at a crossroads to make the declaration?

What can we expect at your release show this Sunday? Any special guests or surprises?
We will invite Song Yuzhe, the mastermind of ”Mutuigua” and ”Dawanggang”. We may also randomly ask people from the audience to improvise together.