A Study in Contradictions 混凝土丛林中的传道士

When I first sat down with Howie Lee in Beijing, I asked him about the EP he’d released a few days earlier. He blinked at me in confusion, and I began to wonder whether I had made some mistake. “Socialism Core Values III?” I said tentatively, and he laughed. “Oh, that’s garbage,” he said. “Just edits, simple stuff.”

I had, in fact, made a mistake: Socialism Core Values III was part of a trio of more casual mixtapes, full of tracks sampling music from grandiose socialist anthems sung in televised Spring Festival galas, 1980s Chinese pop hits, and old folk songs. The night before our meeting, I had watched him litter a DJ set at Beijing’s Zhao Dai club with these tracks and more like them. The audience had responded with joyous disbelief. At one point he played an old Chinese rock song he hadn’t touched up at all—just put the song on and stepped back, watching as the Chinese in the crowd roared the lyrics, and grinned widely, raising his arms to the ceiling and belting out the chorus with them.

The audience clearly found something culturally validating, even empowering, about hearing Lee update this type of music, so often regarded as cloying or tacky, into something danceable. But Lee’s point is that, when DJing, he plays a mix of experimental, underground music and old Chinese songs; in China, he says, this works better than anything else. “If you go to the UK, or anywhere else, you hear the local hits. We play Western hits too because we grew up with them—but we don’t want to abandon our Chinese memories.” When I mentioned that I had Chinese friends who rolled their eyes at such music, he laughed, and then grew serious. He admitted that he too had gone through a period of deriding the saccharine side of Chinese music but now sees such an attitude as unproductive hatred of his own country’s past. “At one point I thought, well, this kind of music is too much, but it’s who I am.”

Lee’s simple remixes reflect his audience’s nostalgia as well as his own. “So many times,” he recalls, “I’d get out of the club drunk at three a.m., get in a taxi, and hear these songs. I’d feel like crying, and not know why.” Sampling them now is a mark of respect: why would he sample a song he doesn’t like?

Lee initially came to DJing by way of punk and rock music. “Nothing has hit me harder than rock did,” he told me, pointing out the rock hits I’d heard him play the night before, the kind of thing he used to DJ in college parties. “I used to play bass in a punk band for a few years in university, we would play underground clubs, Mao Livehouse, places like that.” He left the band around the time he graduated college when they entered talks with a major Taiwanese label that Lee felt was too mainstream. “I didn’t want to sign to that stupid thing,” he says, waving a hand dismissively. “So I quit.”

It was then, around 2009, that he started DJing and producing in earnest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his past as a bass player, his 2010 release 0010111 00100000 010001000 0110001 01111001 0111011 is full of bass-heavy tracks that sound as though they belong in a club setting.  Coming up in the EDM trap wave, by 2012 Lee had gone so far as to secure an official remix for hip-hop great Snoop Dogg. Then came a geographical shift: feeling inspired by the scene in the UK, he moved to London to do a master’s degree in sound art. Starting in 2014, his tracks became cleaner and smoother, with finer detail, more groove, and a noticeable attention to the design of the sound.

But Lee says with a shrug that he found the UK scene less complicated than he had imagined, so rather than stay for very long, he learned what he could in a year and decided to bring it back home.  Upon his return to China, his label Do Hits Records solidified a reputation as a touchstone of China’s underground music scene, releasing volume after volume of compilation albums featuring a wide array of forward-thinking producers.

Listen to some of our Howie Lee’s earlier works below:

Over the years, Lee slowly started to add in more sounds inspired by Chinese music. Concerned that the West has undermined Chinese people’s confidence in their own musical traditions, he set out to “bring China back from Western cultural colonization.” Lee once described himself as a nationalist, though in our conversation he amends this to “civilizationalist,” noting that Chinese culture extends beyond the People’s Republic, as well as the malleability throughout the history of China’s borders, which have included very different people at different times. Still, he says, “We have to accept that we’re different, politically, historically, culturally.”He cites the theory that Westerners exist more as individuals, whereas Chinese people exist in a Confucian relationship to those around them. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We can still be friends.” This conviction has led him to absorb and replicate the sounds of China and the rest of the world. He does not shy from synthesizing these diverse sounds with the kind of music he was making before, but he does avoid privileging sounds of the West over the rest.

With his 2015 release Mù Chè Shān Chū, by far his longest project at the time, he incorporated more eclectic sounds from a wider range of influences. The listener hears not just punk and electronic, but also hip-hop, classical, folk, and a noticeable increase in Chinese strings and percussion. On his following two EPs, Homeless (2017) and Natural Disaster (2018), he honed an aesthetic that’s at times disturbing, full of distorted samples of folk music from China and its neighbors. He increasingly used vocals, but stretched and pitched them bizarrely, pairing them with strings and percussion edited to climax at unexpected times or in unexpected ways.

