Forged from the isolated, windswept hills of Wellington, New Zealand, melded by the breakneck BPM of modern China, Kaishandao (Mandarin for 'machete)' is Chengdu-based producer Kristen Ng, who creates a hard-hitting sound of complex origins and eccentric imperfections that chops a lost and found heritage into a playful mash-up of delirious dance music. We’re so excited to have her feature as #31 on our Tapes series, with this mix from a recent live show in Changsha - enjoy!

Driven by drum machines, guitar, cassette and FX, Kaishandao’s production teases the borders of minimal techno, electronica and lo-fi house, inspired by the DIY spirit and party stamina of Chengdu’s multiplex underground. Resonating with the push of the mosh and fluidity of the club, her sound explores the sonic realms between lo-fi and hi-fi, re-contextualizing a background of divergent influences and experiences for the open-minded dancefloor.

Kristen is also the co-founder of cdcr.live, an online platform that seeks to amplify music and culture from Chengdu and China worldwide. She also runs a multimedia blog and DIY events label Kiwese, with a focus on China-Aotearoa grassroots collaboration, featuring tours with artists such as Orchestra of Spheres, The All Seeing Hand, mr Sterile Assembly, WOMB and Strange Stains.

Tracklist

Homeland Tour - Live in Changsha (2021.7.24)

To the East Coast
二环路
The Bad Days Will End (Unreleased Secret Knives Rework)
Of Mythology
I (Unreleased)
II (Unreleased)

Hi Kaishandao! Thanks so much for joining us :) This is our first Live Mix! Can you let us know a bit about the venue and location where you recorded it? What was the space/show like!?

Hi - thanks for having me!

Yeah, I recorded this set at a small club called Cave42 in Changsha, tucked away down a little side street in the city centre. The club is a long, dark cave with a curved concrete ceiling and a giant skeleton slumped behind the booth. There’s no stage, so the performer and audience are on the same level. The owner of a local record store built a light cube installation for the show and we beamed some psychedelic visuals by my friend Lady Lazer Light onto the ceiling. A Changsha-based party label called MiddleGround invited me out to play for a weekend as part of the Homeland Tour — they often do Friday in Wuhan, then catch the high-speed train back to Changsha for the Saturday. It was my first time playing there and the crowd were a vibe - a mum even brought her toddler to the show and they were dancing together in the front row, too cute!

I was planning to leave for Shanghai the following day but there was a massive typhoon, so we ended staying an extra couple of days, pigging out on crayfish and going swimming in this dope infinity pool in the hills near the city. Result!

This music and artwork are so lovely on this Homeland EP. I love the journey. Can you tell us a bit about where you write music and what sort of setting you like to be in to really create your best music?

Thank you! I produced the album at home in Chengdu, based on material I had been performing in my live sets. I was in between places a bit last year — moved out of a long term flat into a room at Steam Hostel for six months, where I started recording the album. I found my current flat earlier this year, which I absolutely adore — it’s a loft with blue and yellow-painted walls, a sunny little kitchen, and a wooden staircase that goes up to my studio and sleeping area.

The creation of the album was a process of reworking and refining patterns I’d composed at home, taking them out to the club and back again, then seeing what worked and what didn’t. I'd listen back to the live recordings off my phone, then develop and practice the arrangements until they felt whole. Some elements came spontaneously during the recording process — the guitar part on ‘To the East Coast’ came late one night, I overdubbed it a few times super quietly in headphones so as not to wake the neighbours, then layered the different takes together. ‘Driving in Fafa’s Car’ is the only track on the album I can’t play live, I originally made it for my friends’ birthday with a bunch of detuned Machinedrum patterns chopped into audio clips and paired with reverbed guitar.

Actually, the working title for the album was ‘Clubland.’ As the tracks began to fall into place, my sister sent a photo of our grandparents to our family WeChat group. When I saw it, I knew it had to be the album art, and the title evolved into ‘Homeland.’ I think it is just as much a record for the home from the club as it is vice versa, two entwined yet self-contained sanctuaries.

Who's on the artwork? I looked at the credits and it says Por Por and Gong Gong. Although I see you've lived in a few places, I'm really hoping they are close friends/family. Anyway, very cute :) <3

Yeah, the album artwork is of my Por Por and Gong Gong, my maternal grandparents. We’d often drive up to the East Coast to stay with them and the extended family during the summer holidays, memories of backyard cricket, iceblocks and Cantonese cooking; waking in the middle of the night to the clattering of mahjong blocks and cackling aunties in the laundry. Aside from weekend yum cha, Por Por’s house was the only place I ever really heard spoken Cantonese. Before she passed, I remember her being so happy that I was studying Chinese at university. She really inspired me to move to China and reconnect with the culture, something that often fades over generations, especially for immigrant families.

My cousin took the photo outside their house in Gisborne in the summer of 1991. I love the analog, lo-fi grittiness of the photo and the washed-out, pastel colours. I guess that nostalgic sense of home and the journey of leaving and returning is something I’m trying to channel on the album.

A technical question for the heads :) what's your set up? Do you adapt it at all for playing live?

