Review: Li Jianhong – Soul Solitary
Two live performances by the Chinese experimental guitarist, carving open a channel from his core to the world outside.
RELEASED ON RAMBLE RECORDS, WV SORCERER PRODUCTIONS AND ECHODELICK RECORDS.
Chinese experimental guitarist Li Jianhong states that his live performances contain “some hidden emotions that don't come out easily in everyday life”. When you broadcast your state of being through an instrument, gone is the need to moderate emotional expression in accordance with social codes. Instead, his guitar – and crucially, his amplifier – whirl outward to the extremes of both mood and aural intensity. Stifled power chords depict a state of fidgeting frustration, coming out like clenched-teeth grunts, while strands of feedback hit like a prolonged nausea headache. Occasionally Li's voice makes an appearance too, as if the guitar has bust open a channel of expressive sincerity leading from his gut to the world outside. Social inhibitions vanish: he mirrors his instrumental disposition through grunts and warbling incantations, riding squeals of feedback as if engaged in a perilous high wire act. You can really hear the room on these recordings and it’s perfect; the tones are shrouded in booming echo that situates the performance within the confines of a social setting, with all of the instrumentally-eviscerated etiquette and expectations that go with it.
The first of these two performances was captured in China back in 2019, while the second was recorded in France the year prior. Both trace a similar arc, akin to reviving an engine that stubbornly refuses to start. Distortion initially comes in chunks and fits as Li reconfigures, fails and tries again, the angst mounting as each mangled chord conks out just as it sputters into life. Finally, persistence delivers and the noise becomes continuous. He proceeds to ride the resonances, goading the amplifier into doing more of this or less of that, as one imagines him tilting his guitar in the air, elegantly guiding the tone through arcs of transformation, no longer subjected to spasms of distress and now steering masterfully between states. The conclusions of both pieces also bear similarities: the plectrum attacks return, and we enter a denouement of half-guitar-solo-half-crumbling-cliff-face, with high-fret-flurries busting out from within guttural atonal overdrive. A final scream of feedback and it’s done, and one can only assume that Li Jianhong is empty.
