Cao Zhen

    Caozhen0806@126.com

    MORE than 20 musicians from 10 countries and regions will gather at the Second Tomorrow Festival next Thursday in Shenzhen, bringing a week of avant-garde music to the city.

    Organized by OCT-LOFT, the annual music festival will feature five nights of shows, two lectures and a documentary screening at B10 Live and A3+ in OCT-LOFT.

    Performing musicians are Chinese bands TAT and Nanyin Yayi Musical Association, Japanese band Sajjanu, Ghana artist King Ayisoba, Lithuanian band Metroscan, French harpist Hélène Breschand, Serbian alternative rock band Repetitor, French band Magma and French sound artist Tarek Atoui.

    Ayisoba will bring Ghana’s traditional kologo music and sing in his mother tongue and English. The kologo is a two-string guitar with a calabash gourd resonator, which is rhythmic and melodic at the same time. Ayisoba will be accompanied by drummer and dancer Rasta, who will fire up the crowds with traditional dancing, high jumping and powerful drumming.

    Nanyin Yayi Musical Association will play a mixture of traditional music from Fujian Province and modern music.

    Magma is a progressive group led by drummer/composer/vocalist Christian Vander that was formed in 1969. Combining free jazz, classical, blues, psychedelic rock and world music, the band’s music is often categorized as “heavenly.” Their music is strange and requires an open mind on the part of listeners.

    Breschand is a highly versatile musician who works across several genres, from contemporary music to jazz. Sensitive to the inclusion of multiple artistic disciplines such as visual arts, dance, film, light, text and theater activities, she develops a compositional approach, focusing on graphic scores.

    Apart from shows, fans can learn more about world avant-garde music by listening to lectures and watching a documentary at the festival.

    Chris Bohn, editor of The Wire magazine, will give a lecture about the U.K. magazine in the afternoon of May 17. Since the late 1970s, under his own name or as Biba Kopf, Bohn has written about alternative, independent or underground music and, occasionally, cinema from around the world for Melody Maker, New Musical Express, London’s City Limits magazine, Electronic Beats, and more.

    The Wire is undoubtedly the most important avant-garde music magazine in the world. Since it was founded in 1982, The Wire magazine has been chasing the pulse of alternative, experimental, avant-garde, underground or outsider music all around the world and across all forms of musical expression, from free jazz, improvisation and 20th century composition, through house, techno, jungle and grime, to industrial culture, black metal and noise. The magazine has championed a wide circle of musicians and artists, some of whose work has been widely condemned for its anti-mainstream or extreme nature. Over time, The Wire has developed its own critical position that sometimes puts the magazine at odds both with the cultures it documents and society at large.

    Bohn’s lecture “Repeat Offenders” will skip through 35 years of the magazine’s history, most of the time in pursuit of the pulse but every now and again being pursued by it.

    “Do It Together,” a 75-minute documentary directed by Alek Riquelme, will be shown May 16. “Do It Together” is an international collaboration between filmmakers, musicians, venues, graphic designers and many others who combined forces to create new media and organize events where the center goal is the support of independent work and collaboration between artists from different countries and styles.

    For the past few years, the “Do It Together” project has been located in Amsterdam and focused on organizing shows in the Netherlands and creating a documentary film about independent artists around the world.

    Concerts (B10 Live)

    8 p.m., May 14: TAT/Sajjanu

    8 p.m., May 15: King Ayisoba/Metroscan

    8 p.m., May 16: Nanyin Yayi Musical Association/Tarek Atoui

    8 p.m., May 17: Hélène Breschand/Repetitor

    8 p.m., May 29: Magma

    Lectures (A3+)

    2 p.m., May 16: “Ensemble of China Fire and Simply Life” by Landy Chang and Jeff Chia

    2 p.m., May 17: “The Wire: Repeated Offenders” by Chris Bohn

    Screening (A3+)

    4:30 p.m., May 16: “Do It Together” by Alek Riquelme

    Venue: B10 Live & A3+, North Area, OCT-LOFT, Nanshan District (南山区华侨城创意文化园北区B10现场和A3+)

    Metro: Luobao Line, Qiaocheng East Station (侨城东站), Exit A