Lightbulb Life Album
Late at night, the skyscrapers of Shanghai loom in the distance, a galaxy of the metropolis formed by billions of lights shining from the windows of people at home, distant ideas: Lightbulb Life.
Lightbulb Life was recorded in Shanghai, China and features musicians who either originated in China or belong to the global music community living within Shanghai.
The music represents the diversity of China’s musical landscape and draws on many of his experiences living in Shanghai. Beats from Peru, Mauritius, Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Nigeria and modern electronic music are combined with modern jazz compositions, Chinese ethnic minority folk melodies and sampled sounds of the city of Shanghai to create a musical scrapbook. Come hear through Willow’s window on the world.
“Neilson’s interpretation of the melodies we ignore everyday sends a thought-provoking message. Perhaps the next time I hear that guy on his bike marketing refrigerator-repair skills I’ll feel something other than rage. Lightbulb Lives exemplifies a different way to listen to the world around us. Lemonade out of lemons; music out of noise.” Jenn Chan Lyman- Urbanatomy
Microcosm
This song was influenced by the Rumba Club’ track “Baltonimo” from the album Espiritista. They call this groove “Bomba Experimental,” and it embodies the Afro-Latin electro funk of the 70s. This song is one of the many elusive and complex rhythms on the album. I called it Microcosm because it feels like rhythms within rhythms, a swirling vortex of different points of groove. I have attempted to maintain the groove but give it some more motion in the harmony than that used by Rumba Club, providing a chord progression instead of a static one-chord vamp.
Microcosm also refers to how I feel about the Shanghai music scene as the united nations of groove; I played with musicians from Mauritius, Cuba, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Norway and many more. Essentially it is like a microcosm of the musical world.
Taxi
This was the first thing I remember about arriving in Shanghai, the recorded greeting within the taxi. This specific one includes the 57575777 restaurant number advertisement that many Shanghai residents would imitate to one another. It was just asking for me to turn it into a song.
I recorded the greeting on my little handheld recorder and then sampled the receipt machine to begin the beat. Then I used the time-stretch function in Logic Pro, which helped some of the phrases to shift into rhythm, though most of them fit without any manipulation. I transcribed the melody of the woman’s voice and then harmonized it to create what I like to call “Comedy Bossa.”
In the studio we improvised with it and Peter Scherr came up with the awesomely funky two-bass grooves that create the second half of the song. This song is dedicated to Matthew Herbert, a producer I have admired for many years through his use of random sampled sounds.
Lightbulb Life
This is the title track of the album. It is part of the group of compositions I used to explore various grooves from around the world. This is a folkloric rhythm called “Maracatu Nacao” and comes from the north of Brazil in the Pernambuco region. The Maracatu often accompanied a parade where a slave was chosen to become “the king of the slaves” to watch over all the others for the Portuguese colonialists.
Big thanks to Brazilian percussionist Leonardo Susi and drummer Alex Ritz for offering me some deeper insight into this rhythm and for their great playing on the track.
Sunday Story
This song is composed by Coco Zhao. I laid down a sequence using Chinese percussion and Balinese gamelan samples to provide the mood from which the band played some very beautiful music, especially Norwegian pianist Steinar Nickelson.
Coco Zhao is one of China’s unique jazz vocal talents and an old friend. His collaboration with violinist and producer Peng Fei and their group Possicobilities were part of my inspiration to return to Shanghai.
Translation of the song lyrics-
Sunday afternoon, I am sitting in the cafe just cross the street,
the crowded street, and the quiet waterlily by the window
the constant passing by wheels, and layers of shading souls
they all bustling on the edge of this city
While a cigarette is disappearing in my undecided handsDon’t understand the lies under those colorful street billboards
while the movie theater is showing some stories which has nothing to do with me
What is changing me, and what makes me reminisce
the distance of each other is neither far nor near, just in a blurry zone
While all these thoughts have paused in a moment which I can’t explain by words.
Subway
This joins “Taxi” and “Recycling Man” as my ode to the Shanghai soundscape. Learning Chinese I would often repeat phrases from within the recorded dialogues I was studying until I could “sing” along. Chinese, with its tones, is a particularly musical language that does often feel like it needs to be sung. People assume a tonality when they speak it, centering their first tone on a specific note. Language is essentially musical mouth sounds with meaning attached to them. There is much esoteric writing upon this connection usually springing from “in the beginning was the word…”
These compositions are influenced by the work of Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal, particularly his album Festa Dos Deus.
Moonlight Beauties
The vocalist on this track, Jing Song, hails from Lijiang, the beautiful ancient town in Yunnan province. I met him through the owner of the Blue Papaya (a great place to stay in Lijiang), Wu Shan. We all sat around a hearth inside a dark room whilst various people from Zang and Naxi ethnic minority groups sang songs to one another in the informal “get up and sing us a song” style that is so common in China.
Everybody spoke of Jing Song in high regard and I was eager to hear him but he was complaining of a cold and didn’t want to sing. Finally he was coaxed into “just one song.” The melody that he emitted is the recording that introduces this song. It hushed the room and left it silent for moments after, broken only by people’s sighs and a giddy giggle from a female admirer.
I used the recording to write this arrangement around his vocal, recorded it in the studio with the group and then sent it to Jing Song for him to re-record the vocal over. I love this song dearly and it represents the beginning of my fascination with ethnic minority folk songs from western China.
