"Tell you a little goal: I want to put these music in every place that may appear, heard 5 billion times around the world, and reached 200 countries and regions."
During a chat, Ye Yunchuan said so. Autumn had begun, as if the whole world were falling leaves, and I heard some sort of flying insect vibrating its wings.
Ye Yunchuan is a famous music producer. In 2003, he founded the music brand "Ruiming Music" in Beijing. An experimenter, an unreliable saboteur in the eyes of some. In fact, I have always felt that he is the kind of person who has a clear "monastic nature" - as a cultural conservator, he will distance himself from the world as much as possible. He put the tradition into his pocket as much as possible, and at the same time, he also strives to make more imaginative music. In a sense, he is a lone book among contemporary musicians, an enclave independent of the times.
In the past 20 years, he has created and produced 2,500 works, and his works have won about 180 awards and nominations, including the American Independent Music Awards, the Global Music Award, the China Golden Disc Award, the Chinese Music Media Award, etc., which is an inexhaustible honor at once.
"The music I made seems messy and has a variety of tricks, but it is inseparable from the national culture and world music. Ye Luzi has the internal logic of Ye Luzi and the secret book of martial arts. He laughed, "I will fight my sword to go to the end of the world, and it doesn't matter what you set, starve to death." ”
I've heard many people say that he actually has a very high goal, that is, the Grammys. He is one of the few Chinese members registered with the Grammys to have voting rights, and often mails his works to the United States at his own expense to participate in the selection. In 2020, due to the epidemic, the international route was tight, and the freight he sent to the Grammys' selection members spent more than 20,000 yuan, "You don't know how much it cost." ”
Since Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won the Grammy Award for Best Original Music Album for a Movie in 2001, Chinese music has brought the Grammy closer. Unfortunately, this is very limited, especially in China. As a local producer who is committed to expressing Chinese music in the language of world music, he has always hoped that this situation can be changed, so that the world can hear more voices from China and Chinese music has more international discourse.
In 2020, this time it failed again. But he will "lose and fight again and again". At this meeting, I wanted to ask about the Grammys, but he said another "small goal" of his own. This "small goal" suddenly made me seem particularly utilitarian.
"I want more than anyone else." He never hides his ambitions, nor does he hide his loss, "Frankly, I haven't made any achievements in so many years," "My happiness and loss will always coexist, but the beauty is far greater than the depression, and the inner satisfaction is always more." ”
In fact, over the years, he has traveled in the boundless world, "swimming in the sea", and deliberately striving for international influence, which is the greatest achievement in itself. ——It seems to be for yourself, but in fact, it is a voice for Chinese music.
Once, he took 1,000 CDs to Germany to participate in the World Audio Music Exhibition, the English was not good, he wrote on the tablet, "I am a Chinese musician, please listen to our music", and the records were all delivered in two days. Doing exhibitions in the United States, Americans listened to the music he made, saw his records, and felt that it was a Japanese brand. In the impression of Westerners, the best Asian quality is Japan, the most fashionable is South Korea, and Chinese things are cheap. This Oriental Don Quixote fantasy changes this perception.
The premise of change is to make a little new contribution to the world. "And I, apart from music, have nothing else to offer."
His WeChat signature is "One Man's Trip." But with the power of an ordinary musician, he gathered more people, brick by brick, building a grand project that others could not complete at all- this is the "Map of Chinese Music". In the eyes of some people, he is a Nezha, with three heads and six arms. At present, this project, which lasted for three years, including nearly 40 ethnic groups, 213 traditional instruments, recording more than 580 folk musicians, 1,056 tracks, 1,000 music videos, and nearly 300,000 words of text data collection has come to an end.
For a moment, his whole body seemed to be thirty pounds lighter. But then a greater wish hung over him: to preserve these things, but to try to spread them to more people, to the world. "Dissemination is the best way to preserve," he said. If music is also divided into Mahayana and Hinayana like Buddhism, Ye Yunchuan is a typical "Mahayana musician". This is also the most needed musician in contemporary times.
He hopes to use a complete system to answer a question often asked by Westerners, what is "Chinese music" . This music has been passed down from generation to generation, and now it has reached our hands, but it is being eliminated in the name of no traffic, "Have we contributed to the world and to our own people, or have we committed a mistake?" ”
From a success perspective, he is, as he puts it, a "very failed entrepreneur." He called many of his practices the "Meat Bun Project", the so-called meat bun beating the dog, there is no return. In 2005, when he ran out of money to make music, he sold a house on the edge of Beijing's Third Ring Road and rented a house for 10 years to make sure he always had the money to make music. "It turns out that the extremely low IQ of the financial quotient is not online."
