This is one massive story.  It would take a novelette to describe everything, but I’ll try to hit on the main points here.  First a little background:  Davide and I started collaborating on music together.  DJ + Guitar:  A pretty interesting combo, right?  Yeah, I think so.  Anyway, we complement each others’ skill very well.  It was back in November, 2009, I think, sitting together at a La Mian in Nanshan eating Hong Shao Tu Dou Fan (a cheap meat, potato, and rice dish), that Davide first proposed sharing musical ideas.  That seems like a long long time ago, but there were many discussions in between, many many tests and proposals, experiments and so on, that led up to a performance together in Hainan.

Another key moment was when I was showing Davide the “Creating a Relic” video and the intro to the original version of “Outside My Window” came on.  “Oh, what’s that?!  That sounds like a good song to do!”  Why?  The nice simple 16th note intervals at the beginning of the song.  We worked a long time on the song, trying out dozens and dozens of different ideas, while at the same time testing out brand new software (fortunately, we both use Macs) both for recording and for guitar effects.  We learned a ton as we went and reworked ideas multiple times.

In between, we had the opportunity to play at one of Davide’s friend’s Farewell to China party.  Here, we just did a simple version of “I Got a Feeling” (or is it “I Gotta Feeling”?) by the Black-Eyed Peas, intermixed with the “Long Train Running” and “Smoke on the Water” (I thought I’d never play “Smoke on the Water” seriously, but I did…ok, maybe not so seriously).  That performance was fun, not bad; we made a video of it, but it wasn’t one tenth the excitement of Hainan.

Other ideas germinated as well:  Why not make a promotional video for the song?  I’ve got an HD video camera, know how to edit using high end video software like Final Cut and Premiere Pro (I still prefer Premiere!), and possess a green screen and lights!  Even as we began working on a video for Outside My Window, promoters became interested when they heard this news.  We worked extremely long hours before the show in Hainan on the video so we could show it on a big screen that we thought might be there.

The interesting thing about the gig, which was arranged by a Chinese DJ colleague named “Yutise”, was that we could learn almost nothing about it in advance.  Even after the show was over, we really don’t understand the purpose of it.  Davide warned of this multiple times:  “That’s China.  Even if they tell you what it is and describe it to you, it may be completely different by the time you get there.”  We heard numbers of attendees like “two thousand”, “twenty thousand”, and even…”two million”.  Well, “two million”; I knew that wasn’t possible.  The title of the show was “International Electronic Music Festival”.  OK, that sounds great, but why is it being held in Haikou, Hainan of all places.  If anything, you’d think it would be held in Sanya, the beach resort of the island.  These are just some examples of the various questions that we had that were never answered, not that we didn’t try.  That kinda made it fun though.

“The Company” bought our plane tickets, booked our hotel room, and picked us up at the airport.  Although, we didn’t realize who our contact was.  A man came up to us waving a pink sign with Chinese characters all over it.  I looked intently and couldn’t understand it.  Surely, this wasn’t for us.  We sat down and called Yutise who informed us that our contact was indeed already there.  A few minutes later, the man came up to us again, this time with mobile phone in hand.  Written in English were our names.  OK, let’s go!

The city of Haikou was nicer than I was expecting.  It was very hot and humid, definitely tropical.  But the city looked reasonably well cared for and the waterfront approach to the hotel lined with palm trees and parks was inviting.  The hotel was right across from the water; the opposite side of the street was a huge park.  Another pink banner greeted us when we arrived.  There were several staff members dressed in festive blue tropical shirts.  Here, we met “Xiao Dong” and his wife who did a great job in taking care of us.  We were issued our hotel room card keys randomly and went to our rooms.  We both lucked out in our own way:  Davide’s room was awesome, with a chilly AC.  My room was the big suite with a view of the water, but the AC could never chill the room down that cold.  We were both happy and settled on the idea of switching rooms the second night.

We attended a government dinner for the tourism minister of Haikou where we started piecing together the purpose of the show, though still it’s not entirely clear.  The pink banners were also at the dinner.  We eventually learned that they had something to do with a wedding festival of sixty couples, held in the large park across from the hotel.  As far as we could tell, the first performance was a partially a celebration of this event.  Yet, there were two performances.  We still don’t really know the true purpose, although we do know that the organizers were very happy with it and called it a success.

