What's it like to make music however you please? We asked the musician behind “Whale Circus”

Li Xingyu's music is gentle, but the word he uses most in conversation is “confrontation.”

“A lot of you fall asleep to my music, don't you?” On the evening of June 18, at Bandai Namco Shanghai, Li Xingyu tried that line on the 300-odd people in front of him.

He had already played three nights running — small concerts in Nanjing, Hangzhou and Shanghai from the 16th to the 18th — and there was one more in Beijing on June 23.

As usually happens in the music business, the four shows followed an album: in April he had released his third instrumental record, Whale Circus Vol.3 Dreaming.

“Whale Circus” is also Li Xingyu's stage name, or his personal brand. (“When you go looking for information about me, you probably won't turn up much,” he says. “I don't much want to put myself out front.”) Between 2014 and 2017 he put three albums online. The second, Whale Circus Vol.2 Whisper, was picked for Xiami's “Light-Seeking Project,” which supported 13 independent musicians. Some of them were fairly well known: the electronic duo Kaqishe, the folk singer Cheng Bi, who had appeared on the TV show Day Day Up, and Jin Minqi, whose songs had drawn more than 100 million plays. Li Xingyu was the only one making purely instrumental music.

His Xiami page now shows more than 37 million plays and over 20,000 followers. The music is soft and weightless, and it sounds like its titles: Old Friend, Wind, Falling Rain, A Future Promise... Some listeners like to answer it with scenes just as romantic — “you hear falling rain, you hear the night sky, you hear the deep sea, you hear the whale, you hear the wind, you hear goodbye to Earth.”

The four June shows were going to sound far busier. Li Xingyu had rearranged almost every piece into something more complex. Besides him on keyboards, the stage held a six-piece ensemble: guitar, bass, drums, violin, cello, clarinet. A “multimedia visual artist, VJ Ink,” threw background animation onto the big screen behind them — a whale, for instance, to match the theme: the friend who understands you.

Li Xingyu is 32. He graduated from the Communication University of China in 2007 with a degree in recording engineering. Ten years on, he is the only one of the 30-odd people in his class still writing music.

From 2008 to 2013 he was in a “crossover” band called “Hey!!!” with Xiao Laohu and Lei Lei. Lei Lei is an independent animation director with a style of his own; his short film Recycled was selected for the Annecy International Animation Festival. Xiao Laohu is a popular rapper who has twice won the China MC Battle. Asked by QDaily about those years, Li Xingyu put it simply: “We spent a stretch of our youth together, and then we grew up and everyone went off to do his own thing.”

“Hey!!!” made mischievous music that was also full of jabs at real life. Their first hit on Xiami, Big Coconut, was about the misery of graduates looking for work: “Whether you did well in school or badly, you still can't find a job / You still can't find a job / But worse than that / Someone stole my big coconut.” Their second song was a piano piece under a spoken poem, Love, Whale, Ocean.

Over the past decade he has also produced albums for singers such as Liang Xiaoxue and Zhang Xuan, but the work that actually fed him was commercial: music for ads, system sounds for brands like Lenovo phones, and sound design, his own field. His June 16 show in Nanjing was at Oula, the livehouse the folk singer Li Zhi opened last year — and the “architectural acoustics” there, the design and installation of the sound, is Li Xingyu's work.

He runs another project as well, “52Hz Sound Museum,” which records sounds in nature. In the summer of 2016, after he and four friends raised 300,000 yuan on the crowdfunding site kaistart, Li Xingyu spent 15 days collecting sound in the Amazon rainforest and released an album called Laws of Nature.

“Among the many laws of nature in the Amazon rainforest, one is the law of sound... Insects take the very high frequencies, then birds in the mid-high range, then mammals in the middle, and finally the background of environment and weather — usually down in the low frequencies,” the album cover reads.

Next to Whale Circus, which has “no barrier to entry,” the Sound Museum lets him “look at social questions through sound in a more systematic way,” Li Xingyu says, and, more practically, gives him a way to “work with businesses.” In May he wrote the theme music for a charity event run by BottleDream and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

“I've always been fairly confused about how to take the next step in my work — including how to turn it into income, how to keep what I have going running sensibly, and how to keep growing and moving forward.”

This year Li Xingyu hopes to get further.

To prepare the new album and the tour he put together a four-person team: people who had worked at music companies, plus students working part-time. He pays for all of it himself. On Weibo he wrote, “A few more shows at this rate and I'm bankrupt.” But he also counts himself lucky: “Back then only very big record companies did this. If I'd wanted to do it independently, it would have been impossible.”