"You still have to keep making things like a carpenter." In his mind, the role of the carpenter is more lifelike than the so-called "craftsman". "Everything I do is something useless, but I would like to say that what is useless is far more precious and powerful than useful."
Over the years, his "installation fee" has averaged one thousand yuan a year. Perennial jeans hoody, summer jeans, white T-shirt, this is his eternal standard. Easy-going, very flexible, it seems that putting him in any state, he can easily adapt. But some friends said that this is only "appearance". He was actually paranoid, harsh, picky, and unsophisticated. He also admits, "Gemini, in fact, very divided and stubborn." ”
He summed up a word that best reflected his own characteristics: boiling. Like frying Chinese herbs, he "boiled" his "little target" over a slow fire. The repeated failures of the Grammys are one. The "Map of Chinese Music" is even more one, "finding the way for Chinese music to integrate with world culture", which is another Grammy he awarded for his past.
And it is his goal to have Ruiming music – traditional Chinese music – heard 5 billion times, 10 billion times, and countless times around the world.
"Climb over one mountain and see another." He said, "Everyone has their own other side. ”
Ye Yunchuan Photo: Liu Lijie
"The only thing we can do is to keep something that is bound to disappear."
Search God: Because of the epidemic, the world has changed a lot in the past two years. How did you live during this time?
Ye Yunchuan: My 2019 and 2020 were particularly extreme two years. In 2019, I flew dozens of times a year, nearly 300 days without Beijing, went to 14 provinces across the country, and also went to the United States and Japan to record, spanning a huge span. Because I was working on a project called "Chinese Music Map", I ran crazy and intensely through 2019. After going to Saigon, Vietnam, during the Spring Festival in 2020, and then returning to Beijing, the epidemic broke out. Equal to the whole year of 2020, all immersed in doing the latter of these music of mine in 2019. Because in 2019 I was very large, involving more than 30 ethnic groups, 580 folk musicians, and I used 213 instruments. This is the Map of Chinese Music, which spans a lot, and is a music project that others call the original ecology but I call the root and native language.
Soshin: What was the original intention of this project?
Ye Yunchuan: For the world, I will answer a question that Westerners often ask, what is Chinese music? This is a bit of a philosophical question for us, like what is Chinese tofu, and there is no way to answer it. Because we have 500 kinds of tofu, how to talk about it? Japanese tofu is very simple, people say that we are Japanese tofu, Chinese not convinced, we have Hakka stuffed tofu, Mapo tofu and so on hundreds of kinds, how to talk? So I want to use a system to tell the world what Chinese music is. I use the concept of music map to answer the world, this is Chinese music, you can deconstruct it from the province, ethnicity, region, style.
But I want to express something more, I summed up a slogan, "use music to retrieve the memory of the nation, from the mother tongue to find the origin of life." Our homeland has been demolished, and you are using today's so-called modernization to erase everyone's memory. Not only my hometown, but almost everyone's, after being bulldozed and paved with cement, in fact, everything has disappeared, and everything that has been deposited for thousands of years has disappeared. So what can be preserved? Music must be one of them. Because music is hard to tamper with. In all cultural forms, such as your picture, your words, can be tampered with, can be unrecognizable. So history is a little girl dressed up. But music is difficult, because music is something that flows and flows in the heart, as long as you dare to change a note, it immediately appears particularly discordant and unnatural, and it is changed at first glance. So it can best record the sound of an era. The "Xi'an Drum Music" I recorded is the longest recorded in this recording, at least 1300 years ago, and it is said that it was handed down from the musicians who escaped from the court during the Anshi Rebellion, and has been preserved in an almost original state, not to mention more. Of course, sometimes some music cannot be recorded and cannot be said, but for us, when the music sounded more than 1,000 years ago, the dignified and graceful temperament came out, and you listened, wow, this should be the sound of that era! Do you know who those players are? They are just villagers on the outskirts of Xi'an, but as soon as their pipes and flutes and drums come out, they listen to court music, and it is the gorgeous gagaku of the Tang Dynasty. Therefore, "using music to retrieve the memory of the nation" is a good path.
Search for God: The second half of Slogan's sentence, "Looking for the Origin of Life from the Mother Tongue", also sounds relatively large and dangling. Tell us more about it?
Ye Yunchuan: For example, when I go to Meizhou, such a young child can't speak Hakka, why? Because you speak Hakka, how do you go to school? And you will be ridiculed when you talk about it, and you are very earthy. As soon as you hear this music, you immediately hear the Central Plains, and that kind of thick thing obviously can't appear in the Lingnan region, it is thousands of years of migration from the Central Plains. So as long as the music is preserved and the language is preserved, history can continue very well. But if there is no such thing, history is written by the victors, and how to write and how to write may be written beyond recognition. I am very concerned about "finding the origin of life in my mother tongue", because once the language is flattened and generalized, the unique and diverse culture will disappear. Language is not just a tool, it has a genetic code behind every people and every region.
Search for God: To find that China, now I can only go to these places. A lot of what you record is the music of various ethnic minorities, also because of the language, right?
Ye Yunchuan: Yes. The language is preserved, and some of it is also mixed with the language of the times, Mandarin, for example, if you hear Tibetan compatriots speak computers in Tibetan, he also speaks foreign words like computers, but most of them are ancient languages. In this language, you can actually find the so-called code of life, you can know where you came from, and then you know where to go.
Before the Spring Festival, we went to the suburban villages of Beijing to do some original language and music collection, and the village in front of us was well preserved and passed down for hundreds of years. But we go to the new village, all the houses are bulldozed, all new ones are built, and then it is said to be a 400-year-old village. On what basis do you say 400 years? You could even say 400 million years, because the land has been around for 400 million years, but what about the culture itself? What about the history? Nothing is left of you. This situation abounds in Today's China, and there is nothing we can do about it. The only thing we can do, in fact, is also an important motivation for me to make a "Chinese music map", that is, to keep some things that are bound to disappear, definitely disappear, language disappears, music disappears, because no one listens, who listens to your traditional things? You have no traffic on the Internet, and if you don't have traffic, you will brush aside. But I think we recorded it, music, images, words, pictures, three-dimensional basically recorded this cultural style, and then no matter how many years, even if it is a thousand years, you can still hear that sound, as if we listen to Xi'an drum music, more than a thousand years ago, if it did not have the way of playing to record it, how do we know what kind of style the Tang Dynasty was? Now there are a lot of cottages that are imaginary, but at least there are Dunhuang murals and music to see and hear these things from the Tang Dynasty. What do you see in other cultures? It's a terrible reality that we don't have to see anything, and we lack the most basic respect for history and culture.
Search God: What projects will be done next?
Ye Yunchuan: The slogan I shouted myself was the strength of an ordinary musician, hoping to gather more people, and then we poured into the sea together. Because the so-called ocean is the world, and the world is the ocean. I am such a state of being more nervous. The two years of 2020 and 2019 are basically doing this project, and 2021 is the end of me. But I'll keep doing it later, putting the traditional into my pocket as much as possible and making more imaginative music at the same time. I think I can do it for 10 years, but I can do it for a lifetime.
"Because before the age of 6 in the country, I was not bound, I had endless creativity"
Search God: You said that you are a Hakka, so you often go to Guangdong to "find roots". What kind of ins and outs is this, can you tell us clearly?
Ye Yunchuan: I am a Native of Sichuan, A Member of the Hakka Family in Sichuan, and my mother tongue is Hakka. When we were young, we called tuguang, but I don't know why we are called tuguang, all the customs are completely different from the Sichuan people, and the language is completely different. But at that time, because there was no genealogy and no introduction, we didn't know what was going on, and anyway, we were different from the people around us. Do you know why I discovered this secret? It wasn't until I went to Shenzhen later. When I was a teenager, I went to Shenzhen, broke into Shenzhen, no one knew, I stood on the Cai WuWei overpass in Luohu District and cried, there is an urban village, you think, no one knows, no relatives. Then I went down the bridge to find a person my sister's friend had introduced me to, and found that I could understand the locals in the village of the city! It was terrible, because I didn't expect that two thousand kilometers away, I could understand what the people in that village were saying. Later, I began to wonder why, and thus began to have an interest in Hakka culture.
Search for God: Why did you go to Shenzhen at that time?
