'The Streets Are Your Canvas' by GUIGUISUISUI

Contents Prologue Chapter One: Out of Dongbei and Down There Chapter Two: Heading Back North Chapter Three: A Church Chapter Four: South of Siberia Chapter Five: Return of the Morning Calm Chapter Six: A Field Chapter Seven: Tigers in the Mountains Chapter Eight: Water Dragons Chapter Nine: A Friend Chapter Ten: GUIGUI Rising

All words by GUIGUISUISUI unless stated otherwise.

All photography by GUIGUISUISUI and Ripley Torres.

First printing, Beijing, 2013.

The Streets Are Your Canvas: A Prologue The incense has burned down, the wine has been drunk, the sun has lurched up into the sky, shooing away the darkness along with the untold pleasures and pains that dwell within. Alone, only the scent of perfume on the pillows remains. Who? Just another girl or the one who got away? No way of knowing , nothing lasts forever after all. No, we should cherish those little moments, those little moments of peace and sanctuary, away from little storms in tiny tea cups. Unlike the setting sun once our light is gone the end is eternal. Live in the now, because once it’s gone it’s gone forever.

This is the tale of GUIGUISUISUI’s first East Asian tour.

This is also intended to be an account of an informal network of musicians and artists based across Asia. The spirit of Doing It Yourself is strong and there are opportunities for anyone who wants to make and enjoy art, for love not for profit. From Mei Zhiyong, Lin Lin and Gannana in Changchun; Xie Yugang and Wangwen in Dalian; Nevin Domer , Josh Feola, Thruoutin, Jingweir, Sinotronics, Mike Cupoli and Richard Deorian in Beijing; Xiao Zhong and F, Gou Shen, Stegosarus?,XXYY, RDC, and Roundeye in Shanghai; Loose Union, Ripley Torres,the now defunct Powwow,Han Joo Lee and Yogiga in Seoul; GT Arpe in Daejeon; Philan Jung, Mr.Headbutt (RIP), and Axcutor in Daegu; Basement, Genius, Say Sue Me, Three Summer in Busan; Seismic Charge, Warsawpact ,Pieuvre Echotalk and everyone at Club Utero in Fukuoka, this diary is dedicated to the people who are making the places they live genuinely interesting.

Of course there are a lot more active people and interesting places not mentioned just now, or talked about at all in this story. That goes without saying, Asia is a big place after all. What’s more a golden rule in attempting to write anything that might even be semi-readable to anyone else is to write about what you know. Therefore this is a communication of the DIY network that I came to know during my travels.

The message I want to impart is to participate and support: make a band, make a video, make a zine, make a poster,make a record, take some photos, book a show, book a tour. Please, don’t spend $200+ to see some living corpse of a stadium rock act, lurching out onto a stage with their zimmer frame to claw in more cash they don’t even need, just so they can pay for their fleet of yachts or fifth castle, butchering songs they gave up caring about long ago. Instead take that money and go to ten DIY’d shows by local independent artists and touring acts. Support creating for the sake of creativity. Spend your hard earned cash on CDs,tapes,t-shirts,vinyl,silk screen prints...show some love, show some encouragement, and ensure that inspiring people continue to inspire.

Like meditation it’s all in the act, the process. Through such acts we might glimpse something a little more important than a top forty record or a new surgically beautified face on a billboard.

First, some context is probably in order: I’ve been traveling since I was a university student, and been in countless bands since I was a teenager.

Music has always been in my life, largely due to the fact that my father has been singing and blowing blues harp for around half a century.

What’s more he’s really, really good. From the get go I’ve always had a pretty high bar to match when I step on stage. It’s like I’m always a little boy, walking through a crowded pub when I suddenly see my dad on a stage, strangling the microphone stand, sweat pouring down his face, his powerful voice sailing over the sonic assault of guitar, bass, and drums, blasting through the room.

Of the many gifts my loving parents have given me over the years easily one of the greatest was access to a collection of vinyl records including early releases by Led Zepplin and The Who as well as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and assorted rhythm and blues 7”s. They gave me was an introduction to early hard rock and heavy metal, to punk, and to that beautiful legacy known as the blues. Maybe most crucial was the firm opinion that hit-parade pop music, whether it’s ABBA or Lady Gaga, is

a load of shit you’d be better off not putting in your ears. Quite simply they taught me to be picky, to have some taste, to go and look for good music as opposed to just taking whatever is rammed down your throat, and that goes for art, film and literature too. If mainstream shit makes you happy, by all means please yourself, but don’t expect me to play along and praise over-hyped passionless rubbish when there is so much good work out there that gets no attention.

This was the first time I’d actually set out on the road to play a string of shows. A few months later, the snow having melted, I sat in my kitchen with a cup of Earl Grey and the luxury of reflection. I’ve since moved to Beijing; writing this was one of last things I did before leaving Northeast China, an all together more wild and much,much colder place. Thinking back to all the journeys I’ve taken and thinking of this one in particular I can only say it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I’m not sure it’s something I would recommend to anyone else, but somebody once said, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” Indeed making journeys like this is something I intend to do again and again until I can’t or don’t want to anymore.

Since August 2011 I’d lived in Changchun, Jilin province, Northeast China. As already mentioned the top end of China is much rougher around the edges, sandwiched between Russia and North Korea.