“Right now I'm probably doing more Circus shows, and the records build up influence slowly, so a single show might pay more, and that's comfortable. It's simple, really: you invite me, I come, we finish the show, everyone takes a share and that's that — nice and cheerful.”

Li Xingyu on “Whale Circus,” the independent music market and what he has lived through

Q=QDaily

L=Li Xingyu

Q: Did the three albums start from different places?

L: Every album is a discovery, really — a stage in growing up. On the first one I was younger, and when you're young your mind runs everywhere, you're still in the fantasy stage, full of ideas, full of interesting little stories.

By the second I had started to reflect on myself, to examine myself. By the third I was putting forward views about life, about being alive — you start to have your own point of view, your own understanding of the world.

Q: Why is the third album called Dreaming?

L: Dreams are interesting. A dream is a fragment of consciousness, but being alive is itself a kind of consciousness: all our senses, all of it, is run by the consciousness in the brain. That can be altered, and at the same time you can't be sure what is real and what is a dream. A few years ago people wouldn't have gone there; they'd still explain it the way Freud did. But technology has reached a point where those explanations no longer hold.

I wanted to express a view of the world and of life: even though you can't choose your own consciousness, or can't know what the truth is, you come back to the thing that every religion and philosophy has probably been saying — the present moment.

Q: “The present moment” sounds very abstract. Did you have a concrete starting point when you were writing?

L: Whatever the theory, whatever the philosophy, whatever the situation, the point where it touches down is always real life. Some of it happened around me — my mother's dog died, so I wrote Goodnight, Pudding. Some are dreams I actually had; Wooden Horse Kingdom was a dream. And there's living through the Nepal earthquake.

Making things always works this way: what you hear is the surface, but you can study it and go further down. What people see is the fruit and the leaves and the branches on the outside of the tree, but the tree is built on its roots. For me, at the age I've reached, that's a big realization and a big shift.

Q: What does the shift mean, exactly?

L: It means that before, I needed a noisier way of working — going on feeling, on one flash of inspiration after another. I was young then, in my 20s, and everyone's mind is racing at that age; that's what people call inspiration. I think inspiration only exists in your 20s. I wouldn't call it that now.

Q: Do you think more systematically now?

L: Now it's a system. It's no longer inspiration alone; it's become a starting point for thinking.

Q: Does that help you see the world more clearly?

L: The opposite, actually — less clearly. Once you see how much is unknown... the more you understand, the more ignorant you find you are. Now I feel I know nothing, and that makes me want to learn all the more urgently.

Q: What do you make of the conditions musicians have been working in these past couple of years?

L: Making music loses money. I think that's true nearly everywhere, pop musicians included — they earn from commercial appearances, fees for showing up and so on. The music itself is hard to make money from. That's the ecosystem we have. I think the internet came up too fast here: China never went through the wave of paying for records before the internet had already replaced it. Nobody has come round yet to sorting out copyright; it still doesn't work. Take Xiami: in a given month it pays something based on plays and downloads, but that might be a few hundred yuan a month, and what are you going to do in Beijing with a few hundred yuan? It's completely out of proportion. On top of that, when I put out a record, a lot of it comes out of my own pocket. The cost of an album — leaving out my own time and creative work — takes more than a dozen people, so I'm using money I earn elsewhere to subsidize this.

Q: You earn nothing when people stream your albums?

L: They're open for free listening. Asking someone to pay before they've even heard it strikes me as a strange thing to do — I'm not fond of that approach. But there's no sensible pay model yet either. And people don't need downloads anymore; streaming is enough.

Q: But compared with your college band days, with “Hey!!!,” has anything improved?

L: Yes. You still can't make much money, but at least there are many ways to make some. It isn't like before, when there truly was no path. Especially with my college band — there were too few channels to release anything. Think about it: apart from Modern Sky, the independent musicians who came up then, like Cao Fang, were signed by Xiao Ke. It was all record companies doing this. Releasing a record independently was out of the question.

Q: How do you see the difference between independent music and pop?

L: There's no absolute boundary. If you're looking after what listeners want, or making something to fit the market, then it's pop, whatever you call it. But if you start from your own point of view, that work can be called independent music, and it can also be popular.

Q: Would you call your life idealistic?

L: I suppose. I'm not sure anymore what idealism actually is, but I live simply.

What I put in and what comes out aren't in proportion, but I'm happy. You feel you always have something to do, you can always make something of value. That's enough.

Q: When did you start loving music?

L: In high school I suddenly fell for music, for rock. Rock hit me all at once — hormones, teenage rebellion, all that. Pop music was no use at all, not to a boy. The whole atmosphere of rock, that confrontation, that release of hormones, that restlessness — it fit a teenage boy perfectly.