Ye Yunchuan: I don't want to stay in Sichuan anymore. At that time, I felt that Shenzhen was a place to break into, and I should go, so I took more than 50 hours of train to Shenzhen. More than 50 hours of train, what was the result? After getting off the train and sleeping on the bed, my feet were still shaking, and I kept shaking. The years in Shenzhen were the hardest, but they were also years of establishing good professional habits and learning the most precious things, such as the spirit of contract, such as the never-ending pioneering cattle spirit. After that, I returned to Chengdu for a while and enjoyed life for a few years, but I felt that it was not the state I wanted, and then I came to Beijing to see that Beijing was going to open the Olympic Games. Feeling that the Olympics are so important, I should see what opportunities I have.
Soshen: I came to Beijing in 2001, what year were you?
Ye Yunchuan: Circa 2002. In the first two years of coming to Beijing, I followed people to do some things, a lot of deception, and it was particularly bad. Came with pride, and ended up falling on a big, big heel. I also want to give up, and then I think, don't give up, give up is no play at all, in Shenzhen also survived. So what to do? Then make music.
Search: Why can music be done?
Ye Yunchuan: Because the previous things were done with a lot of people, I felt that there were a lot of scammers, who owed me, who cheated me, and finally made me particularly miserable, and I thought, I want to do things that I can control. I invited the famous producer Teacher Zhang Chunyi to do a case, and then opened the opening, and since then it has been me, I have been making music to do it now.
Be grateful for what you've been through for so many years, for better or worse, and that's how life grows. I can proudly say that among these works of mine, it is indeed a little deeper than the average, it is not an entertainment thing, it is something that can make you think a little after listening, obviously some of my experience in this process, with the way of music to give to everyone.
Search for God: Was it to find someone to compose and play in the beginning? What exactly does this producer do?
Ye Yunchuan: Although I learned to play the piano and sing and write songs when I was a child, I couldn't play other people's songs, but I couldn't play other people's songs, but others couldn't write other people's recordings. However, I think there is a person who can learn, Liu Bei of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the martial arts are not as good as Guan Zhang, the planning is not as good as Zhuge Ge, but he can achieve himself with benevolence and courage, haha. So learning is the way I have grown up from the beginning of making music to today. One by one works is just homework, I have been learning to hand in homework, sometimes the homework is exaggerated, sometimes the homework is abandoned, I don't care, but it is homework, learned, the inner progress is the most important.
My musical role is a producer, like you, people always ask me what you really do, I said responsible for buying a box lunch, this is the first function, you want you to invite the musician to dinner. The second theory is that the rope in the pearl necklace, although the price is only two dollars, without this rope, this is not a pearl necklace. Third, some of them are like the Chinese character "Wu", which goes up to heaven, down to earth, and connects people in the middle, because you can understand god's language and feel the voice from ordinary people's hearts.
Search God: When you explain this, it is estimated that many people still can't understand it. What part of Sichuan are you from?
Ye Yunchuan: Chengdu, in fact, our home is on the current Third Ring Road. I have been back before, to relatives' homes, and the demolition has long erased all our memories, and I am very sad. I am especially grateful for that state of life when I was a child. Because before the age of 6 in the country, I was not bound, and I had endless creativity. So to this day I'm very proud that I've never lacked creativity. You give me a handful of mud, I can shape whatever I want, but if you give me a toy, you give me a Lego, you tell me how it has to be spelled, what the logic is, then I may end up being an upgraded version of the machine, that is worthless. It is precisely because I was a child who was muddy, muddy pond, fishing, and playing, that when I grew up, I felt that this world was infinite if you imagined it at will. So I can now brag that I have friends of more than 40 nationalities in China and have been to 40 different countries, which can be extended indefinitely. I think that's the most important thing for everyone. But all of this has been changed in the process of modernization, we have lost the most simple and authentic things in the process from agriculture to industrialization, the details of life have disappeared, and then each of us has become a nail on the assembly line.
"Only those who swim in the sea are in awe"
Soshin: You are one of the few Chinese members registered in the Grammys, and I heard that every year you mail your works to the United States at your own expense to participate in the selection. It's a simple thing to say and complicated to do. Why?
Ye Yunchuan: 2020 failed again, and I was so depressed and sad for a while. Send records to the Grammys, you don't know how much effort it takes, and the freight alone is more than 20,000. However, the loss is not the first time, and it does not matter if you think about it. I rarely talk to people about this topic because I don't talk much about things that I don't implement.
Search: But I think it's valuable.
Ye Yunchuan: It should be regarded as a kind of complex. A person swimming in the pool, swimming 50 meters in a moment, swimming more than a dozen times a day, he will feel so good, but only people who swim in the sea will be in awe. Why? Because no matter how powerful a person is, he is not worth mentioning in front of the ocean and in front of nature, and he will be in awe. Like when we see a little more, we generate awe. But in turn, you will also have surprises, generate a lot of strong desires, why? Because there will be countless treasures in the ocean.
Search: When did you start to contact the outside world?
Ye Yunchuan: The first time I went abroad to participate in the exhibition, I went to Cannes about sixteen years ago, followed others, and went at my own expense. From Cannes to Paris, and then everyone went to buy a brand name, I went shopping by myself. There are 18 metro lines in Paris, and I only remember one station name, so I start to swing around and want to learn about French culture. Since its inception in 2003, our records have been in English and Chinese, and Chinese in traditional chinese. Because many Chinese people don't know simplified characters, I want Chinese abroad to be able to understand them. So it started sixteen years ago.
But it failed miserably. I have participated in two Cannes exhibitions, not exaggerated at all, foreigners are walking around us. In the eyes of many Westerners, China seems to be similar to the era of braids. How to change these narrow perceptions is a problem of method. That is to say, what kind of height are you standing at to communicate with others, if you just say that China is a great place, then people say goodbye and do not send, people are very polite. But if you come up with a real work, people will obviously look at you differently. So all my work will be of particularly high quality, recording, producing, printing, so that there is a small atmosphere that has some listeners in dozens of countries.
Search: Consciously do this from the beginning.
Ye Yunchuan: It's not that I'm particularly conscious of doing this, but they all agree with my work, because I position the quality of music as TOP, and our music quality is that we have been improving with the world, and everyone is at this level, but this style you like or not. Including in 2019, we did six exhibitions in the United States and held four concerts, that is, to contact the world as much as possible, to introduce our own culture, and hope that we can stand at the top and tell others that we are excellent. Because without this, there is no way for everyone to talk. Before that, it seemed that the best thing in Asia was Japan, the most fashionable was South Korea, and Chinese culture, Chinese music, and almost everything in China, cheap is good, is such a cognitive pattern. I hope that like we can get some right to speak, because without the right to speak, people will not listen to you. So I actually deliberately fought for these international influences, and although the results were very unsuccessful, I kept trying. I want more than anyone else. Frankly, I haven't achieved anything over the years. 2019 was a bit better, and "Wasteland Moon" won several awards internationally, which is a work with some international influence.
Soso Shen Ji: I personally feel that your work is very suitable as a gift for foreigners.
Ye Yunchuan: This is what you think, and I think the most important thing is whether we can do this work well. My works are relatively clean, and now there are too many works that are not exquisite, because there is no market, it is easy to settle. But I can't, I have a spiritual purity, and I can't stand the little dirty things in the music, such as the conflict or flaws between the instruments. Once in the remix, a recording engineer kicked the stool away, and I was angry, because there were unwanted sounds I heard in it, and I had to change it, which was too harsh and annoying. Traditional Chinese instruments used to be basically solo, but later when I learned that Western symphony orchestras want to orchestraize, it is easy to cause conflict, including when we want to get 7 people to play and sing together, you find that it is all conflict. So it takes more effort to regulate the fusion. This form is not the traditional Chinese cultural philosophy, in the traditional culture we are all one person, talking to the nature of heaven and earth, so I recorded a work in the valley of the Great Wall called "The Unity of Heaven and Man", which reflected very well, including the German partner who said that he also wanted to record me in the Black Forest. Because playing the piano in the valley, there are many natural sounds, birds and insects chirping, frogs and fish are jumping, especially harmonious. At that time, some of the global routes of Hainan Airlines, Air China, and China Southern Airlines were broadcast, and it may be that they felt that this was very suitable for quietly listening to fantasies on the plane, but none of the companies gave me a penny.
Search god: You can go to them, this is a business.
Ye Yunchuan: Sometimes I can't take care of so much, and the cost of rights protection is too high. On the other hand, what I am most pleased with is that I have made some things that everyone likes and affects some people, which is not very good? Including the data from a network platform that day — really not an exaggeration, using our work as a background music is great — one of our tracks was used by 310,000 videos, which must have brought us billions of indirect listens to our music, we have 2200 songs, then I am very happy, although it does not have a dollar, because it is free background music. I agree with this way of disseminating, we have a contract. Getting more people to hear about it is the most important thing, and as for how many people give you money, it's the second thing, right? Didn't I hide it without giving me money? So what do I do with it?
