Zhao Cong - blow, blow, blow, blow, blow

A Closer Listen

You are drifting through the air over a valley of sharp crackling sounds. The wind picks you up; it feels distinctly like a breath, emitted by an unseen body beyond perception, and it pushes you toward a forest of contactless percussions. Once there, you understand that the blows are the result of an immense pressure, a pneumological impact that makes the ground flutter. Although it seems to sometimes quiet down into silence, it really doesn’t – the surface flows with elastic creaks. 

blow, blow, blow, blow, blow is the latest album by Beijing-based experimentalist Zhao Cong, recorded entirely with balloons, detailing the processes of inflation and deflation with minimal edits. This “naturalistic” approach grants the album what microscopic imaging grants to a photograph: the chance to mechanically enhance our senses, digging deep into the crevices of a reality that often seems innocuous. Expanding latex becomes a soundscape, aleatorily arranging an aural performance of materiality beyond any sort of musical guiding principle, complicating even the terms of naturalist procedures such as field recordings. The artifice resides not in the studio or in the instrumentation, but in the application of force of various kinds upon a certain object.

This implies, of course, the continuation of an experimental tradition that reformulates what playing an instrument means, baring it down to the development of technique by any means, a rejection of nature in favor of reality, of integration between the agency of people and the forces of the planet. Sand, water, and flesh, but also hammers, cranes, and bulldozers. Zhao Cong has chosen balloons, which in their simplicity and non-elemental signification fall right in the middle of this expanded field of music: they might need holding with our hands, but the real interaction is with our mouth and breath, which then go on to produce sounds that are short, unsustainable, harmonically dense and yet seemingly univocal. They result in something which our bodies would never achieve on their own.

When Cong magnifies these sounds and plays around with the technique (inflate – deflate), it turns out they form incredibly rich textures and sonic peculiarities. The most adequate way I’ve found to describe them, since there really are no words, is as zoomed-in interactions of forces, in the same way the wind sometimes rattles a window, pushing it as if to break it down, yet the rattle, the blows that strain glass within a frame (aluminum, plastic, wood…), results unique to our ears, every single time. If you put your ear close to the wall, you’ll listen to this dynamic in which no piece of matter is static: everything vibrates.

You could follow the narrative I started this review with, but there really is no ordered sequence of signification, only stochastic events, coincidences, complex arrangements of the reality of sound produced by the movement of air. An endless resource, metabolized, transferred from elastic innards into elastic artificial object. When tuning into it, you’re tuning into that infinity that cuts across the slightest of interactions – let it remind you that in every single second of time passing there lives a wonder within. (David Murrieta Flores)