I recorded Homeland with my live set up - Elektron Machinedrum, Elektron Octatrack mkII, electric guitar, FX pedals and a walkman. There’s a bunch of tape samples that appear on the album, mostly from random old cassettes I found at opshops in Wellington, sampled, mashed and processed through the machines. The tangibility of punching a beat in on a sequencer, or flipping tape in a tape deck really appeals to me. I run everything through the Octatrack so I can apply filters to the drums, LFOs to the guitar, and glue everything together with a master compressor. The Octatrack is a beast - I currently use it to trigger various pad, breakbeat and vocal samples and re-sample the input from the Machinedrum. I thrash the crossfader a lot for hi/lo pass filters and transitions between patterns in my live set. It's the core of the set up, I've only really scratched the surface of its capabilities. The Machinedrum is my favourite - it has really banging kick drums and you can mess with the parameters in really dramatic ways to create various kinds of analog bleeps and synth sounds, tweak toms or hats into melodic pads and stabs, kicks into basslines, and so on.

Much of the album was recorded straight from the machines into a soundcard, which I later arranged in Ableton. Recording a jam as single audio track really captures a moment in time — it also forces you to do one or two good takes and then move on, rather than endlessly faffing about in the box. Though don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my fair share of faffing about, spending hours poring over some kind of elaborate sequence, then deleting everything afterwards haha! It’s all part of the process. Finding a recording workflow that worked for me took a long time, but once I relaxed into it, things began to fall into place. There are always going to be imperfections, but that’s the beauty of it. Accepting the things we cannot change, and all that.

It feels so awesome that you've had a tour already this year haha, mental. What was the atmosphere like, how were the shows?! Did they all go ahead!? Ah i'm so pleased that you got to do this, what a great thing to see after such a crazy what felt like a lifetime of covid and lock downs.

Yeah, the tour was mad - it was 18 shows across the country over four months. When I was booking the tour I knew I wanted to go on an adventure - it's fairly normal for bands to do long tours in China but less common for electronic artists or DJs, so I just wanted to push the boat out and see how many I could do. The club community across China has become really closely connected since Covid, there's a great circuit of venues out there and a lot of artist exchange between cities. Most of the shows were at clubs with DJ friends playing support, but there were a few exceptions like Gebi, a DIY experimental venue in a reconverted temple in Yiwu, where I played a long set for over three hours. I also went up to Inner Mongolia and played at some dive bars, as well as an impromptu campfire show at a Mongolian yurt community in the grasslands. China has an incredible high-speed rail system which makes it fairly easy and affordable to travel between cities. Unfortunately, Guangzhou and Yangjiang got canceled because of an outbreak in Delta cases in Guangdong, but I definitely plan to book them again for later in the year. Taking the album to Guangdong is really important to me as it's my ancestral homeland.

The turnouts at the shows were great, I'm chuffed! The atmosphere in some of the small cities like Xilinhot and Wenzhou was as lit as the bigger club shows in Beijing and Shanghai. When Covid hit in January last year, several cities including Chengdu went into strict lockdown for about two months. It was a really challenging time, with a lot of anxiety about what I wanted to do and how I was going to subsist. I’d just left my job at a music venue in December and was planning to find new work after Chinese New Year, but then everything shut down with this apocalyptic worldwide shitfest. When the clubs opened up again, I started getting invited to perform in other cities, which I hadn’t experienced much before Covid, so I had a lot more opportunities to perform and generate new music. Now, all around the country, we are seeing resident DJs develop into touring headliners, and new talent coming through as residents. I think it's been an incredible past 18 months for the scene - the clubs are thriving, local artists are getting booked and paid, and communities are regularly connecting with each other and traveling intercity. With international bookings off the cards, club schedules are full of Chinese talent, which has been an incredible shift for us to step up. In a way, Homeland is a product of that shift.

Best place you played on the tour?

Wow, so many good times. Playing at OIL in Shenzhen was really wild — it was the Cage Party, where they install a 5x5m steel cage in the middle of the club, then put the guest artists inside and shut the door. I played just after Deadly Cradle Death, an electro noise punk duo from Beijing. People were clinging onto the bars on all four sides, screaming and clanging on the chains, with white strobes and this huge banging soundsystem going off. I felt like that dinosaur being transported in a shipping container at the beginning of Jurassic Park. It was really surreal.

Just curious for myself as someone who doesn't do the live thing if you prefer it to DJing? I imagine it's a different experience of course.

Actually, I’m not a DJ. I started out as a guitarist who fell in love with the clubs, which then developed into this live project. I really enjoy playing live, though there’s always a string of things that can go wrong, especially when touring with bags of gear in carry-on cases and packing up in the dark after a few beers… lost power adapter, faulty MIDI cable, broken guitar string, machines crapping out for unknown reasons… its all part of it. Live music has been always such a huge part of my life and I feel grateful to be able to perform my own music now, especially given the Covid state of affairs. Though sometimes I envy DJs for being able to just rock up to the club with a USB and headphones, haha! Maybe someday…

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instagram.com/kaishandao

Interview by @armand.origins