Part 1

Name: Li Daiguo
Nationality: Chinese-Taiwanese-American
Occupation: Composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist
Current release: Li Daiguo teams up with Liang YiYuan for Sonic Talismans, out via Full Spectrum on September 6th 2024.
Recommendations: Gundecha Brothers: Bhaktamar Stotra; Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine

If you enjoyed this Li Daiguo interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I don't really tend to have that kind of heavy visual synesthetic reaction to sound.  What happens to my body … well it really seems to vary according to the situation, and also whether the sound I'm listening to is one that I'm making or not.

If I'm listening to something on Bluetooth headphones and it's pleasure listening as opposed to say research listening, probably it's generating productive energy so I might do something active like garden work or house work or exercise. I might also pleasure listen to lead into a nap or sleep or to put one of my kids to sleep.

I listen with eyes open and closed at different times. When I'm on an instrument it tends to be closed more often than open, and in that case the body is a very different state, it's definitely a high level of relaxation, concentration, and also imaginaging moving something like omnidirectionally at high speed.

Also it depends on what I'm doing on the instrument too ...

Entering/creating new worlds through music has always exerted a strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to listening to and creating music?

That's a nice way to put it. For creating music, yes, the point is to create a world that can be entered, so that is definitely the biggest draw.

For listening I suppose it's the same, or maybe there is music I like to listen to that doesn't necessarily put me in another world but it can immediately cause an emotional or imaginative or some kind of consciousness-influencing reaction that I like.

But for the music I make, yes it's a bit of a portal, I believe, that is the draw.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what's changed since then?

I was forced to learn western classical music from the age of 5 like a typical Chinese American kid in the 80s. I continued perfunctorily until around the age of 12 when something in me woke up and it became interesting. I started to like metal, bluegrass, and Chinese traditional music, and also continued to develop more interest in western classical.

By 13-16 it was an important hobby, maybe my favorite thing to do at the time, and though I had teenage rockstar daydreams I didn't really plan for it to become my career.

Now as a middle aged man it is still one of my favorite things to do, maybe still the favorite single activity, and it is my career and in some way a cornerstone of my religious life.

Tell me about one or two of your early pieces that you're still proud of (or satisfied with) – and why you're content with them.

I did a short piece called “music for advertisements” that was 7 or so short pieces that eventually got released by Genjing Records, a mostly punk label out of Beijing by an American with many years in the underground music scene in china. It got put out as a 7 inch.



I composed and produced it in Chengdu just before I moved away to Yunnan, and it was sort of my farewell to that city. When I listen back I still like how it makes me feel, still can be transported and surprised by it, and enjoy the short form. And despite feeling like I have matured and evolved into someone better I still like the person who made that and what they are saying in that piece.

That was also maybe the first thing I made where I thought about the concept/title track etc. seriously alongside the music. Previous to that I was really more into sound as sound and all the places it could take you or all the things it could mean without having to have lyrics and track titles that tell people what such beautiful abstract mystical and magical things have to mean.

In short I always felt like a lot of that kind of titling and conceptualizing dumbs things down for people.

What is your current your studio or workspace like? What instruments, tools, equipment, and space do you need to make music?

I live in a small village in southwest China in a large house that sits right next to a lake in a decent sized valley. The room where I do my productions has a view of a massive mountain range that is often capped with snow and wearing a flowing wig of mist when the sun is not blazing like the eye of Elon against a hypnotically bright blue sky.

In the hallway outside the door is a wall sized window looking out onto the massive lake I live by, which, according to the pseudoscientific conjecture we all enjoy from social media, keeps my oxytocin levels just above the normal level. Most of the walls and ceiling are padded with black foam for sound insulation and plants are also pervasively climbing the foam walls and ceiling and inserting their roots into it. The rest is concrete and the floor is wooden boards.

I have a piano and dozens of instruments, an antique Chinese table upon which I keep my computer with setup for recording mixing etc., and some other simple furniture. Sometimes when I travel to cities I record in regular studios as well, but the majority of my work is done where I live. Although the advancements in professional studio production have made everything louder and cleaner, there are a lot of times when the sound recorded in the vacuum seems lacking, as one can see with all the plugins that can add tape hiss or other “natural” sounds to something that can feel too digital.

I prefer to allow the sounds of my environment enter my work. Within a hundred meter radius are the chickens, frogs, and various insects in our gardens, my neighbor's goat, and a variety of other village sounds. The wind in Dali, where I live, is also quite well known for its propensity to be so forceful as to move bricks and large stones (not to mention rooftop furniture), and anyone who knows about the power of wind can tell you that that level of velocity coming in through the cracks of windows and doors can sound like ghosts playing trumpets made of incense smoke or a nagging archetypal grandma or the coos of a baby from a now distant dimension.

But in the most minimal sense I only need my body to make music.

From the earliest sketches to the finished piece, tell me about the creative process for your current release, please.

Our process is quite simple. Liang Yiyuan and me have worked together for many years and usually the first thing to be determined when starting something new is deciding which instruments to use.

In this case Liang Yiyuan had recently come to a bit of a culminating point on the development of his unique lexicon for yangqin, and so knowing how he has been playing that, I decided that the variety of instruments that could compliment that best for me would be bawu, guzheng, piano, pipa, and double bass.

We improvised freely at first, and then the next stage involved reflecting on the tendencies that we were having and how to shape things more specifically. One of the significant dimensions was time, where we would deliberately try to keep things to 1-2 minutes. Another was finding specific motives in improvisation and then revisiting them and for several takes to see what different outcomes would occur.

After a few days of recording we let it sit, and over the next year and a half we separately made selections of the takes that we liked. After we agreed on which sections to use, we entered the mixing stage which we did separately as well but with occasional meetings.

Finally we reflected on the narrative arc and the entire feeling of the collection and started discuss conceptualization (which in my mind is packaging). Then we got in touch with full spectrum.

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these?

I don't know. Maybe. I'm actually pretty hyper and wacky, especially with my kids, so maybe not.

Although with albums like this one where some people might feel the sounds are kind of dark or even scary and horrific … I don't really act horrifically during the day to day. Or don't I?!?!? Damn! Know thyself is a hard one …