When we meet Duck Fight
Goose’s Han Han to discuss
his band’s new album,
their first in five years, he’s just spent the previous week at
a camp for music producers in northern Europe, courtesy of the Norwegian
taxpayer. We envisage alternative talents from across
the globe pushing the boundaries
of modern music as part of a well-meaning, heavily government-funded
Scandinavian festival of creativity
and positive energy.
After all, Han is
one of China’s leading experimental
musicians, both through his solo
Gooooose project and as one
quarter of Shanghai future-rock
act Duck Fight Goose, who are among the
country’s finest bands – presumably
the credentials upon which the
organisers based their invite.
But no. It turns out the camp was
focused on producing pop hits for
major labels – the more commercial
the better. ‘It was like a factory, our
group produced maybe 40 songs
in four days,’ says Han. ‘But there
was no mask, they were very up front
about what they were doing.’
Han’s music isn’t always
known for its mass appeal, and
together with 33 (‘SanSan’), Panda
and drummer JB (who joined in 2013), he’s built a reputation for
uncompromising live shows. Yet here he was in
Norway charged with
cranking out hits for
the next generation
of Western pop stars.
Unsurprisingly, Han’s
involvement with the
potential hit-making
ended up being somewhat minimal. ‘I was
honest with them
and played them
some of my songs on
Soundcloud. They thought it was interesting,
but not exactly what they were after,' he says diplomatically. 'The other producers liked my stuff
though. A lot of the producers there
make these pop songs to help fund
their other, more alternative work.’
He laughs when we ask if the
experience has left him tempted
to go into writing pop hits for
mainstream stars such as Jolin Tsai
or Li Yuchun. ‘Maybe,’ he chuckles. 'To be honest, I was quite happy they
saw my style as too underground.
That means I’m doing the right
thing.’ Instead, Han’s focus right
now is on releasing a very different
kind of record.
Entitled Clvb Zvkvnft (German for
‘Club Future’), Duck Fight Goose’s
second album proper features packaging
that looks like a computer game and is accompanied by a
press release which
states that, ‘it’s almost
better to think of their
music as software,
undergoing iteration
after iteration, stack
upon stack, version
updates pushed
with the engineer’s
perfectionist fervour.’
For anyone
following the quartet’s
trajectory solely through their
recorded output, this second LP
is certainly a radical change – well
beyond a DFG2.0. Whereas their
2010 debut EP Flow was a relatively
straight-up math-rock record, and 2011’s full length Sports still
contained plenty of guitars, Clvb
Zvkvnft has more in common with the
likes of Jon Hopkins and Lindstrom
than it does with, say, Battles.
Yet this isn’t
exactly Duck Fight
Goose’s Kid A. The
quartet have been
hurtling toward a
futuristic electronic
sound for some
time now, with a new
gadget and effect
seemingly added every
time they’ve played
live over the past half
decade. ‘I wouldn’t call
this electronic music,
though it’s more like it;
there’s more elements
from that kind of music,’
says Han. ‘But each song
has its own style. There’s
no real reference point –
which is partly why it took so
long. There’s old-time disco,
IDM... it’s varied.’
It’s certainly a record
with a lot going on, from the
sci-fi soundtrack synths
of ‘ATM In Da Space’ and the
punchy, funked up march and
robotic recitations of ‘Army’
to the skittering, bassy
rhythms of ‘Metro Disco’.
Incredibly, this is the stripped back
version. When Han sent us a demo
of the record in January this year, it
was considerably more complex,
almost bewilderingly so.
Realising
this, Han has spent the intervening
months with producer Li Weiyu (of
Shanghai’s Juju Studios) stripping
back some of the layers.
‘At one point there were like 60
tracks in one song,’ Han says. ‘Now
it’s more like 30, or just 20 in some
cases. We spent a lot of time picking
out the most important elements
of the song and then focusing on
the overall design from there.’ This
gave stand out songs such as the
anthemic ‘Horse’ more room to
breathe, before the final master was
relayed through Li’s reel-to-reel tape
machine to ‘add a little grit’.
The resulting 12 track LP is
due for release on D-Force with a
special audio-visual show at MAO
Livehouse this month, also featuring
Dalian prog-rock act DOC. Working
with locally-based artist Neng Huo
(能火), DFG will be playing Clvb
Zvkvnft in full with dedicated visual
accompaniment manipulated and
remixed live.
‘Our music is quite full,’ says Han,
‘so we want the live show to be a
whole experience.’
It might not be
Scandinavian pop, but it might just
be a taste of the club of the future.
Check out a 'trailer' for the show below:
