Life

Boom, boom in a dark room

By Todd Balazovic (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-17 08:00

Above: French electronica maverick Vitalic will bring his acclaimed performance and lightshow to the capital for the first time. Below left: The crowd goes wild during an earlier Vitalic gig. Photos Provided to China Daily

Jue Festival will zap the capital with high-voltage electronica acts, Todd Balazovic discovers.

Beijing music lovers will be wooed by the eerie rhythms of one of the world's best electronica musicians this week, when the third annual Jue Festival kicks off in the capital.

The Jue music and art festival will feature the far-out French electronica musician Vitalic and local favorite Pet Conspiracy during the festival's biggest Beijing performance at Tango, formerly known as Starlive, on Thursday.

The festival will be staged in Beijing and Shanghai throughout March and into early April, and will feature performances by global and local acts.

"Jue is a Chinese word, which means 'to sense' or 'feel', or also 'to awaken'," said Nathan Davis, chief operations officer of Splitworks, who helped organize the festival.

"We would like to awaken these two cities to the significant young artistic talent that is bubbling under the surface."

More than 70 events are planned for the three-week bonanza, with performance art forms ranging from live comedy acts to spoken-word poetry.

One of the most notable names is internationally renowned electronica guru Vitalic - aka Pascal Arbez, when he's not manning the synthesizers. Vitalic is often compared to the likes of Aphex Twin and Daft Punk

Brought to Beijing by The M Agency and Splitworks, the one-man band that is Vitalic has well honed his live show, which fuses an abstract sound Arbez calls "electronica disco" with a mind-blowing lightshow.

"It's difficult to explain what I mean by disco. It's not pure disco, as you think of popular 1970s music. It's more about something with the clap, with the drums and with the melodies of the genre," Arbez said.

This will be his first Beijing gig. "I really don't know what to expect. I don't know how the audience will react. I hope it's going to be a pack of people who are open-minded," Arbez said.

Also making an anticipated appearance is Pet Conspiracy, whose gig heralds a step back into the Beijing music scene's spotlight after a short absence, during which the outfit toured the globe and recorded an album.

"In the beginning, we were actually planning not to have any gigs before the release. But when the M proposed to us we play with Vitalic, we couldn't say no," said Pet Conspiracy's singer Maria Santonastaso.

She said that while the core principles of her group's music are similar to Vitalic's, their full-band effect and onstage antics endow them with a very different style. Pet conspiracy's rough and rugged stage performances, coupled with the musicians' dissonant disco house punk mix, have earned the band local and global acclaim.

"We have a kind of dirty and slightly fierce style in terms of both music and performance," drummer Edo de Bastiani said.

Last year's Jue Festival attracted more than 26,000 people, and organizers said they hope to see the numbers surpass 30,000 this year.

"It should be the biggest yet," Davis said.