Soshin: Are there many organizations that work with you?
Ye Yunchuan: Yes, we all cooperate in the channels where we listen to music online, and it's not bad, some money, the minimum amount of money I received is 1 cent, and there are also monthly payments of 20 yuan. Once I went to a big sister's house, she let me drink a pack of nutritional powder, the price is 40 yuan, I said this sip and drank my money for two months. Of course, there are many of them, and they are all very happy. Music has a great impact on people, just like salt, salt is the cheapest to sell, which may be reasonable, but it will hurt the hearts of people engaged in music, most people will give up, so they need everyone's care. We mainly rely on listeners around the world to buy our records and vinyl to maintain this creation. I personally feel that for business itself, it must be done by people with ability, and if people without ability to do it, such as us doing it, it is obviously a monkey breaking the bud valley, and you must throw one when you pick one. The reason why I don't want to pick that up is because I know that I'm going to lose this one, but I'm more important than that, so I don't lose it. There is one, and if there is none, right? For you have to make a trade-off. If you give me both and I'm happy too, the problem is not to give two, God is fair, give one take one, what to do? Then I definitely want this. You have to make good music, maybe it will still be in 200 years.
Search: You must have been short of money too.
Ye Yunchuan: There is not much shortage of money in making music, because the money is spent here. I've kept the average setup fee at $1,000 a year over the years (laughs). Also, the most extreme is that during the epidemic in 2020, there were two steamed buns at noon for half a year, and I calculated that each meal was solved by 5 yuan. Of course it's a joke, you get the work done, and there are always countless listeners who pay for it, and you continue to make music. When I was short of money for my original music, I sold my house and exchanged it for the cost of recording music. It turns out that the extremely low IQ of the financial quotient is not online. It was 2005, on the edge of the third ring road, five or six thousand yuan a square meter of Beijing. So I rented for 10 years, guaranteeing that I would always have the money to make music.
In the United States, Ye Yunchuan collaborated with local musicians to record gospel music
"I have believed since I was a child that I just have to climb slowly and slowly, and climb to the top of the grapes will be ripe."
Search god: As you said earlier, before the age of 6 in the countryside, it is precisely because you are not bound that you have infinite creativity. I want you to tell us about your childhood again.
Ye Yunchuan: When I was a child, it was like this, why did I speak Hakka? Hakka is my mother tongue, my parents, grandparents, grandparents are all Hakka, my brothers and sisters can't speak, I also found some back. Before the age of 6 in the countryside, I didn't go to kindergarten, and I played silly. Silly play is actually no one to play with me, because I have a very, very introverted personality, you don't look at me now talking, like a talking, when I was a child, it was simply, seeing girls blushing, when someone comes to the house to eat, I am not on the table, just hide aside. What is the main way to play a silly game? Hope it rains. When it rains, there are fish in the ditches and fields in the countryside, and you can catch them as much as you want, which is very rewarding. The deepest memory is that once the fish pond was opened, everyone could go fishing, but all the adults and children were fishing in one place, only I was in another area where no one was, net after net, net after net, even if nothing was found, I would rather fish my own fish alone. When I think about it now, it has a special sense of picture.
Search: At that time, we were all in a state of stocking.
Ye Yunchuan: At that time, the ecology was relatively good, and as soon as there was thunder in the spring, the loach jumped out of the mud. At this time, as long as there is water where there is my battlefield, I will take a net to fish. Once, when I was fishing, I was almost dragged into the water and drowned, because I was only a few years old, and I caught a big fish, and the fish dragged me down, and it was the big brother who swam nearby who fished me up in the pond. All my time before I was 6 years old was in a relationship with the earth, and most of the time I was a person, a state of man and nature. This state has been affecting me now.
Search: When was the enlightenment of music?
Ye Yunchuan: He is also about 6 years old. Because my sister is a kindergarten teacher, she can play the piano and sing anything. At that time, I heard the campus folk song, and the one I remember most deeply was "Catching Loach", which particularly touched me, that is my nature, because I caught loach every day. And the second song is "Snail and Yellow Oriole", which I still remember, Yellow Oriole, don't laugh at me, when I climb on it, the grapes will ripen. Many people don't believe it, too lazy to climb so high, troublesome. I believe this, I have believed since I was a child, I just have to climb slowly and slowly, climb to the top of the tree, the grapes will ripen, in fact, I have established such values at a very young age.
