8 posts tagged “blog”

(See how much I improved in vector drawing?)

I've been preoccupied with self-enlightenment and business-related matters. I'll return to the J-Rock fandom after this week. <3 I know I owe people/parties posts. Will sort things out soon enough.

Since writing about the (first) Chinese visual kei band Silver Ash (official homepage) more than a year and a month ago, I never did make good on my promise to post part 2 of their Sohu interview. The truth is, I had begun working on it after finishing translating part 1 of the interview. However, I soon become frustrated with the massive! amount of ambiguities in the transcript. Everything from the lack of subject, tense clarity, and context, possibly exacerbated by the online chat interview format, discouraged me and I pretty much abandoned that project.

Recently, my interest in Chinese rock music resurged and I plan to write more about the subject in upcoming posts. By chance, I once again stumbled upon the Silver Ash vocalist Ling's blog. Looks like many things have happened since last October when I first wrote about the band. According to Wikipedia:

It was last heard that they were still without a record label, as well, but were given various offers from Japanese record labels, such as Avex Trax. They were previously signed to Toshiba-EMI, but were released from the contract again due to government problems.

In the most recent news, Silver Ash held a live on August 30th (2006) with Japanese band, La'cryma Christi, particularly to be viewed by the record label SWEET-CHILD.

Their most recent release is the PV for a track named 海的女儿 (pinyin: Hai de nu'er). The title of the track roughly translates into Daughter of the Sea.

In addition, as recently as this September, Silver Ash had performed along with Japan's rice and Gram Maria in Beijing.

Alas, Silver Ash is terribly ill-fated. The departure from their record label in 2004 also marked the end of the band's career pinnacle. Even though the members were forced to leave the band and despite the setbacks and traumas the vocalist Ling faced, he still was able to keep Silver Ash alive after 3 years of unbelievable hardship.

As I began to browse through Ling's blog entries, I was continuously struck by his strength of character, his perseverance. I've come to admire his relentless struggles against one setback after another. No matter how beatdown he may be, he still retains that glimmer of optimism and smiles in the face of adversity.

I decided to translate one of his recent entries and present it here. In this particular post, Ling speaks of his life outlook and talks in detail of how Silver Ash's ascent to success came about. For all of us who face challenges of all forms in our daily lives, here's the take of one musician on his experiences.

I've been meaning to post this... but didn't realize the last entry on our band history was made three months ago. Many things have happened in these past three months; they have altered the course of my life completely.... So I haven't had the mood to write long and involved band history discussions.

The "Tower" tarot card (1) Xiaobai read for me on the train to Sichuan (2) had clearly been taking effect on my life... My entire second half of the year, family, life, and work had all reached their nadir. The traumas took place one after another.

I still insist on not believing in fate; I insist on believing that one can control one's own destiny. So, I told myself that the fate dictated by cards can the changed by one's own determination. But I had forgotten, no matter how hard I fought, I could only influence my own decisions. Sometimes, events and people are outside of your control, but the decisions and choices derived from them have profound impact on your life, your happiness, even your faith in humanity. Now... at the time my life is about to enter the next yearly cycle, I think of three months ago, when things had yet to come to pass. It's with hope, that I think back on the band's history. It's with hope, that I face my future. I now continue to write about that time, when my sole focus was on the band's future... when I was bursting with excitement and creativity for music.

After "Lunar Eclipse Night", the band's collaboration with Youth.cn came to an end. But the biggest change to the band came when our guitarist Nancy made the decision to study abroad in Canada. The band once more reverted to a four-piece ensemble. Losing a guitarist meant that the band, in order to maintain the richness of the sound when performing live, must play some pre-recorded music. For our drummer, this was a big challenge, because he must precisely match his rhythm to the recording. For the longest time, the band's practice solely focused on perfecting this. During this period, I mostly worked with Lucy to tweak the finished songs, though most of the work that went into changing the compositions fell on him. But I, who initially was not familiar of this area, gradually began to acquire the knowledge of whole-piece music composition and verse structure as a result of working on revising the songs.

One day I went online, and received an E-mail....

It was signed "Lu Bo, Scream Records".... (3)

It was the first time a record label had come to us, yet our performances to date only added up to four or five lives total.

I was so excited. Even though at the time I didn't really like Scream Records, I thought that fortune had finally beckoned, its gate was about to swing open for us.

I had already written about our acquaintance with Lu Bo in the blog, so I won't repeat myself here. Anyway, our three-year collaboration with Scream Records formally commenced. From a new-born band, we slowly began our ascent to maturity and style.

When the band first signed, because our operation and style are completely different from the label's other bands, every decision needed discussion with all involved because no one had any previous experience. The first photo shoot was going to be a test run with makeup, but somehow this set that we spent a night shooting became the most widely circulated, most widely recognized photos of the band during its early period. Even now, the most commonly seen photos of the band found online are all from this set. In the end, the first official photo shoot with official costumes wasn't really used, though this set of photos appeared on the band's first single.

Because we never wanted our band to become overly feminized, for that photo shoot, we all had prepared black costumes. But at the shooting session, Lucy insisted on wearing a white gown. Seeing the makeup artist also supporting him, I backed down. In the end, I think it's this "how can they tell if I am he or she" (4) white gown image that first, on a visual level, began to propel Lucy to his later immense popularity.

Soon, we released the "Organum" single which included the band's self-recorded demo. Additionally, the pre-order numbers broke Scream Records's CD retail record. And it was this single that changed the face of China's rock bands' product release structure, for a mere three-track CD with a simple video was able to compete with ten-something-track albums on the record store shelves.

