Yang
Fan – What Happened After 1,001 Nights (Genjing Records)
LP
Out
Now
8.5
/ 10
Chinese
experimentalist releases her debut album.
Call
this Avant Garde, call it experimental, call it a bag of chips if you like, but
the new album by Chinese solo artist Yang Fan is as weird a trip as you will
partake for quite some time. In the true
spirit of D.I.Y. albums, it was performed, recorded, mixed and produced at home
and is probably best listened to in isolation with the lights turned down low
so that you can fully immerse yourself in all of its peculiar goings on.
With
several instruments which include glockenspiel, brass bells and wailing cats,
the tone of the album is probably quite literally set. Transcending, psychedelic and generally
mind-blowing, each and every track holds something completely new. See! (Here Comes) The Witch! for instance
includes the sound of an air-raid siren and a baby crying.
Yang
Fan formed her first band at 15 and she clearly had ideas oozing out of her
head at an early age, the scope and originality is quite fascinating and the
album is worth listening to for that alone.
In terms of musical value, there are plenty of addictive and memorable
hooks and melodies, one of the many highlights being the standout track Autumn
In Your Town which contains some of the few words in the twelve tracks.
Based
around One Thousand And One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern, West and
South Asian Stories and known in English as Arabian Nights, it covers many
stories collated by travellers and scholars in the seventeenth century and
centres around the legendary Arabian queen Scheherazade (it’s a complicated
story, look it up).
The
feel of the album may be best summed up with the title Awake (Or Not?). Is it a dream, is it real or is it somewhere
in between? We may never know, but the
fact remains that it is one of the many fascinating tracks here as well as one
of the longest at a completely enthralling seven and a half minutes.
The
album closes with Song For Someone, a barren, empty end to the often unbelievable
dream world of Yang Fan. Whether you’d
like to stay there for any length of time is questionable, but it’s certainly
well worth a passing visit.
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