Search: What happened later?
Ye Yunchuan: I'm sorry - in fact, there is no embarrassment, I have not received an official education since junior high school, I can't get into high school, I can't even pass the vocational high school, because the results are so bad. How bad is it? In courses like Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, I can score 2 to 4 points, not on a 5-point scale, which is 100 points, and those 2 to 4 points are all based on multiple choice questions. In all the classes I only read novels, I also read novels in Chinese classes, I don't listen to any teacher, completely immersed in my own world. The teacher was angry, and later said, you are free, as long as it does not affect other students.
I read comic strips when I didn't know words, and I saved a lot of pocket money to buy comic books. Later, it was stored in the countryside, and one year relatives in the countryside said that your old house was burned, huh? It doesn't matter if you burn down the house, but the comic strips are all burned down, which is very sad. Then read novels, Chinese and foreign masterpieces, and read old Books in Hong Kong without reading them. So I recognize traditional characters, and I have no problem with you giving me traditional books, because I have seen it this way since I was a child. Before the age of 13 or 14, I was very naïve to think that I had read almost all the books I should read in my life, including martial arts books.
So what's the benefit of reading a lot of books? It is that my values have been enriched very early on, and this value is the value of ancient people, not modern people. Because it gave me too much, all the right and wrong, all explained very clearly in the book, even "Three Words and Two Beats" and "Ru Lin Wai Shi" have read, when I was a child, I had no interest in the so-called officialdom at all. In fact, I am not deliberately intertwined in Beijing, and I will not cater to it, I will do my thing, catch my own small fish and shrimp, or look at the sky and fantasize.
Search God: In fact, you are still in a wild state.
Ye Yunchuan: Yes, I grew up in a wild state. What others find dreamy, for me, is nothing more than to spend more time like a snail to fight for. In the end, almost everything can be achieved. I am particularly concerned about my two stages of growth, 6 years old, 13 years old, it can be said that I stopped growing at the age of 13, and the rest of my life I think is repeating, that is, constantly overlapping these things in my own beliefs. Later, to go to Europe to do something, to go to the United States, to go to Japan to do something, is to do such fantasy things with this belief. Frankly speaking, the tuition fee has been paid countlessly, and I really dare not count these things, and there is no need to calculate them.
"In a fast time, no one wants to do this kind of thing"
Ye Yunchuan: I'll play you a piece of music, seriously, not as background music for the chat. This is a work completed in 2017, "Myths, Classics of Mountains and Seas, Ancient Legends", which was actually inspired by watching comic strips and "Classics of Mountains and Seas" when I was a child. This work took almost 7 years, the process is very tortuous, fortunately carried down. You've seen the Classic of Mountains and Seas, haven't you? I actually don't want to talk about the gods and monsters in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, nine tails and ten heads, and I think that if I pay too much attention to these things, I don't understand the things behind the Classic of Mountains and Seas at all. I want to find the spiritual temperament of the ancient Chinese.
Search for God: The Spiritual Temperament of Ancient Chinese? Did you find it?
Ye Yunchuan: I think that many of these ancient myths represent the spiritual temperament of traditional China, but today they have all been lost. So I'm going to reproduce it from this work of my own. For example, the first song is called "Pangu Kaitian", which is pioneering. There are also eternal themes, war, love, and of course, another Chinese spirit that I have always valued more, the song is called "Father By Day". Every time I talk about this, I get goosebumps, that is, he knows what cannot be achieved, but he also has to do it, he has to sacrifice, and when he is finally exhausted and unable to chase the sun, he throws the peach stick in his hand to the east, and he tells others that the sun rises from the east. How noble do you think such a sacrificial spirit is! But people today don't say that, they feel stupid, and I want to talk about Chinese great things about love and devotion from here.
Search God: After listening to this song, I really felt that my hair was upside down.
