Shanghai Oscillators Group
Dec 9, 2023
Today was my first visit to Trigger's little office, located on the third floor in an office building across the street from exit 13 of Caoyang Road Station. I'm not clear on the complete story, but my understanding is that Trigger is a rebranding of NOIShanghai, which used to host noise shows in various venues throughout the city. Now that they have their own stable location, they have an event every weekend.
I came today to see the Shanghai Oscillators Group, whose name excited my imagination. The oscillators in question were all Hewlett Packard 3312A Function Generators. The five members of the group had their five function generators arranged in a circle around the two tables they'd pushed together in the center of the office. They played five songs, each written by one of the five members of the group. The only member I was able to find much information about online was Maimai. Here's a song from his old band Muscle Snog. He also made a movie Cowardly Ghosts (胆小鬼们). The guy in a Trigger t-shirt who sat in the back of the office in front of a soundboard during the whole performance jokingly referred to Maimai as "Mr. Director." Later on, when doing some additional setup, he tried to plug a cord into Maimai's ear, which prompted no reaction whatsoever.
Two pieces in particular stood out to me.
The first used an electronic clock that occasionally emitted that little melody clock towers chime. When the melody ends, the clock rings out as many times as the hour. Over the course of the song, the five musicians would swap seats as the clock commanded them. The final time the clock played that melody, it kept chiming and chiming, counting up to an hour that didn't exist.
The other song I liked used a vocoder. A girl who looked a bit like my friend Mippy whispered into the microphone, and her breath turned into an electronic harmonica-like sound. Then she started playing cat's cradle with the lady sitting next to her, using a ball of yarn they'd brought. The microphone was left on the table, and the rest of the oscillators died down, leaving a single oscillator slowly pulsing about once a second, causing the whole table to rattle. The microphone picked up that rattle and imbued that pulse with the faintest overtone of the vocoder, the two sounds walking hand in hand together towards death.
The warmth I felt from this music, without any melody and divorced from traditional notions of harmony, was perhaps akin to what someone else would feel listening to the Mozart Piano Sonatas they'd grown up with. I had no Mozart as a kid. I suppose that's why I ended up in this room in Shanghai, over two decades later.
After each song finished, they flipped the pages they had set in front of them, just like classical musicians. Only, instead of those pieces of paper having sheet music printed on them, they contained diagrams specifying the settings of the oscillators.
Throughout the performance, all five members maintained listless expressions, which I also found quite relatable. I wish I could live a life like that, without any need for expression. Every time I smile, I feel like an idiot. Apparently, I frown sometimes which causes people to ask me what's wrong, though most of the time I don't sense any change in the expression on my face.
All the expression one could hope for was already present in the oscillators themselves. These machines don't require any keys to be held down or strings to be plucked in order to make sound. You turn the knobs and, like Gyroids in Animal Crossing, they continue spitting out the sound you specified until the planet turns to ash. Sometimes they're whispering, and sometimes they're screaming. The frequencies go up and down, always in motion, unable to be pegged to 12 well-defined pitches -- five voices from another dimension, in dialogue with each other.
When I lived in America, I didn't really listen to live music much. None of the cities I lived in seemed to have very much of the kind of music I liked. It always seemed like there was just DJ stuff or indie rock stuff. It's difficult for me to relate to either of those. Maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough to find cool events. When I did go to shows, it was always stuff I wasn't super interested in, and I always felt a bit like an intruder.
It turns out though that when I actually like the music being played, despite the faintest sensation of belonging welling up in my heart for a few seconds at a time, that feeling of intrusion only becomes even more intense.
After finding Trigger's office, I spoke my name at the door (I'd made a reservation) and they gave me a commemorative Trigger guitar pick. I stepped into the room and pulled a stool over to a corner where I could sit. The oscillators were all set up, and the five members of the group were talking with the three or four other people there, who must have all been friends (more people would arrive later). I opened the book I'd brought and read it until the performance started. I listened to these five compositions, which somehow felt more personal and intimate being produced by machines one operates rather than instruments one plays. Something inside of me reacted to this music, the same way I've reacted to so much music alone at my computer, wearing headphones. Only this time I was sitting next to the people who made it. They were real human beings I could talk to, if I dared. Unlike music emanating from my computer, this music left no room for me to delude myself into thinking it belonged to me, or that I belonged to it. Almost everyone in that room had a greater claim to that music than I did. All I had were my own feelings, somehow derived from that music, trapped in the prison of my own stomach.
The last segment of the event was Maimai's own solo guitar performance. It was very loud. I didn't have a clear view of his setup, but it sounded like he had the HP function generators making some extreme noise which the sound of his guitar would interfere with. As many of these noise performances go, he started out slow, plucking one note at a time, just barely reshaping the noise, then gradually he played faster and faster.
The performance ended and I could hardly hear anything for a few minutes. I took the elevator downstairs and stepped outside. The sun was setting, and the air was filled with the smell of exhaust. I'm not sure if the world had changed, or if the temporary distortion of my hearing affected my mood, but I felt a desolation all around me, which only increased as the sky grew darker.
Now as I type these words, I'm sitting with five of Xiaoxi's friends at a table covered with meaty foods I can't eat. So once again I get to play the part of the weirdo awkwardly typing into his phone while everyone else eats. I'm already only tenuously a member of humanity, and it's stuff like this, where I refuse (for whatever reason) to do the things everyone else does, that make me feel even less human. I suppose it's my own selfishness that separates me from humanity, the same way my own fear keeps me from speaking to any of the musicians I've come to see in Shanghai.
As I was walking out of Trigger's office, I asked the guy from Torturing Nurse, who organizes all these events, where the bathroom was. He pointed down the hallway and told me to turn right. I said thank you. I suppose those few words served as my verbal social interaction for the day. Everything before that had been something akin to social interaction, but not really deserving of the name. Five musicians sat at a table and shared themselves with me, a total stranger to them. All I could do was accumulate feelings derived from their music, unable to return them to the source.
Edit (24/01/31): I discovered Xingchi has a video on his youtube channel of the whole performance. You can also check out Jia Xiao's website. Jia Xiao and Yifan of the Shanghai Oscillators Group translated this journal entry into Chinese!