What Are the Bands You Fell for at a Music Festival Actually Thinking? | Four People at the Music Festival

For bands and musicians, music festivals are now a big deal.

From April 29 to May 2 we are publishing one article about music festivals every day, representing in turn the organizers, the musicians, the audience and the business partners. This is the festival as they see it.

On the afternoon of April 27, the band Re-TROS (Re-Establishing the Rights of Statues) began its soundcheck at Beijing's Voice of the City festival. A few days earlier, China's most successful post-punk band had come back from the Strawberry Music Festival in Wuhan, and right after this April 27 show came Strawberry in Beijing and then Shanghai, then the Wuhan China-France Music Festival.

"There are plenty of others too," said Liu Min, the band's bassist. "So many I can't keep track of them."

Re-TROS believes it asks more of festival equipment than most bands do, so it plays only a handful. Even so, nothing holds back the flood that arrives every April through June, the most crowded stretch of the domestic festival calendar. Add the short public holidays and the density peaks around May Day, when a popular band can play three or four shows in a single week.

For bands and musicians, music festivals are now a big deal. Xu Yuanzhuo, CEO of the music video company Jishuzhai, says what record labels watch most closely right now is how many festivals an artist can book in a year. For Re-TROS, festival fees come to nearly half of its annual income, and the price keeps rising.

The band itself looks no different than usual. Since forming in 2003, Re-TROS has played dozens of festivals large and small, and it is no longer as nervous as it was at the first Modern Sky Festival more than a decade ago. It has enough original songs banked that a festival set needs little extra preparation — mostly it is a matter of adjusting the setlist.

The one real worry is that a schedule this packed leaves the members "a bit tired." Festival stages are usually big, and in the major cities they keep getting bigger. The stage stands some way from the crowd with open ground all around it, so the band has to play fuller than it would indoors, and swing wider on stage.

Fangou looks much less rushed by comparison: one show, at the Shanghai Strawberry Music Festival on April 30. Fangou counts as a new band, and by rights its chances of landing on an organizer's invitation list should be slim — everyone wants the famous acts that can pull a crowd on their name alone, and once the producer of each stage starts writing names down, the lists overlap heavily.

The music critic Zhang Xiaozhou recommended Fangou to the Strawberry organizers. You may know this post-rock band better by its old name, he explains — Top Floor Circus, a veteran band that sang in Shanghai dialect. In February this year, Top Floor Circus's singer Lu Chen left, and the four remaining members regrouped as Fangou to make post-rock.

As a new band, Fangou is not as sure of itself as it was in the Top Floor Circus years, and it rehearsed six times before the show. The members do not think a festival set decides anything, but they still sound a little nervous. "If the songs aren't good enough, this is probably the last time," band member Mei Er said over the phone. "And if they're recognized, then none of this will be ours to worry about."

Re-TROS and Fangou among them, some bands believe that "if you go to a festival hoping to get famous, you'll never get there, not in a lifetime" — and at the same time they plainly prize a rare chance to play to a big crowd. "Festivals help the writing too. They give us another angle to look at our own songs from," said Re-TROS singer Hua Dong.

Sometimes the festival works like a threshold that tests a band. Other times it is a besieged city: the bands outside fight to get in, and the ones inside keep complaining it isn't good enough.

Going to a Music Festival

"A music festival is a hurdle a lot of small bands can't clear."

That is how ManTo saw the moment before its first Hot Wave Music Festival in 2014. The hurdle is mainly technical, and it also exposes whether a band has played enough shows — which decides directly whether it can hold a big stage.

ManTo first went to Hot Wave as a college band. The stage was small, and the set wasn't part of the festival proper; it was a college-band contest. ManTo won it and signed to the label Zhuluhefeng, and with the label pushing, the band made it onto Hot Wave's main stage that autumn, in front of more than a thousand people. The same year it played Midi, this time on a very small stage.

Whether you get a stage, how big it is, even where you fall in the running order — bands care about all of it. It is calculating and mercenary, and it has nothing at all to do with the raw, self-forgetting noise coming out of the speakers, but it is the rating system festivals run on. Miserable Faith, the rock band that signed to Modern Sky last year for a figure in the tens of millions of yuan, counts as a beneficiary. Some musicians think part of its standing today comes from being among the Midi Music School's early graduates and closing the bill at the Midi festival several times, which makes it easy to think: well, if they're closing, they must be a formidable band.

Some labels price big bands and small ones as a bundle, to get newly signed acts more exposure, and some producers who take on a single stage even collect a cut when they invite a small band. ManTo believes in the rating system anyway. After Midi, these young musicians couldn't help "getting a lot of hopes up" about where the band might go.

ManTo's bassist Nihei Yudai said: "After we got back from the festival there was more work, and a lot of people in the scene would go, oh, I know your band, that sort of thing." At its busiest the band played a livehouse show about once a week.

But real growth off the back of festivals — Nihei now calls that "a laughable idea," an "impossible hope."

ManTo will not play any festival this spring. The band is under pressure to break up, and Nihei has put most of his energy into a Shanghai recording studio, doing mixes. He has also sent his mixing work to Berklee College of Music in Boston, trying for a master's in music engineering.