I listened to foreign bands, and to a few Chinese ones. But China was only starting then. This was the early 2000s, right when bands were appearing, punk and metal and the rest of it just coming out. I loved all that — it let so much out. Most of what they sang about was unfairness in society, and things like being against war. Mixed in there were lines about love, and at the time it really felt like I'd found something to live for.

Q: But your style now sounds like the opposite of rock.

L: Plenty of people ask that. I think it's in your blood. What kind of music you make is one thing; whether you are rock is another. What the listener takes in is the surface. What keeps the music alive at its core is a great many things, rock included.

Most people who make this kind of thing — soft instrumental music — tend to be sad people. So a lot of instrumental music has only one sadness running through it. Mine may be a little different: people feel something firm in it. That's why so many of them say it heals them, that it's warm. At first it may sound painful and sentimental, but bit by bit you find there's some strength in there too.

That's music's doing as well, I think. In my rock years I took in a lot of what is good about rock: a very positive kind of confrontation, rather than dwelling on things in a negative way. And growing up in this era, you notice that plenty of things are wrong, and I think a wrong thing should be named. If it's wrong, it's bad, and I should push back. The darker side of people, for instance — I hated it, I was disgusted by it. I also watched a lot of Japanese manga and anime then, and I came to feel that the sincerest things were the best things. I've lived that way, and treated the world that way, ever since.

Q: Is there anyone in instrumental music you particularly respect?

L: Ryuichi Sakamoto, Germany's Nils Frahm, and some of the great film composers.

Q: It's surprising that you were in a band with Xiao Laohu and Lei Lei — the three of you are completely different now.

L: Three completely different people together, that's what makes it interesting. That's the crossover. But listen to it and you'll find the three of us are already who we are today. We grew out of that.

Q: Can you describe what each of you is like?

L: Xiao Laohu loves telling stories, so his music is very narrative. It has a strong sense of groove, that Black-music groove. Our band liked telling stories too, all sorts of little stories.

Lei Lei has beautiful ideas; he brought a lot of them into the band, just like in his animation — really good fun as ideas go.

And me: the music I make now isn't very visual, but I make it long and complicated, with a lot of changes.

Put the three of us together and the music comes out fun, full of stories, and visual all at once.

Q: Do you know many musicians like you?

L: Not many. I don't really know the music scene, I don't move in any particular circle. The person I see most is Lei Lei; the two of us go out and talk about our own work. With people in the same line of work there often isn't that much to say.

Q: Why isn't there much to say? Because the work is solitary?

L: Maybe. And I think it also has to do with a general lack of education among musicians. Most musicians are arts-stream kids — they study music from childhood and don't study much else, and that education is too thin. Music rescues these people who haven't had much schooling, and it also gives them an outlet. Look at America's wildest rock stars, or take a tamer example: the Beatles in Britain went to Oxford or Cambridge; Jim Morrison was that far into drugs, but he went to UCLA. You can't compare — they were all top students from good universities doing this. Us, we couldn't even get into a diploma mill. That's the obvious gap.

It's not that we did something wrong; the era produced this. It isn't their fault either — they're the generation rock music rescued, and they really do lack education, and that isn't their fault. But when they do something wrong, it is genuinely embarrassing. I teach at a contemporary music academy, and I tell my students: you should read more, learn more, don't spend all day on this one thing — there's nothing much there to work on.

Q: What should ideal music education look like?

L: Honestly, the professional courses at school were fairly basic for me — microphone technique, how equipment works, that sort of thing; those helped more. Learning music itself, you're on your own. Teachers can't teach it. How many people in China could teach it? And the ones who can don't teach classes.

Read more, learn more; people are less ignorant that way. I've found it's the same in every field. Learn the theory by rote and you end up trapped inside it, you hit a ceiling, and once you're in there you may never get out.

All knowledge is really there to make you grow fast, to let you put up a framework of your own quickly. Learning that 1+1=2, learning multiplication and addition and subtraction, lets you know in a hurry, oh, so that's how it is. But work out for yourself why 1+1=2 and the process is much slower — with one advantage: you fully understand why 1+1=2, instead of school telling you. Apply that to music. If you're told these particular notes sound good, you end up with a conditioned reflex; you don't actually know why they sound good, when it comes from the resonance between those notes.

Q: Have you thought about why Old Friend became your most popular song?

L: That piece means a lot to me too, but I never imagined it would mean something to other people. I wasn't in a good state when I was writing it, and the piece healed me.

Q: Who is the “old friend”?

L: Myself. You find that you and yourself are like old friends — familiar and strange at the same time. Once you've grown up to a certain point, you have this thought that you don't really know yourself. All of us need to go and get to know ourselves again.

Images from Li Xingyu's Weibo and his Xiami page