JASON KOPEC ///
RELEASE THE CHEERFULNESS, CHINA - GROUND UP 2 ///
NOISE | ORDER ///
WORDS: AW HENDERSON ///

China is difficult. Everything about it is challenging to approach. Its language is infamously complex, its history is monumentally hard to condense and its culture, geography and economy dwarf all its neighbors, and most countries on the other side of the world, in scope. Looking at a map of China, the viewer is struck by just how much there is, and how pitifully little hope there is for non-scholars of ever grasping the whole of China.

That's also how I feel, tasked to review the latest in Jason Kopec's Ground Up field recording series for Noise|Order records. Release the Cheerfulness, China is epic in a way The Mars Volta or Explosions in the Sky cannot hope to touch. It's laughable to even compare the contents of this disc with any of the other music you might find reviewed on this site. The collection clocks in at over an hour, and the tracks (all without titles, though Kopec himself graciously provided me with descriptive, though unofficial, names for each piece) range from 41 seconds to just shy of 16 minutes in length. More striking is the variation in sound presented here: traffic sounds from construction zones in Shanghai; traditional Erhu instrumentalists performing outdoors; Chinese television snippets taken completely out of context (not that I could understand them anyway); a montage of ambience recorded in a temple. You cannot appreciate the diversity of the listening experience presented here without sitting down and focusing on it. Unfortunately, this places the music on Ground Up 2 squarely out of the range of pleasure listening that too few ever venture beyond, but for those who do there is a uniquely rewarding world waiting for your ears.

Some tracks are musical in an identifiable, familiar way. The second song, which features a guqin, or seven-stringed Chinese zither, is quite melodic and pleasant. The skill of the instrument's player is evident, and the playing is clean, bright and encouraging. The track immediately following turns the zither-built mood on end as the listener walks in between the jangly echoes of bells of different sorts being played in the halls of a temple. The album itself arrived with almost no artwork, certainly none that reflected the locales from which these disparate sounds were gathered, but I have no trouble imagine the stone columns, arches, colorful decorations and trickling sunlight that must has accompanied this and many other tracks.

Kopec bills himself a musical ethnographer, and it's tempting to think of the music on Ground Up 2 as a record in the historical sense rather than the musical one. But there is music here, and it's quite good. Fans of outsider music hopefully won't wince at the (thankfully?) short recording of multiple, frankly very shrill voices singing in a park, after which the hardest chunk to swallow is either the five minutes of television recordings or the sixteen minutes of Beijing temple recordings. The later is actually far more engrossing than one would initially call it, provided all expectations of structure, progression or climax are left at the temple threshold. I don't presume to theological conclusions, but the general cyclical themes present in many Eastern religions and cultures are very much captured in the mournfully blown woodwinds and irregular – one could say desultory – nature of the bass drum, which ambles in and out of the song like a bear contented on honey.

Having taken only one semester of Chinese history as an undergraduate, I cannot hope to place these songs in their cultural context, and so I refrain from doing so in hopes of avoiding any inaccurate and potentially insulting gaffes. I know only that as an English speaker, China exists as one tremendously impenetrable Other in my consciousness (I'm not sure how I got a B+ in that history class), and I imagine that many Westerners share this point of view. Listening to Release the Cheerfulness, China would be a worthwhile listen for its educational value alone, then. Luckily, it's a worthwhile listen for far more reasons than that. Like a good fantasy novel, these recordings transport you somewhere in your mind that feels real to you, regardless of whether you are capable of visiting. Just be thankful that Jason Kopec got a chance to, because he came back with one heck of a souvenir.