This band that came out of a campus has probably hit the problem most small bands in the market hit: not enough original songs with any pull. Most of its shows are covers, and it has barely recorded a proper album. "Look at what I'm mixing now — eight tracks, one master. For a song like that we charge 20,000 yuan to record and mix," said Nihei, the mixing engineer. "How many songs does a record need? There's no way we could afford it."

A ticket into the festivals does not solve any of that. If anything, lineups that repeat themselves this much only make the fact harder to miss.

Feeling Something

As long as the equipment behaves, Hua Dong prefers playing outdoors: "the sound is better, the light and the general feel are more comfortable, and there are more people." That makes some problems bearable — the sound delay at festivals is bad enough that the band sometimes can't tell which sound is its own.

The bassist Liu Min, who is also Hua Dong's wife, has her own moments of thinking festivals are fine.

Rain, for instance. The band on stage usually has some cover; the crowd below stands in it. Liu Min rarely watches the audience while she plays, but at times like that she "feels that force in the air," and is a little moved. Sometimes the crowd sets enormous balloons loose during a set, or runs a conga line, a whole mass of people turning in one big circle. None of that happens indoors.

But far more is out of your hands at a festival than in a room. At a livehouse the crowd came for a particular band; at a festival the people in front of you "may not be the ones you want at all." "Say the band after you is a Taiwanese pop act. Then the crowd waiting down there might be teenage girls or whoever, and they have no idea what you're singing," Liu Min said.

At first, festival crowds were more or less the livehouse crowds. Not anymore, Mei Er thinks — festival audiences now are mostly there to take photos, to be outdoors, or just young people who want to cut loose for a day, which he calls "getting some exercise." Much of the time they don't care who is on stage or what is being sung.

For a lot of people, the early festivals are the ones worth missing.

Mei Er's first was the Midi Music Festival in 2002, when Midi was still held on the school's own grounds and his band, then still called Top Floor Circus, had barely debuted. Like the organizers at the time, they had no concept of a festival as a business. They took the plainest train from Shanghai to Beijing, ate in the Midi School canteen, slept in its dorms, and had no plan to make money.

At those early Midi festivals, Mei Er watched people throw bricks onto the stage. As a musician himself, he doesn't think there's much wrong with expressing anger at a band that sounds bad.

Hua Dong remembers a downpour in 2005. In all his years of festivals, he says, no other rain came close. But the crowd was enormous, and it waited patiently through Re-TROS's set; by the time the American band Yeah Yeah Yeahs came on to close, the audience "had completely lost it." "It was like the recordings of foreign festivals I watched as a kid — call it utopia, call it idealism — for that instant it felt like I could feel something," Hua Dong said.

That feeling is probably hard to bring back. More and more that has nothing to do with music has been folded into festivals, which have opened their gates just as wide to young people whose enthusiasm for the music runs much cooler. To be fair, though, the later audiences have not entirely let these musicians down. In 2013 Re-TROS found what it was looking for in a crowd in Wuhan.

Re-TROS closed the Wuhan China-France Music Festival that year. In the front row sat an official, upright and formal, her security in front of her and several thousand ordinary spectators behind, fenced off from her. Less than a minute into the set she stood up and left, and the moment she did, the several thousand rushed the front row and knocked over every table and chair reserved for her.

Hua Dong says the scene fits what he means by "the spirit of rock." He explained it, joking, as "let the leader leave first."

"Those Music Festivals"

Because the sound equipment wasn't good enough, Re-TROS's soundcheck at Beijing's Voice of the City festival took nearly an hour and a half — half an hour longer than a domestic festival soundcheck usually runs.

An American friend of the band runs an agency overseas and books its shows outside the mainland. Through him Re-TROS has played South by Southwest and festivals in Europe, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. Describing those festivals, the word Hua Dong reaches for most is "professional." The musician Li Zhi uses it too: in a long Weibo post he wrote that when he watches shows abroad he keeps an eye on the professional details, and borrows some of them when his turn comes to put on a concert.

Re-TROS's happiest soundcheck was in the United States. The band was asked to finish its own check in 15 minutes. After that the venue's crew did a second pass, also inside 15 minutes, and "the result was excellent."

Until domestic festivals get more professional, bands seem bound to feel mixed about them. Hua Dong puts that down to commercialization and the turn toward entertainment: bands no longer give all their attention to the music, and instead keep worrying over how much a festival pays and how many people will learn their name.

"If the organizers treat it as a business, then let's talk business," Mei Er said over the phone. What would fix it, he says, are festivals that are "homegrown" — not overly dependent on sponsors and local government. "But in China right now there aren't enough people listening to rock to keep a homegrown festival alive," he added.

And festivals already seem to be speeding off in another direction: less tied to the music industry, more about how people want to spend a day.

For musicians, beyond the steadily rising fees, festivals still hold something worth keeping. As a way to get more people to know a band, Hua Dong thinks a festival at least beats a talent show. "What standing do those judges have to judge me? You don't even know what I'm doing."

As festivals reach more small towns, bands have started running into sets that go off like a dud. The crowd doesn't know how to react to something that may sit outside what it has learned to like, and often it just freezes. Hua Dong thinks this may be a good thing. After enough festivals full of people faking a high, at least "this isn't an act."

But it's clear enough that making comparisons like these is itself a concession.

Images from Mtime, Modern Sky, Xiami, Douban