Grown up on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, for many years Hai Qing played in many bands, until 2015 when he delved into his own projects. In 2017 D-Force Records released his first album The Flesh, whose avant-garde progressive rock suffused with Mongolian melodies entranced even veteran music fans in China. Now two years later he has made the sequel, Utopian Daymare.

Continuing the same method first employed in the first album, Utopian Daymare is a collaboration between Hai Qing and guitarist Li Xing. Hai Qing writes the songs in a rudimentary form, mostly folk ballad-esque words with guitar. Afterwards, Li Xing adapts these for the larger instrumentation of the band, developing the songs with extravagant instrumental sections and fantastically long forms – each track on the album is 6 minutes long or more, with the longest being 12 minutes.

Compared to their earlier work, with the new record Hai Qing and Li Xing aim to present a work with even more rigour and precision. They both take daggers-drawn guitar playing to the utmost limit, what’s more, some of the much praised elements of The Flesh, like the Mongolian rhyming scheme, traditional folk instrumentation, and improvisation, have all been reduced to a minimum in this project. Zhang Meng is the only other band member who is remaining from the first album. When recording the sheng, he connected two guitar amplifiers to the ancient Eastern instrument, producing a kind of sound similar in intensity to that of an electric organ.

Hai Qing’s lyrics as always have a terse, poetic quality: deep beneath an unassuming exterior lies a hidden understanding. Amnesia uses but four phrases to sketch the memory loss of an entire era; portrayed in Refugee are images of oft-seen day to day hardship, whose counterpoint is expressed by the line, “Heaven covers the earth, but not mankind” ; You Make Me Feel Psychadelic and Eat that Trick resemble love songs, but just like those classic Chinese rock songs of the past, love songs always contain certain implications; Roll the Egg Run, an absurdist parable about a rooster and a hen, whose lyrics, like “How far can it be from east to west?”, nevertheless extend further a discussion of the last hundred years. Worth mentioning too the rather obscure title of the record, which, just like the music and the lyrics, easily misleads one into traps and pitfalls. Word for word, the Chinese title translates to: ‘the crow flies, the hare walks, day turns to night’. Actually, put together the characters for crow and hare (wutu) are homophonous with the word for utopia (wutuobang) – in the twinkling of an eye, day and night are inverted, utopia becomes a nightmare.*

Utopian Daymare includes two smoke-coloured vinyl discs, the cover and insides are composed of six artworks by Czech artist Petr Nikl (involved in fields as diverse as painting, music and theatre, to give a cursory overview). You could say the record is a collector’s item. Utopian Daymare is published by Little Soul, their first release in fact. Little Soul is a subdivision of Merrie Records dedicated to avant-garde and experimental music.

* Translator’s note: “The crow flies, the hare walks” is Chinese idiom which refers to the movement of the sun and the moon, an analogy for the rapid passage of time.



海青是一位大器晚成的音乐人。内蒙古草原长大，多年来他在很多乐队里担纲乐手，直到2015年才开始属于自己的创作。2017年海青在大福唱片发行了他的第一张专辑《肉蛋蛋》，那些弥漫着蒙古东方旋律的前卫摇滚作品让国内的资深乐迷眼前一亮。两年后他带来了续篇：《乌飞兔走昼还夜》。

延续此前的专辑合作模式，《乌飞兔走昼还夜》依然由海青与吉他手李星共同完成：海青创作了歌曲最初的雏形，彼时它们大多只是一人一琴的谣曲；而后李星将它们改编升级成全乐队的形式，延伸出繁芜的器乐演奏段落与不可思议的歌曲时间长度——整张专辑的8首歌曲全部都在6分钟以上，最长的一首更有12分钟。

相比起前作，海青与李星希望在新专辑中呈现一种更加严谨的创作。两把电吉他剑拔弩张的演奏被凸显到了极致，而《肉蛋蛋》中那些讨喜的元素，如蒙古韵律，传统民乐，甚至还有即兴，在这一局中都被尽力降到了最低。张梦是唯一一位参与了两张专辑录音的乐手，在录制笙的时候，他为这种古老的东方乐器串接了两台吉他音箱，进而呈现出一种近似于电风琴的激烈的声响。

歌词依然海青一贯的简洁与诗意，平静的表面之下暗藏着深邃的解读。《失忆症》用寥寥四句勾绘了一整个时代的遗忘病症；《流民》中描绘的是纪实摄影一般的街头日常，映衬的却是“天罩大地不罩人”的悲悯；《你让我魂飞魄散了》与《险些中计》似是情歌，就如同那些经典的中国摇滚乐作品那样，情歌总有着弦外之音；还有《谁来孵这个蛋》，一个关于公鸡和母鸡的荒唐寓言，背后却是“东边离西边到底有多远”这样延绵了上百年的话题。

不妨也来聊聊这个有些晦涩的专辑名，它像专辑的音乐与歌词一样散部着迷雾与陷阱。“乌兔”其实是乌托邦的谐音——转瞬之间昼夜颠倒，乌托邦成梦魇。

《乌飞兔走昼还夜》的实体唱片包括两张有着烟熏纹理质地的彩胶唱片，封面与内页采用了捷克艺术家 Petr Nikl 的六幅画作（他在绘画、音乐、剧场等不同领域均有涉猎），颇具收藏价值。《乌飞兔走昼还夜》由小心唱片发行，亦是小心唱片的第一个发行。小心唱片是美丽唱片致力于前卫/实验音乐的分支系列。