The Audioscapes of the Contemporary Chinese-Speaking World III - Sunset at West Lake (西湖)
By Ella Eagle Davies
From vast mountain ranges, to childhood classrooms, to bustling night markets, performances of landscapes can be found everywhere in music from across Sinophone communities. In The Audioscapes of the Chinese-Speaking World, columnist Ella Eagle Davies takes the reader on a whirlwind trip through these musical worlds, examining instances where concepts of place, youth, and identity collide to produce sometimes explosive, sometimes subtle, and often weirdly wonderful negotiations of contemporary Chinese youth. In this instalment, Ella focuses in on Chinese indie band Miserable Faith, reflecting on the transcendent and transportive quality of their song ‘West Lake.’
痛仰乐队 MISERABLE FAITH《西湖》 Official MV
“The love for West Lake lies in the aesthetic fusion of the bass and the drums. The solos perform the elegant yet unpretentious soul of West Lake. The profound sense of space seems to light up the fog across the lake, smoke rises across the vast expanse of sky. For a bass-lover like me, it fires up my innermost heart.”
One evening in Hangzhou, you wander down to the banks of West Lake. You cast your eyes upwards to the sky and watch the sun disappear behind the misty mountains. Night descends like a swathe of twilight fabric, with stars punctured through the cloth. You watch contentedly until, all of a sudden, the sky is set on fire for a brief, awe-inspiring moment by a river of shooting stars. In these stolen seconds, you catch sight of them as they cascade downwards, their reflections dancing on the unbroken surface of the lake. You turn to tell your friends but it’s too late. Returning your gaze to the lake, you realise that the stars have gone, and all that remains is the empty night sky.
For Gao Hu, the lead vocalist of Chinese indie band Miserable Faith (痛仰乐队), this experience later became the story behind the song West Lake (西湖 in Chinese). “The song is like a painting,” one Zhihu user writes. “If you close your eyes and listen quietly, it’s as if you’re on a boat on West Lake, or amongst the smoke and rain of Jiangnan.” Labelled as a perfect accompaniment to escape claustrophobic rainy days, the song’s greatest strength is its atmosphere and storytelling capacity. From the first invitation to board a boat to San Tan (三潭)- the largest of the islands in the lake- the listener is drawn into this particular, fleeting moment within the liminal space between dusk and twilight. West Lake, simply put, is an ode to the landscape it captures, and it speaks to the band’s insatiable wanderlust.
《那一天那一夜；从我的故事里走远》 “That day and that evening, have already wandered far from my story.”
Established in 1999, Miserable Faith have yet to lose steam. The quartet - composed of Gao Hu on vocals, Song Jie on guitar, Zhang Jing on bass, and Da Fo on drums - are widely considered one of the greatest Chinese rock bands of all time. In a career spanning eight albums and EPs, the band have received non-stop acclaim and have maintained a ferocious creative energy that has captured the hearts of fans across a variety of backgrounds. Originally known for their energetic, often frenzied hard rock, 2008 saw a change in their style as the band made a new breakthrough with the album The Music Won’t Be Stopped (不要停止我的音乐). Incorporating sounds with deep regional flavours and localised topics, the album was a tribute to the band’s life on the road as they toured from Inner Mongolia to Xinjiang, to Yunnan, Tibet and Nepal. The small but unforgettable experiences and places they encountered became the foundations of their future musical and lyrical trajectory.
The band have toured extensively, as evidenced by this poster for the band’s Taiwan tour. (Image via their Facebook page)
The transcendental nature of these visits award the songs a sense of bittersweet melancholy:
再也没有留恋的斜阳
No more sunset lingering in the sky,
再也没有倒映的月亮
No more reflections of the moonlight,
再也没有醉人的暖风
No more intoxicating warm breeze,
转眼消散在云烟
In the blink of an eye, they disappear into the clouds of smoke.
But these moments were clearly formative experiences for the band members. Themes of dreams, friendships, love, and warmth are conveyed clearly within the multiple, distinct strata of the song and are interwoven in the narratives of the places depicted. Miserable Faith’s musical efforts are not known for being complicated, and yet the bass translates the sensation of alcohol-induced warmth, the guitar riffs reproduce the soaring elation of the onlooker, and the drums beat to the rhythm of the lake’s rippling waters.
In West Lake, landscapes are transformed into multi-layered concepts that facilitate a sensorial embodiment similar to physical interactions within material environments. The dynamic interrelationship between music and place is facilitated by music’s particular capacity for mobility and memory. The physical pleasures of music in particular allow for the production of senses of belonging or nostalgia: “When I was studying in Germany, I went out one night,” writes one Chinese fan on Music163. “My phone starts to play this song…suddenly I really start to miss my home. Maybe I’ll return someday.”
It reminds us that the existence of these landscapes are relational. Without the testimonies of those that transverse them, space cannot be transformed into places imbued with significance. Our bodies and our surrounding environment constantly orient and re-orient themselves in relation to each other, and it is this process that gives existence meaning. Even more special is that places are constantly evolving- as such, awe-inspiring moments such as meteor showers are just a page in the annals of history. And yet, these nanoscopic events can change our perceptions of landscapes and ourselves forever.
Crowds flock to live performances in large numbers, with flags bearing the band’s signature logo in tow. (Image via their Facebook page)
《望不到云河；也望不到天际；流星刹那已然掠过》 “You can no longer see the river of clouds; nor can you see the skyline; the shooting stars have already swept past us.”
Music is often regarded as synonymous with escapism and remembering, and Miserable Faith’s song proves that place in music also has an everyday value. It has been over fourteen years since the release of The Music Won’t Be Stopped, and yet young listeners still flock to online forums to discuss how the song relates to their own personal experiences. One fan, in a comment from 2015, narrates how the lyrics remind them of a confession of love to a childhood sweetheart on the banks of West Lake. Another replies almost four years later to tell the story of an unforgettable summer trip: “The tour guide started to play West Lake on guitar and I joined in singing,” they write. “The group was by the lake at the time. It was a magical experience.”
Miserable Faith remind their listeners to remain in the moment and appreciate the little things in nature. This originates from the band members’ own love for the landscapes they have travelled through, and this influences their musical composition and live performances. Lead vocalist Gao Hu explains in an interview: “I find outdoor venues inspire me more, because you get that direct connection with nature, with the sky above you, the earth beneath you and nature’s wonders surrounding you.”
Just as the sun sets over the scene in West Lake, life is fleeting. But there will always be new adventures, new places to explore, new sunsets. And it is with this knowledge that young listeners in China, often trapped in the mundane routine of work or education, find their spirits lifted.
Find Miserable Faith’s discography on Spotify: for a taste of their hard rock roots, listen to 《不》