Recycling Man
I lived in a lane apartment in Shanghai where I was one of very few foreigners. Every morning I would hear the usual group of elderly early risers talk loudly about their affairs, gathering outside to buy “cai” (vegetables for the morning meal). One old woman had a laugh almost like a kookaburra, an Australian bird famous for its raucous laugh. I would be reminded of home before pulling the pillow over my head to block the sound out. The sizzle of the woks next door subjecting the vegetables to an oily doom would be accompanied by the regular calls of trash recyclers either blaring loudspeakers or ringing bells.
Like an ornithologist I began to recognize the different calls of these trash foragers as they began their day and I struggled to get back to sleep. The various pitches and rhythmic rate of their bells and the words they called out signified their breed.
Around many streets of Shanghai you can see these trash foragers pedaling or pushing their carts laden with their “catch.” Like the bowerbirds from my home country, sometimes these recyclers appear to specialize in an extensive collection of a single type of random item stacked high upon their three-wheel bike fitted with tray. From household electrical wiring, cardboard, plastic bottles, pieces of wood or mountains of Styrofoam boxes assembled like white powdery Lego pieces.
The king of these collectors is the appliance recycling man. Over a loudspeaker he blares a grainy recording on a loop rousing all within its sonic radius. Long before I knew what the words meant I was singing the rise and fall melody of his voice, as though it were some mechanical birdcall. The call of kongtiao, dian nao, bing xiang, wei bo and xiyiji would be blared on a loop.
These groups of hunters often circle the block numerous times in case someone suddenly releases the impulse to dispose of that shaky and leaky old washing machine, decrepit AC or the old TV forsaken for a flat screen. The call would crescendo and decrescendo along his route past my apartment. I would often rise to see the appliance recycling men, their catch strapped to the back of their bicycles, from smaller loads of old transistor radios and tape decks to huge hauls, the most impressive being a 10-inch TV and a bar fridge strapped to each side of the bike, the recycling man’s legs powering against his pedals as he shifted the large weight.
As the loudspeaker call would fade into the distance, I would sometimes dream of them returning home with their mechanical patients then proceeding to operate on them, their electronic entrails methodically cut out, like surgeons harvesting organs. “This belt drive is going to provide new life for an old Samsung washing machine.”
Choobie
This song uses a Tony Allen rhythm, the famous drummer from Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat bands. The title is my new family nickname, given to me by my brother- in-law, to whom I’ve dedicated this song as he introduced me to Fela Kuti’s music. The etymology of the name goes, Willow, Willowbian Tube (similar to fallopian tube), then Tubey, then the Australian accent, which turns “Tu” in “Ch” becoming Choobie. The name stuck so well that my nephew, whose voice you hear preceding the track, couldn’t remember my real name when asked at show-and-tell. This song is for so many of us who live far from our families here in Shanghai.
Secret Society
The intro to this song features actual construction noise recorded above my apartment on Luban Lu, Shanghai 2003. No effects have been used to magnify any of that noise—it was really that loud. To endure the sonic assault my ears were enduring I would pretend that they were an avant garde percussion ensemble giving a suspenseful and dramatic performance, ranging from enthusiastic group improvisations to dramatic pointilist minimalism.
Construction noise is like an initiation to Shanghai life; most people who have lived here for any substantial time would have endured it at one stage and can compassionately relate to one another when one of their own is suffering the plight of the hammer and drill. The tune uses the “Abakua” rhythm from Cuba, a group that requires initiation rituals to become a member.
I wrote an article about enduring the drill and how it is akin to an initiation rite, called “The Drill.” It was published in That’s Shanghai magazine, you can read it here.
Survival Charades
The title of this song refers to my first period of time in China. Having arrived to play a contract gig at CJW and not speaking a word of Chinese, I often felt I was having to master my skills at charades to survive. I had a blackout in my apartment and the most difficult thing I have ever had to try to mime was “candle.”
The song is part of the group of compositions exploring rhythms from around the world. This one uses the Afro Peruvian rhythm “Festejo.” Big thanks to Peruvian Pablo from the JZ latin band for his lessons on this rhythm which, navigating, ironically felt like Survival Charades for many of us.
Photographer and videographer Nicky Almasy used my song as the soundtrack for a video on the night lights of Shanghai, see below.
Fake Monk
This is a cover of Cui Jian’s song, the title meaning Fake Monk. Cui Jian to me is like a shining beacon of artistic integrity amongst the Chinese music scene. When I first lived in China I performed a lot with pianist Xia Jia and drummer Bei Bei who turned out to be members of Cui Jian’s touring group.
Cui Jian’s live show is definitely worth seeing and this song of his is by far my favorite. It describes a wandering libertine which could be the description for most travelling musicians.
This song was recorded at the iconic home of rock in Shanghai, Yuyintang, as part of our tour before recording. I use my favorite effects pedal, the Maestro Sound System for Woodwinds, on this track.
More reviews
“This track, ‘Taxi’, encapsulates what is most striking about Lightbulb Life. It’s fiendishly clever, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s eclectic, but it manages to be easily accessible. It’s technically masterful, but it doesn’t come across as stodgy. It manages instead to be downright cool.
Much like the city of Shanghai in which it was composed, Lightbulb Life acts like a magnet, pulling in influences from across the world, while maintaining its hometown flair…What results is a spectacle of sound that is as intriguing as it is entertaining”.
-Tom Mangione- Shanghai Talk Magazine May, 2012