在躁动的瞬间，人们在僻静处寻找灵感的影子。生活里没有人看见它，即使它在身边，你仍无动于衷，在大街上，伴着嘈杂，你仍感觉寂寞。

用俗事驱逐寂寞，剩下的依然是寂寞，似乎这个时候你会不经意依赖你的眼睛和直感。时间是一个顺接器，它会接通你的神志，让你飘移现实。

我所欣赏的很多资深艺术家，往往能够轻松驾驭自己的灵感来源，能从身边的平凡生活中提炼出灵感。很多人在现实和梦里徘徊，他们保持着最初的纯真，受好奇驱使，不断否定生存的状态。他们中可能有人已经丢弃了初衷，但仍然能在凡俗生活里保持充实的想像力和一颗平静而好奇的心，让通俗生活中的一切变成作品里新的原动力。他们的作品因此真实而动人。

——络绎

If there’s one person to whom Luoyi and I most owe a debt of gratitude for helping us with our musical career, that person is Zhang Yadong.

In late December, 2006 Luoyi and I went to Beijing with a collection of a half-dozen songs we had recorded at Mark Rubel’s Pogo Studio in Champaign. Our goal was to return from the trip with a record contract, one that would justify quitting our other jobs and working full-time on our musical partnership. In preparation for this, Luoyi had cold-called dozens of record labels in Beijing, where most of the entertainment and media businesses in China are headquartered.

Among those she called was Dong Music International, the newly formed record label of Zhang Yadong. Yadong is best known as the songwriter and producer of many of Wong Faye’s successful hits. We hopped into a cab one chilly afternoon, right around New Year’s (2007), and rode to an apartment complex across town. We were ushered into the all-white office of Yadong, who had not yet arrived for our meeting. The office was obviously brand new; price tags still dangled from the furniture, and the paint smelled fresh.

Yadong arrived after a few minutes, out of breath. He invited us to the recording studio downstairs. The studio had been built below ground level, and was wonderfully quiet. The equipment racks had a mix of the best new digital equipment and vintage analog pieces. Enormous Genelec monitors were soffit-mounted and angled toward the mix position. Yadong put our demo CD on and listened through the songs.

A few days later he invited us to dinner at the Pure Lotus. He arrived with a beautiful young singer / writer / actress at his side. She had recently signed with his label. After dinner we went to one of Yadong’s apartments. The lower level of the apartment is a sprawling recording studio, chock full of instruments and audio gear of all kinds. He proposed to sign us, but he wanted to use a number of the songs from our demo recording for his other artists.

Yadong’s company is both a record label and a production business; the label employs arrangers and recording engineers who make recordings for pop stars and would-be pop stars day in and day out. Yadong is a legendary producer in Asia and commands quite high fees for his songs, arrangements, and production. This is very valuable in a business whose primary revenue model — sales of recordings — has been gutted by piracy. Many pop stars in Asia (perhaps it’s true generally, I don’t know) can’t and don’t write their own songs. They are singers and, in effect, models. So it falls to their record label to do all the musical work for them, including securing songs, arranging them, producing the vocals, and so on. But many of the record labels don’t have songwriters and arrangers on their staff who are capable of reliably producing hit records. If they have enough money, they look for someone like Yadong to produce the recordings for them. Indeed, if an individual has enough money, they can, in effect, buy a recording contract in China, by paying the label for the full costs of producing, releasing, and promoting a record. Yadong and other Chinese producers with a proven track record are able to make a handsome living from this kind of work.

(On a follow-up visit to Yadong’s studio, Luoyi saw a well-known Chinese singer recording a new single. Yadong was visibly impatient with the music, and paced around nervously during the session. It wears on these producers that they have to listen to and produce music they dislike for a living. Like many of the best producers we have met, Yadong has refined and wide-ranging taste in music and devours every CD he can get his hands on. He lights up with a huge smile when he hears really good music. The reality of the Chinese music business is that most of his days are spent working on music in which he takes no real pleasure. A few months after this follow-up visit, we heard the new single playing on the radio as we rode around in a cab. Yadong had produced another hit record.)

Zhang Yadong’s offer to us — to sign us as artists, but to use some of our material for his other artists — took me by surprise. I wanted to focus first and foremost on our own recordings, and I didn’t especially want the added load of writing, and probably arranging as well, songs for other artists. I was worried that, when push came to shove, our own recordings would take a back seat, and that we would find ourselves on the production side of the music business without every having had the chance to produce and release music of our own. It was in large part for this reason that we intially signed not with Yadong, but with Zhu Shu.

I later came to see that my reaction was wrong, and that my ideas about the best way to thrive in the Chinese music business were naive. The production side of the music business is one of the few lines of music-related work that can yield a reliable and steady income. No one can predict whether a particular recording will be a success, but it is a safe bet that no money will be made from sales of even a successful recording since it can be copied and propagated around the Internet freely. Live shows make money, but even this is dicey business, especially in China, as the Chinese market does not support high ticket prices for any but the most famous artists. China is saturated with live shows, and it’s difficult to draw attention to yet another live act without tremendous promotional effort and expense. Music production, on the other hand, is a relatively steady business. The equipment and skill that are needed to produce one’s own recordings can easily enough be turned to making others’ recordings. The production side of the business is also where all the creative control lies. On top of this, I had not anticipated how much musical material we would end up discarding in the course of recording our own CD. We left a trail of dozens of unused songs and discarded arrangements, trying to settle on a collection of songs for our CD that held together and that make a coherent album. It makes no sense to pass over the chance to make some use of this material. We ended up licensing a number of the songs we wrote along the way to other artists.