- Ling, Silver Ash

(1) In tarot card reading, the Tower symbolizes destruction and loss.
(2) 四川 (Sichuan) is also spelled Szechuan or Szechwan. It's a province in western China, famous for its spicy cuisine.
(3) 嚎叫唱片 (Scream Records) is a sub-label of Jingwen Records and one of the major rock, punk and new metal labels. It's the biggest alternative rock label in China and committed themselves to sign every year several bands and release at least 10 records (from: Rock in China wiki).
(4) 安能辨我是雌雄 (An neng bian wo shi ci xiong). This is the last line of the "Ode of Mulan". Thanks to Disney, most people have a general idea of the story of the young lady who disguised herself as a man to serve in the army in her father's place. The translation was from The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry, by Hans H. Frankel, Yale University Press, 1976. The full translation can be found here.

Dear readers, if I may bring your attention to the bottom of the left panel of this blog, I now have a message box up. So, if you don't feel like registering with Vox, you can still leave your comments and other related/unrelated messages on Cbox. Feel free to use it to yell at me for slacking off updating this blog. I don't do it on purpose, seriously.

Hopefully, this Cbox can make the blog more interactive. I'd love to get inputs from you all.

I wish I can move the entire panel up so you guys don't have to scroll down. But Vox doesn't have this functionality right now. >_>

And on an unrelated note, the domain auralcandy.com now points to this blog. If you're too lazy to type the "vox" part of auralcandy.vox.com, feel free to use the domain instead.

I'm really not dead!

Real life has taken priority and I'm in the process of sorting everything out. My 2.5-month-stay in New York City has ended and I'm now home. Though, it's (highly) likely that I'll be returning to NYC next year, this time for taking up a job offer.

Now, I'm trying to figure out how to get an apartment in Midtown Manhattan or Upper East Side without going bankrupt from the outrageous rent. Even though I won't move until around summer of next year, I still need to begin research on how to land an apartment for under $1500 a month. Is it even possible for Midtown and Upper East Side, two of the highest cost areas of NYC? How about with southern exposure, laundry, (elevator), doorman thrown in? Should I put up an looking-for-roommate ad? >_<

I swear I'll get back to blogging about beloved J-Rock soon. Just... let me figure out my life right now. ^_^;;

I work 10-11 hours daily and am dead exhausted every night. I really want to talk about the latest J-Rock releases, but am too tired to use my brain cells to write entries. I should really be replying to people' comments on this blog, but I don't have the energy to do it one-by-one. Argghhh...!

I just listened to the latest KISAKI Project feat. Jui's single, Byousha Kaze. Once again, I fell victim to Jui's alluring voice. I just can't resist that man's charms, can I?

In other news, Elec has posted all 4 of his mini-interviews with female visual kei band Danger Gang along with another excellent live report. Go read it/watch them! The special shout-outs to Go and Paul are awesome. You two (three) lucky men!

Jimi, your life rocks. You wanna swap your life with mine? You can come to NYC, and I'll go to Saitama. XP

La-dee-da, I'm signing off, am going to bed now so I can stay awake for my 4 meetings tomorrow. X___x

I'm leaving tomorrow for NYC. Not sure how often I'll be able to update this blog from next Monday on. I can either be struck down by work and be dead throughout most of the upcoming weeks. Or, work won't be too bad and I can continue to write in here regularly. Or, maybe I'll be so distracted with hanging out with old friends and going out that I won't give an arse about updating here. We'll have to see.

Though, I'll try to write during the weekends.

Wish me a safe flight.

As for that Dir en grey live in NYC, I've no idea if I can make it. If I do, you can expect a live report from me. Again, we'll see.

You know, I've been wondering why recently I'm seeing more bands adding me to their neighborhoods. I just chucked it to coincidence until I saw the Vox Team announcement. Looks like Columbia Records UK and RCA have made it so that now the only way to submit demos to them is through Vox!

I had long seen the potential in Vox's music blogging capabilities and this was exactly why I had created this particular blog on the Vox platform back during its beta phase. I'm happy to see that Vox is seizing this unique competitive advantage to generate business opportunities. I've mentioned a while ago that the current top blogs on Vox are all dedicated to music. Looks like Vox had taken notice of this as well. Now if only the Japanese music record labels would pay more attention. They should realize that the current top Vox music blogs are all Japanese-oriented. Vox can actually be used to as a conduit to reach both the international fans and the international music industry!

And to those bands in my neighborhood, welcome to Vox and nice to meet you all. While I solely blog about Japanese rock music, I'm also keenly interested in how you all are doing in building your respective careers. Since I may one day jump industry and cross over to music from the business side, I love to gain some insights from you artists' perspectives. I hope to learn a great deal from you guys. Good luck with your endeavors and let's be good neighbors!

According to Alexa, Japanese musc blogs make up a significant portion of the overall visitor traffic on Vox.

Take a look at Vox.com's Alexa stat page, screencapped in this post.

Of the top 8 blogs on Vox (excluding Vox's own development blogs), 6 of them are J-music-centric and 1 occasionally mentions Japanese music. And of the same 8 blogs, 5 either solely focus or heavily focus on the Japanese boy band Arashi. Who knew Arashi is this loved!

And I'm honored to find Aural Candy being one of the 8 blogs on the ranking list. I had no idea this blog has gotten so popular! Wow. O_o