Last summer I was invited to perform a Living Room Tour concert in Beijing. It’s a project I do at the home of an audience member, or any place where they live. Yes, it’s certainly true that some people may have no place to live – in which case it could also be somewhere outdoors, or a friend’s couch. Normally I ask a few other musicians to join in, as I feel too much responsibility when facing a small audience so closely for an hour or so. So I visited the artist Ake at a tiny art space located in a traditional and local kind of neighbourhood in the centre of Beijing, and I asked her if she would perform in one of these concerts. She agreed without hesitation. Then I asked, “So who else should we invite? I feel someone outside of the music scene would be nice…” She looked at a young man who was sitting in the corner and answered with a little hesitation: “How about He You here? He’s an artist and returned a few months ago from studying in London.” And why not? I already had a good feeling from his presence there – the way he talked and his bearing. So we became a team.

When we visited the ‘venue’ – that is, the apartment – a few days before the concert, I saw a printed sheet of A4 paper posted in the elevator. It was an announcement from the local police station: “Dear house owners, please don’t rent your apartment through Airbnb or similar sites without legal registration. We have already arrested several people who have done this.”

Oh, that’s strict! The warning was still there a week later when we held the concert (or party, as all the audience were friends). There were nine people in the audience plus three performers. Fortunately, no one was using Airbnb. The audience member who invited me, ie, the organiser, asked us to leave our shoes inside the door. “I don’t want to attract attention by holding such a ‘mass gathering’!” Ah yes, there is a law against that too. But how many people make up a mass gathering? Four? Six? One hundred? We started to discuss this, but no one knew the exact number, and no one had heard of anyone who had been arrested for holding a party. Anyway, we just agreed that we should not leave too many shoes outside the door.

It was a nice afternoon and we didn’t disturb anyone. The loudest noise we made was some gentle applause. The second loudest sound was He You using a small paper shredder he found in the room. He had made scans of the hands of everyone present and printed them out using a small printer/scanner which he also found in the room, and then fed these into the shredder. The third loudest sound was Ake taking a shower in the bathroom while we sat in the living room with her clothes. Then I asked the audience to choose a word or phrase from a book I found and whisper it to their neighbour, who would then whisper it to the next person, until the words became confused [a version of the game Chinese Whispers]. We had fruit, nuts, and wine in between these noises. And whisky. Then we all left for dinner with a bottle of Chinese Baijiu. That’s all.

We didn’t use loudspeakers, because only ‘real’ venues have loudspeakers. Why bother to upgrade a home into a venue? For the same reason, there were no musical instruments either. But this is not a rule: sometimes instruments have been used for the Living Room Tour. Why should we be so strict?

Once, as I stepped out of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, I saw some graffiti that said: “No system is good except the sound system!” Maybe my memory is not accurate – especially after visiting Christiania – but I’m sure that the sentence went something like that. Anyway, it got me thinking. I thought that it was wrong, actually, because a sound system is also a system. How is it an exception? There must be a contradiction in using one system against another system. Is there a good system and a bad system? In any case, I started to think about the point inspired by the sentence, about all these systems…

There is more potential for the sound systems in China to be bad. Especially if you go back ten years when rock bands were not so commercially successful, and not to mention the art spaces, coffee shops, bars, and bookstores that held informal performances. They could be worse than the nightmare JBL home speakers I’ve seen used for a kind of very expressionistic electronic music in the US (which I’ve talked about before in this column).

I think the point made by that graffiti on the wall outside Christiania is that the sound system sometimes depends on the social system. If you want a good sound system you’d better go and ask for funding or support from AT&T or SONY, or a nice culture committee; otherwise pay for it out of your own pocket, as some of the venue owners in Japan have done. I don’t want to play crystal-clean sound on a pair of 100 Euro speakers and then blow them up. So my options are a) find a position with the Chinese Electronic Music Centre of the Central Conservatory of Music, but I doubt they would accept someone like me; or b) give up on the dream of crystal-clean acousmatic aesthetics. Of course, some people have other options – I have no problem with that. I also have no problem with acousmatic music and 128-channel concerts. On the one hand I would vote to stop funding the Wiener Staatsoper in order to give the money to noisecore artists, but I also have no problem with Beethoven. It is just that at this moment I myself have no other options.

Once in Seoul I was chatting with my colleagues in the group FEN [Far East Network]. Someone mentioned a rumour about the underground music scene in North Korea: “They say that there are punk bands in North Korea!” And I had a brainwave: “So, they must be acoustic punk?”

That must be a nice genre! Acoustic punk won’t depend on loudspeakers, systems, or electricity, and maybe there isn’t even an audience. Oi!

For people who are too old or lack the energy to play punk rock, I suggest you could just blow up some pathetic 2" JBL home audio system to get a similar effect. Playing some quiet lo-fi music on it can be nice, just don’t do harsh noise or regular electronic music on such poor loudspeakers. But many underground musicians are too modest to expect or demand better loudspeakers at their venues. To delude yourself into imagining that you will get a big and clean sound on what are basically paralytic speakers creates only more victims of the system. (By the way, I have tried some small JBLs for feedback work and I can say they make fantastic distortion before they die. I don’t know if this could be an option c?)

The tiny art space where I met Ake and He You closed a week before I wrote this. It ran for ten years, surviving several serious setbacks, such as a government inspired initiative to block all the doors and windows of the small shops and restaurants in the area. Two years ago, another venue where I used to regularly organise concerts with friends since 2014 changed hands and became a fancy wine club. Invitations from museums in the US have been postponed, and some festivals in Europe have been cancelled and/or their funding has dried up. Museums and festivals on other continents are the kind of systems I don’t really belong to, but sometimes I can hitch a random ride with them. This is my situation. So, while waiting for the next invitation or new venues to appear I have spent some time with friends to develop our own unplugged electronic music, or music with no instruments, at various homes and studios.

Some people seem to expect the end of the world. Or the Third World War. They are sharing information about the equipment, food and self-organising skills needed under these extreme conditions. Sometimes I have similar anxieties. What if Donald Trump bans all of us nonsensical Chinese artists from visiting? What if European organisers grow tired of writing funding applications for long distance flight tickets? What if the Chinese economy continually heats up and consequently people have no time to waste? Or simply, what if I get reported for being harmful to the almighty loudspeakers? And, after all, what if the audience is totally uninformed about the context and history of this music? The world will end, sooner or later. But I’m not preparing for that. I have to do something with my own anxieties right now.

Special thanks to Edward Sanderson for his help with this piece.