Wei Wei, a.k.a VAVABOND, laptop noise/improvisation musician.
Also member of the psychedelic noise group “VagusNerve” and free improvised duo “Mind Fiber”.
Process meaningless and fragmented sounds in a nonlinear-time approach.
It's been several years since I firstly adopted inductors into my music making. Inductors are sensors for electric currents. By using them as sound pickups, I got interesting sounds and boring sounds from all kinds of electronic equipment, such as mobile phones, digital cameras, laptops, lights, plug boards, elevators, etc. The stronger and the more complex the electric currents there are, the more abundant and varied the sounds will be.
In this album, I mainly included electronic equipment related to my daily work for improvisation, my old laptop, my phone, my mixer, etc. It is impossible to get them totally under control – what I got was quite possible not what I had expected. As sensors, inductors are very sensitive. Temperature, humidity, the angles I pointed the inductors, the content I read on the phone, the brightness the digital camera shot… all rendered different outcomes. I mean, you can generally know what you are looking for and how you can get it, but you cannot predict accurately about what they will give you. Just imagine the electric currents that are running through tens of thousands of chips with in them, which makes them “sound”. I’m not saying that those electric equipment involved in this album are livings with intelligence, but they are equivalent as contributors and collaborators. We are on the same level shoulder by shoulder when facing to the sounds, the noise, the void.
Through such a mechanism, I got just the “right” thing. The magic of improvisation. But who made it? Me? Or the inductors and the electronic equipment? Or some higher existence beyond me and them?
In Stanislaw Lem’s story “Non Serviam”, the conscious software reaches a level of complexity of thought very similar to humans till the point of wondering about their hypothetical creators. When being asked about whether the conjunction of these incoherencies might not be love, it (he) replies, “To one who does not exist surely it is not possible to do either a service or an injury; and if the Creating One; in His omniscience, knows beforehand that the one created will be grateful to Him and love Him or that he will be ungrateful and deny Him, He thereby produces a constraint, albeit one not accessible to the direct comprehension of the one created. For this reason nothing is due God; neither love nor hate; nor gratitude, nor Rebuke, not the hope of reward, nor the fear of retribution. Nothing is due Him. …One begins to suspect that maybe He is not almighty. A God not almighty would be deserving of feelings akin to pity, and indeed to love as well; but this, I think, none of our theodicies allow. And so we say: We serve ourselves and no one else.”
The Doom Trip label never misses, and the latest LP from the genius Heejin Jang is a trip into thrilling industrial terror. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 30, 2023