Yutise informed us that we needed to get to the stage now!  We protested that we had to change; I was still dressed like a computer programmer!  No time, no time!  Well, I don’t recall how it all worked out, but we ended up going to the stage for a “sound check” and then returning to the hotel, changed, and returned back to the stage.  I don’t even know what the purpose of the sound check was.  We didn’t check our sound once; we just plugged everything into the laptop and verified that we heard our music.  OK, we could have done that in the hotel.  Bizarre.

Returning back to the stage at night was a thrill, and terrifying!  The stage now was lit up, LCD screen going with all sorts of images, lights flashing all over the place, and even some fireworks now and then.  I remember approaching the stage from behind and hearing the swell of the crowd.  Would I be able to do this?  “Suuuuure”, I thought.  The music is not technically demanding.  There’s no reason to not be able to pull this off.  Because of my lack of performance time, my ability really dials back quite a bit.  I don’t feel nearly as flexible or limber to play challenging music.  But, I knew I could do this.

“Outside My Window” rocked the house!  Especially the second night.  The first night was a little chaotic, and I hit one sour note (an F natural over a nice D major progression) that sounded utterly apparent and horrible to me, though I know that an audience frequently misses these things.  Oh well, there’s nothing to do but move on and keep on enjoying.  But, the second night was smooth as silk, much more fun, and much more relaxed.  Even though the part I created for the guitar was really simple, I still needed to focus quite a bit on the fingering.  I didn’t look up that much.  The first time I did though, right after the beat really kicked in, I looked up for a flash and only saw hundreds of hands in the air.  I won’t forget that vision for a long time.

The intro to “Outside My Window” on night two (for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I can say “I love the guitar sound!”):

0:00 – Davide, speaking through his headphones:  Women ai ni!! (“We Love you” in Chinese), followed by me laughing
0:08 – Song starts (we came up with this version the night before!)
0:12 – MC says something in Chinese.  I can’t make it out.
1:07 – Electro synth enters.  Picking notes on guitar more aggressively.  The “Guitar Rig” software responds very nicely to this.
1:20 – Nice new melody on guitar (night before!).
1:37 – I really like the build-up here, while sampled guitar plays new melody.
1:51 – Kick it!

As fantastic as the song was on night two, it started out roughly with a technical misconfiguration.  I won’t go into all the reasons that lead up to that, but Davide had to start the set alone and debug the problem as he performed.  A simple setting change of either the outputs or inputs configuration on the computer got us going again.

Misadventures in between performances:

• Various late night meals and snacks with various friendly staff members.
• A rough meal on a side street in downtown Haikou.  We were stared at quite a bit.  Folks were shocked that we could speak the language.
• A foul-smelling outdoor restaurant with not a single customer wanted to charge us 500 RMB (about $75) for a crab.
• Davide’s CD fell off the stage and into the sand.  “Quick!  Wash them and find a replacement case!”
• Hurry, hurry, rush, rush, no time to change!  Then we get to the venue and wait around for an hour and a half.
• “Check out this awesome hotel room!  This is a great place to play AOE!”
• Expressing our gratitude at given coconuts to drink when we first arrived, we were gifted them multiple times per day throughout the trip.  This meant frequent trips to the bathroom.
• The press:  “How do you feel about Hainan?” and “How did you learn about Haikou?” I had to think fast for a substitute answer for not knowing anything about it before the show.  Although, now I’m a strong endorser.
• Handing out CDs, getting mobbed eventually.

In the end, I thought the name “International Electronic Music Festival” was a misnomer.  It didn’t seem to be much of a festival and the only thing that made it international was Davide and me.  But, the show was awesome, so much fun.  The folks were really nice and took care of us.  We filmed the second night (the adapter wasn’t connected well enough to charge the battery the first night!)

One amazing thing that I realized is that opportunities can come at any time.  When I was younger, I thought it would be cool to be a “rock star”.  Looking back, I feel happy with the way things worked out or, more accurately, are working out, but I always hoped that I could do more performances.  That’s one area where I was severely lacking.  Well, “later in life”, this opportunity has come up, and in such a grand and enjoyable way.  I hope there are more to come; we’ll work to make it happen.

Here are some pics from my little beat-up camera.  We’re still trying to hunt down some other professional pictures as well as footage from the big camera on the crane above the audience.

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