Meeting up with Wukong, the Monkey King

It's strange how one event can relate to another. We met up with an upcoming, promising talent in Hangzhou after getting tattooed. In the tattoo shop, Tang Feng played us the demo's of his friend Wukong (The Monkey King). It was an interesting mix of electronica and acoustic instruments, nice Chinese loungy soundscapes.

We met the same evening at our concert on the opening ceremony of the 11th International West Lake Expo. It was great to meet Tang Feng, Wukong and Sun. They all digged the music and Wukong seemed fascinated by Steven's omnichord. We partied all night and did a jam in one of the oldest clubs in Hangzhou, the Bartender. The unforgettable night finally ended at a tattoo master's house underneath a massive bridge complex (Lange Wapper X3). It would be great if we could do something together in the future, to be continued!

12 hours in Shanghai, before take off

Driving into Shanghai again strikes us with a feeling of having entered a sciense fiction movie. The dazzling network of high bridged junctions over some spots in the town is mindblowing. It's hard to go back to the hotel here, we can still catch up some sleep in the plane...

Back in China 2009

We just got back from our second China tour. This time our blog wasn’t accessible, nor facebook or youtube. We had to wait until we got back to get it all posted. Nevertheless, it was another big adventure and we

all had the feeling we got to know a few more pieces of the big China puzzle. The trip went smooth, we caught a beautiful sunrise. Arriving at midnight for us, Shanghai was just waking up but we headed straight to Hangzhou. Nice sunset, no clouds in the air.

However, on the bus to Hangzhou we got the disappointing news that some of the concerts had been cancelled, due to the swine flu, while others were still under discussion. On the other hand, it's hard to get bored in a city that never sleeps, so we got to known Hangzhou better and visited the new build town on the other side of the Qiantang river. Amazing how fast this city changes, new blocks keep popping out of the ground at the speed of light.

By the time we got used to the local traffic, food and beverages we flew over to the south of China, to what's supposed to be the 3rd large town Guangzhou. The climate here is much warmer, up to 35° C at this time of the year. Consequently, the food's a lot hotter too! It might be true that Cantonese food is the best, we discovered a whole array of different cooking here and we enjoyed a lot and at the end of our meal we drank a delicious snake wine liquor. Unfortunately, our best Mandarin didn't help us out over here, the people speak Cantonese and it was hard to detect some common vocabulary.

Our first concert in the Mini Theatre of the Culture Museum of Guangzhou was dedicated to the Wall street journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in 2002. It was on October 10, which was Daniel's birthday. We tried to explain to the people that on the same night all over the world, musicians were playing in good memory of him. Steven dedicated especially the song he wrote for his son Jaco to this event, as he was impressed by the strength of Daniel's parents to make something meaningful, beautiful and positive out of a very negative and meaningless act. Several people in the audience told us afterwards they'd had been touched by the profound extra dimension of the concert.