Ye Yunchuan: A few months ago, the composer of our "Myth" album, Teacher Zhang Chao, called me and said that Yunchuan you are a "great man", and I said that you are ridiculing brothers. We are familiar with it. He said that he couldn't go anywhere during the epidemic, so he poured all the Western classical music over and went back to listen to "Mythology", which was particularly proud and moved. At that time, to do this work, Teacher Zhang Chao lived in the suburbs of Beijing, I went from the East Fifth Ring Road to a round trip of about 170 kilometers, I seemed to have run eight times, three Gu Maolu only ran three times, I ran eight times. He said I wouldn't have such music without me, we were accomplishing each other. In the business society, in a fast era, no one wants to do this kind of thing, and when recording for several months, what is the sadness in the heart? Because you know, you lose money by doing it. A piece of music with dozens of people, and all of them to find the best players to play, is very expensive, most people may not like it, but if you don't do it, it is impossible to produce what you want. The result may not be so good, but you want it to be a good work, and you are willing to pay for it, right?
Search: In the process of recording, do you always find that kind of musician or instrument that is very special?
Ye Yunchuan: Yes, you can listen to it casually, this piece of music, the guqin is more than 900 years old, the best guqin player Zhao Jiazhen played, then the last pluck you listened to, is not the harp, is the basket. I have used 400 kinds of instruments in my own recording music, and the recording engineers Li Dakang, Li Xiaopei and Zhang Xiaoan are the best recording engineers in China, which can ensure the high quality of the works. Different instruments are used in different music, regardless of where the instrument comes from and which one is suitable to use. When I make music in different countries, I also choose those really good recording studios. Perhaps most people are not so picky about making music. But I think all these costs are worth it, because only by pursuing the extreme, the good things have a chance to stay.
With Indian musicians
"A world without fools is terrible"
Search: In all your music, there is a very strong sense of loneliness.
Ye Yunchuan: Yes, even if it is music that seems to me to be very happy, but it is lonely inside. My WeChat name is "one-person's trip", because I know that even if we have a good relationship, it is impossible to "travel" together, you are destined to do this thing as a person, then these works, in fact, from beginning to end, with such a state.
Search God: It is the person on the WeChat boot page, Lonely Planet.
Ye Yunchuan: But this loneliness is not because of anything, it is because I have been like this since I was a child, that is, from how old I am.
Sodom: Loneliness is the essence of music. You don't feel lonely in real life – because I know you have a lot of friends in every way.
Ye Yunchuan: I still think, there is still. There's actually something quite bitter up to now, but I have an advantage, and I'll turn it into strength. When I feel like I've endured a lot of stuff in it, I convert it into energy. I'm a very strong person, and this state will help me, not say that it will affect me. In life, you see that many people are happy and will enjoy, then I basically have nothing, my biggest enjoyment is in the music, I already enjoy it every day. The problem is that solo music is not as good as all music, so my other bigger wish is to spread it to more people. A lot of people don't say they don't like it, but because they don't know you, they don't know that you have these things, because now they are full of things that belong to traffic, and we don't account for traffic.
So, in the eyes of a person like you, will physical records disappear? Just like our traditional media...
Ye Yunchuan: You actually already have an answer to this question, right? It's either a question of whether it will disappear or it's bound to disappear. I tell you, it's an honor for you to know me, and I'm going to be the inheritor of intangible cultural heritage, the bearer of records (laughs). It's no suspense, but I'll basically do the last one. Today we are faced with a very bad state, no matter how much hard work you put in, in the end you can not reflect your value, because people will not pay for these values. For example, if I make a "Chinese music map", such a thick thing, if you digitize it all, it is all fragments, then how to reflect our attitude to this matter? So in the end, it is still necessary to make a carrier, like the vinyl, CD and other ways I have made in recent years, because this kind of thing has a certain sense of ceremony, there is a sense of aesthetic identity, and many things can be condensed into this. You try to make something that you can handle under conditions that you can afford, and indeed such a thing as a benchmarking world. I took these works to the United States, and they all said beautiful, book. What the United States is doing now is very rudimentary, why? Because printing in the United States is very expensive, simple pieces of paper and plastic are so messed up, the artist goes out, takes a bag and takes it away, and signs and sells broken pieces of paper on the spot. Every time I go abroad, I bring a whole box of records, I have a super large box to take with me, and I am happy to send it all everywhere I go, because I think this quality represents China.
Search God: Are you the only one in China to do this kind of exhibition?
Ye Yunchuan: In theory, this should be the case, because it is not cost-effective, and only fools can do it if they are not cost-effective. The last time I gave a speech at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, I said there wasn't a single fool below, and everyone laughed. I said that the world without fools is terrible, and if everyone is so smart, that fool is not enough.
The images in this article are provided by the interviewee himself, except for the signature