Listen to select tracks from Mù Chè Shān Chū, Homeless, and Natural Disaster below:

Technology has opened doors to more and more sounds, and Lee seems intent on using them all. His music is a thousand things at once, with familiar sounds finding a new expression. Lee says as much when speaking of his transformation of folk, which he describes as a “kind of a deconstruction—destroy the old stuff to build the new old.”

“A lot of people doing traditional folk music don’t like what I do. They’re really hardcore,” he says, with obvious relish. “I appreciate that so much. I think they should preserve their tradition because they come from that background. But I don’t come from that background. One day maybe they’ll understand me.” Lee’s folk sounds are thrilling and unsettling—clearly drawn from tradition but unfamiliar enough to make you sit up and listen.

The result is a global amalgam of sound, at once archaic and futuristic, pure and broken, melding ancient sounds with the noise of industry and the internet age. The contradiction is a reflection of a society struggling with how its cultural norms and traditions collide with technology, increased access to the rest of the world, and its own swift development. Given how well these elements blend in his music, there’s reason to hope they can do so in the rest of the world, too. Lee sees the contradiction as something that goes hand-in-hand with the immense amount of capital circulating in China. “It’s destroying a lot of stuff, but it’s destroying and rebuilding.”

Listeners can expect further explorations of these collisions to continue on Howie Lee’s new album, titled Tian Di Bu Ren. Lee’s shift from pure electronic to the inclusion of more natural sounds was on full display on the Do Hits 8th anniversary tour earlier this year. Though he mostly performed surrounded by keyboards and MIDI controllers before a huge screen full of computer-generated imagery, he also came to the front of the stage to sing unmic’d, kneeling with a stringed instrument on his lap. He recites for me a list of instruments he used in the recording process—“a lot of drums, jazzy drums, saxophones, a little bit of zurna flute, bass, guitar”—then adds that he’s been playing with programs on his iPad and more complicated editing. He’s even incorporated artificial intelligence software, which he feeds samples to manipulate and copy. “It generates this weird-sounding, wild, and crazy stuff. Something a human cannot make.”

He is also beginning to experiment more with lyrics. Previously, on tracks like “A Junkie’s Whispering” on the Homeless EP, inspired by a fascination with music in languages he did not know, he rapped in technologically pitched-down nonsense syllables. “I listen to music in other languages and have no idea what they’re saying but it’s so great—so why can’t I make something up? That was my point, for a while. But now I’ve started to write lyrics, I think lyrics can do good things,” he says. Thematically, some songs on the new album are inspired by ethnic groups such as the Miao living in China’s mountains, and by the influx of those people to the cities, where they live in the new mountains: apartment buildings. “They have this culture in the mountains in China where they sing to the women, back and forth—I’m kind of writing the ‘loneliness mountain songs’ for people living in the concrete jungle.”

At the time of writing, three singles have been released in advance of the album. The first, “Tomorrow Can Not Be Waited” [sic], featured a curious music video that explored the relationship between Daoism and virtual reality. Next came “Enter the Tigerwoods” and “21st Century Suicide,” both of which blur the lines between electronic music and more traditional recording techniques. They both display fascinating continuation of Lee’s work, but “21st Century Suicide” is especially striking as a three-act piece. Beginning with a single staticky bass note, it features Lee’s heartbreaking vocals and a mix of Chinese and Western instruments, and ends with a flute playing over a blast of synthesizers and frenetic drumming that build up and then fade out into a single breathy bass note that seems to disappear into the wind.

Listen to some of our favorite tracks from Howie Lee’s Tian Di Bu Ren below:

When I point out to Lee that his professed faith in the collective identities of culture and nation might be at odds with his idiosyncratic sound, he makes no attempt to reconcile these contradictions. He compares it to the search for the Way, as expressed in Daoism and Buddhism, and relates the story of one of Buddha’s followers asking him in confusion why he was telling people about the Way if it was truly so unexplainable. “The common argument is that once you start to talk about the Way, it disappears—the real Way is not something you can explain, but the Buddha still has to tell people it exists . . . This is the big conflict,” he says earnestly. “This is something I have to explore through my art, and the more I do it, the more I will understand.”

Lee’s music is something he creates to say what he can’t put into words yet, a manifestation of his search for the Way. He tells the story of his search to make sense of all the clashing elements of our modern world, complete with the sonic textures of everything from mountains to cities, from the real to the virtual, from the ancient to the futuristic. It’s a world so full of contradictions that, when one attempts description, it defies clear portrayal, slipping through the listener’s ears and ultimately beyond their grasp.

Tian Di Bu Ren can now be streamed on Apple Music, Spotify, NetEase Cloud Music, Xiami, and more.

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Contributor: Kiril Bolotnikov
Photographer: David Yen
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li