Jason Kopec - "Release the Cheerfulness, China"

Jason Kopec - "Untitled Track 2" (Noise|Order 2008)

Jason Kopec – Release the Cheerfulness, China: Ground Up 2 / Noise|Order

Eth-nog-ra-phy (eth- ‘nä-gruh-fē): the study and systematic recording of human cultures; a descriptive work produced from such research. (Merriam-Webster)

Jason Kopec refers to himself as a musical ethnographer. While this is not a new concept (see Sublime Frequencies as a popular and well executed example), it’s a practice that typically leads to very interesting results, especially for audiophiles. Historically, traditional ethnographers gain an expertise in their field of interest by holistic research methods. In other words, it’s the complete submergence into another culture by an anthropologist to try and form qualitative and quantitative descriptions of different societies and social occurrences. The goal is to achieve as good of an understanding of the situation as possible by first-hand experience and report it in some sort of research paper for others to learn from and become culturally aware and stimulated. As a musical ethnographer, this would enlist a similar approach to research with an enlightening audio statement as the final product. The product of Kopec’s research is presented through the Ground Up series via his own label, Noise|Order Recordings. His field recordings sidestep compete academia though thanks to a lack of accompanying information, which surprisingly plays to the album’s favor in this writer’s opinion.

Kopec dubbed Group Up 2, Release the Cheerfulness, China. As the title implies, it consists of field recordings he captured during a four-month expedition through the vast East Asian civilization. Unlike a lot of ethnomusicological studies, it does not concentrate on a highly specific style, instrument, people or concentrated area. Instead, Kopec apparently just meanders with ears open and microphone ready. The contents of the disc range from captured ambient scenes – like that of Shanghai traffic noise or peaceful nature chirps – to traditional music or channel flipping through local television. The liner notes are sparse to an alarming degree, leaving less to be learned from these audible culture glimpses as to be aesthetically enjoyed.

The sonic scenes are not terribly hard to decipher. There are tracks that solely concentrate on a particular native instrument performance, such as the refined glissando of a guqin during the second track or the familiar awkward yearns of a solo erhu performance on track nine. When the ensembles are larger, for example the sixteen-minute meditative performance of bells, strings, flutes and bass drum during track twelve or the slightly militaristic sounding track eight, pinpointing a particular style of music or geographical area where it may stem from would only be possible for folks experienced in Chinese culture.

The ambient scenes run a similar course of vague identifiability. The highly resonant space recorded in track eleven conjures images of massive temples or maybe even natural caves as hollow soundwaves and sparse gong hits cascade into an eerie, unsettling drone. And the final two tracks capture what sounds like a late evening plaza scene as ambient conversation and a passing vehicle are drowned out by the menacing chirp of some sort of species in the Acrididae family. The common listener can always form a generic mental image of the circumstances under which Kopec turned on his field kit, but the specifics are left to Kopec’s memory alone, letting the sounds transcend any kind of voyeurism into a sort of indefinable music.

This is all thanks to the lack of liner notes on Kopec’s part. It’s simultaneously frustrating from an academic standpoint and alleviating by forcing the recordings into simply a recreational listen. Release the Cheerfulness, China could just as easily be a study on curious sonic characteristics of the East Asian culture, but instead it becomes a transportive piece of ambient music suitable for nearly any circumstance when you just want something exotic on in the background of your apartment. I’m not sure if this makes Kopec the musical ethnographer he proclaims to be, but instead a sonic photographer. The moment is captured not for the particular details to be pieced together into the bigger puzzle of understanding life, but to be enjoyed in aesthetic sense as an interesting scene unable to be recreated and displaying the momentary beauty of the exotic world we live in.