For 15 years, Zhaoze have been giants in Guangzhou’s music scene, creating an inclusive sound that’s incorporated everything from Western classical to Canton folk. On the breathtaking new album Yesterday, Yes Tonight, they have crafted the world’s first electric guqin album. The hometown-inspired concept piece will be accompanied by a concert literally a year in the making - a December 12 extravaganza at Xinghai Concert Hall.
For their first-ever show in a classical concert hall, Zhaoze has recruited distinguished Hong Kong producer Kang Jaijun to oversee their Relativity of Space and Time show.
“The concept is related to physics. We will create videos and an atmosphere that resembles space. Science fiction is an inspiration for many of our songs,” explains frontman and guqin player Hoyliang.
“Of course, relativity also refers to relationships. Like those times when you’re a kid and instantly connect with someone over music. For this show, we will not only share the new album but more than a decade of our classic works.”
The award-winning group have changed drastically since emerging with their 2002 alternative-rock-indebted, self-titled debut.
“When we started the band, we had the ambition to create something unique,” Hoyliang explains. “To find a sound that suited us, we learned as many styles as possible and then began to eliminate the ones that didn’t work.”
While albums like 2005’s The City incorporated electronic and ambient elements, Zhaoze found their now trademark sound on their fifth album, Cang Lang Xing. The 2010 disc was their first to prominently feature the guqin.
“As society becomes more economically and culturally global, we feel that traditional culture still flows in our blood. We wanted to express this naturally and meaningfully,” Hoyliang says.
“Chinese classical aesthetics are very unique and worth exploring. More young people are becoming interested in this, but are reinterpreting it in their unique way.”
Subsequent albums like the Western classical-influenced 1911 and 2013’s Yond have followed this mix of ancient and modern. However, for the just released Yesterday, Yes Tonight, the band recorded with an electric guqin for the first time.
For years, a staple in the band’s live shows, Hoyliang compares the instrument’s impact to the electric guitar. “Hopefully it will open a new window and bring more possibilities,” he says.
Praising it “for giving me more freedom as an arranger and making me feel more part of a rock band,” Hoyliang uses a cello bow to saw the electric guqin, a la Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin, on five of the album’s songs. The instrument is filtered through several effects, producing the first recent Zhaoze recording to incorporate the rock influences of their early days.
Yesterday, Yes Tonight is the band’s latest concept album. Set in a city, the seven songs relate the days of different people from sunset to sunrise.
“Guangzhou was very influential to this album,” Hoyliang says. “We live and breathe this city and want to deliver that to this album. ‘In My Closing Eyes (Stars)’ has lyrics in Cantonese and Mandarin, while we have another song in English. We wanted to portray Guangzhou’s multilingual environment.”
In an accompanying video, the band perform the album on a rooftop with visuals from the city interspersed. The album, video and concert cap off an ambitious year for Zhaoze, but Hoyliang admits there’s more to come soon. A companion album is in the works which the group intend to release in the first half of next year.
“If Yesterday, Yes Tonight is about modern life in the city, this disc will be more pastoral and archaic,” he says. “We’ve rented a house in Kaiping where there are beautiful rustic gardens and ancient watchtowers with Chinese and Western influences nearby. We’re going to record there and shoot another video so that can people have a clear vision of the concept.”
> Sat Dec 12, 8-10pm; RMB180-380 (RMB680 for VIP tickets). Xinghai Concert Hall, tickets.
> Yesterday, Yes Tonight and Zhaoze’s other albums are available at zhaoze.bandcamp.com.
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