At the end of the day, we ended up leaving Zhu Shu (on friendly terms) and signing with Yadong. Our initial misstep, and the change of record label, cost us the better part of a year.

I had been impressed with Yadong from the very first, not least because of the many beautiful recordings he made with Wong Faye. We Zhi Ai Mo Sheng Ren (I Only Like Strange People) is surely one of the best-written pop songs to come from Asia. (This song was originally recorded by Yadong himself, and was later covered by Wong Faye.) Over time, I came to be even more taken by his enormous talent and energy. On one visit to our home, Yadong asked to listen through the collection of songs I was working on. These recordings were raw, usually nothing more than a piano background and a melody played on a synthesizer. It has been my experience that very few people, even music professionals, are able to reliably identify the potential in songs when they are presented in such a raw form. Most often, it is necessary to present a nearly finished arrangement before you can get a reliable reaction and meaningful criticism. Not so with Yadong. He is able to listen right into the center of a song, to the raw melody, chords, and the native groove, and to see the potential before any arrangement has been made.

Yadong has the energy of an entrepreneur and the sensibilities of an artist. It’s impossible to meet him without being struck by how dynamic he is, and how tirelessly he works at the business of music. Like many musicians, he’s a night person. Once while we were eating with him at 3AM in one of his favorite all-night restaurants, I asked him what meal this was. “Lunch,” he said.

It will soon be two years since we met Yadong. Our first CD is now being mixed in the same studio where he listened to our demo, two winters ago. Because he is so busy we see him relatively infrequently, but he remains the most important person in our musical life.

Many thanks, Yadong!

by Luddy

My partner Pan Luoyi, she was born and raised in a musical family in Shanghai. Her father, Pan Nai Shi, is a well-known singing teacher, so much so that we regularly meet musicians who have studied with him or who have worked with singers who have studied with him. Her sister Sissy was a professional singer. To my ear, Sissy’s sound is typical of the female vocalists one hears in Shanghai’s night clubs: powerful, technical, with a sound that can easily cut through the throbbing beat of a band. Luoyi’s style is softer and fuller, and owes more to feeling than to technique.

If you have to pay your dues, then Luoyi has paid them several times over. After graduating from a local art and music college in Shanghai, she tried her hand briefly at teaching but concluded quickly that it wasn’t for her. She set out instead to become a professional singer. She says her first gig paid her 7 RMB per night. She was fired, found another gig, was fired again, and so on, until she learned to sing.

By the time I met her, she was inundated with offers from agents who wanted to book her. She was forever squirming to turn away offers without damaging her relationships with these agents. She made a handsome living. On the other hand she worked hard. I remember many weekends when she was booked for three sets at around 6pm, and another three sets beginning at 9 or 10 pm. We would fly across town in a taxi rushing her from one gig to the next.

Now and again she would take me to one the clubs where she had first worked. One was a dance hall straight from the 1930s: a slightly raised stage where the band played, with a large dance floor in front, and small round tables ringing the room. Couples danced to cornball tunes set to rat-a-tat drums and honking saxophones. The music was straight from the Peace Hotel, and indeed the saxophonist that Luoyi had worked with years ago in this club was a member of the Peace Hotel band.

I should call her Luoyi, as she is called by all her friends, but I long ago settled into the habit of referring to her by both her family and given name: Pan Luoyi. This must sound oddly formal to our Chinese friends.

More often, I call her cat. Luoyi is for me the embodiment of the feline personality. Not the sultry and devious personality that is common enough in Asia. Luoyi is the mischievous variety of cat that makes the species at once so intriguing and so maddening. This kind of cat is very entertaining but impossible to control.

Luoyi speaks English by translating Mandarin word by word. She can do this quite quickly, as she has a decent vocabulary of English words. The result is sometimes incomprehensible to our English-speaking friends, but I almost always understand what she is saying. Once I accidentally drank her contact lenses (that’s a story for another day), and she responded by saying this is the have glasses people unhappiness. I was thinking no, this is the thirsty people unhappiness, but then again, I wasn’t the one whose contact lenses had just disappeared.

Thanks to Luoyi I have not had a boring day for the past five years.

by Luddy

许多年前有一双古老的眼睛一直不厌倦地注视着这个世界, 似乎在那个时候，才看到一些不显眼的角落，也许仅剩那么一点空间，在不显眼的暗处，越来越清晰的东西进入我的躯体深处，当它顺着我的呼吸倾泻到纸上的时候，发生了这些故事，也许它来自东方，也许它来自西方，但是不管在哪里，这样的故事总会跨越地域的文明重复着发生，只有当灵魂和意识存在的时候它会说出一个奇怪的名字－JOMO 。

JOMO 用音乐构筑心里的故事，不管在哪里、哪一年，甚至是否已经发生，已经不再重要，因为那些没有年代，没有空间的故事，是不需要用语言来恒定的，人的灵魂电波在不停地变幻，它让世界总都处在变化中，但是，人的故事却永远在相似地延续，走进JOMO ，你看到的是自己，也会看到所有同样感受的画面和人群。

游历在十一个空间，让意识呼吸，置身于光圈之外，让你看到人的思维和微观情感交织时触发的奇异世界。