Changchun a rust-belt rat-trap of a city that’s frozen to minus thirty degrees celsius for half the year, closer to Pyeongyang than to Beijing, and not just geographically speaking. It’s a mix of depressing and drab apartment buildings, shacks and sheds on a patchwork of dirt tracks, which contrast sharply with the gentrified shopping malls and hastily constructed apartment buildings, overflowing with coffee shops and retail outlets selling absolutely nothing of use to man nor beast. The music scene is tiny, populated by uninspired copycat metal bands, and every once in a while an acoustic guitar wielding expat mutilating a cover of The Eagles or some other classic rawk rubbish. Only the likes of Mei Zhiyong and Wu Ren Wenhua colour this otherwise bland landscape. In short, it’s paradise.

“I hate the fucking Eagles, man.”

(The Dude) Yet this is where I was making my music, making my art. Out of bitter frustration at the mudanity of everything I created GUIGUISUISI, a world of weird from within my own head. There was no music I wanted to listen to so I made the music I wanted to hear. There was no art to speak to me so I made the art I wanted to talk about. A bass string stretched over a skateboard deck (The Diddly Board) gifted by the great Gary Ptaszek, a self modified open tuned hollow body guitar (The Suburban Ruffian), a handful of harmonicas, and a few guitar pedals dragged round to the handful of music bars. I screamed and hollered punk-blues murder ballads and songs about pirouetting cats, sweating running down my face and stinging my eyes. Afterwards I would hand out photocopied zines filled with my crap poetry,photography, writing, and darkest musings. I’m quite sure nobody gave a fuck but I didn’t care. I did it anyway.

I’d recorded a CD titled Dongbei Delta with a Chinese beat boxer named Xiao Hai aka. Hunter. It was sketchy affair, recorded in a cafe, a couple of amps arranged around a single microphone, but it was a record nevertheless, more than most manage to muster in Dongbei. I decided to take it on tour for five weeks, down to Shanghai, up through Beijing and Dalian and then across to South Korea — my old home — across to Japan, and then back to Dongbei. Why? Well, why not?

It was one hell of a trip.

Chapter One: Out of Dongbei and Down There December 27,2013: I left my home in Changchun looking like an overloaded mule. The Suburban Ruffian on my back,a rucksack on my front, a long cardboard box under one arm containing The Diddly Board and a skateboard wrapped in some plaid shirts, the other arm pulling a suitcase with my pedal board and some more clothes inside. It was snowing.

Cold, bastard cold, as I walked along frozen mud trails that pass for roads around where I lived. The flakes of snow, perfect little crystals.

Crystals of what? Not amphetamine. Rather flakes of ketamine falling from the heavens, subduing and paralyzing all beneath the great frozen sky. The the handle of the suitcase cut into my hand like a frozen knife.

I struggled onto the light rail and stood sandwiched between people, some of whom seemed acutely interested in me. On that day the feeling wasn’t mutual.

The grey skies and the morose apartment buildings whizzed by outside, black ink billowing from the countless smokestacks, mixing into the gray above.

I struggled off the light rail at the train station. My bags were seriously heavy. I was being dragged down in every direction. A man decided he wanted to practice his English and strike up a conversation consisting of the obvious being stated repeatedly.

“It’s cold isn’t it?”

“Your bags look heavy.”

I hate people stating the obvious.

Down a flight of muddy steps, hordes of people swarming around me, into a gloomy concrete underpass. Trundling along. Up three flights of stairs, bags and all. Finally to the top and into the train station,

unloading and putting my bags through the X-ray machine at the security check point. Struggling to the waiting area, I found the gate for my train and an empty seat. I placed my bags in a small pile and stripped off my snow jacket. My sweatshirt was drenched with sweat. I probably should have taken a plane.

Soon enough I was on the train. It took twenty nine and a half hours to reach Shanghai, probably the longest train journey I’ve ever taken.

Before the train departed I called Lin, the closest thing Changchun had to a promoter. In fact he sold himself as a promoter, producer, record label executive, bar owner, sound engineer, band leader, all rolled into one. I called him and asked about the Dongbei Delta CDs, which I was supposed to have with me. There had been some kind of bad noise about getting them pressed and the sleeves made. My suspicions were that Lin had changed his mind about going in half on the production of the CD. He said they would be done soon and he’d mail them to me in Shanghai.

I talked a little to Chinese man in the bunk across from me, but for the most part I stayed on my own bunk, my luggage arranged around me. I ate the noodles I’d prepared before I left, listened to Son House and Robert Johnson, and read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I slept, for hours upon hours, disappearing into dreamscapes filled with bottle necks rolling up and down fretboards as I dived into rivers of bourbon.

December 28,2012: Dongbei in the winter is cold, but the moment I stepped off the train I realised Shanghai isn’t much better. While the average temperate is a good twenty five degrees higher than in the North, there is no central heating. I arrived in a cold, damp, expensive city that offered probably the slowest start the tour could have had.

Chapter Two: Heading Back North January 2,2013: I was staying with Lenz of Goushen and hung out with her and her band mates. There weren’t any shows to speak of. Pairs, Roundeye, Battle Cattle, Stegosaurus?, all were out of town or busy.

It was tormenting, all of these awesome bands but no chance to see or play with them. In fact apart from an expat band and a couple of lackluster college bands I saw at Live Bar on NYE, who made me want to crawl inside myself with despair, I saw no live music in Shanghai.

The Bund was open though.

Every day I was waking up, sneezing chronically for some unknown reason, and spending far too long sending emails trying to find out when CDs were going to get made or else trying to book shows for the tour.

At this point there were still a lot of blanks on the calendar. Night time consisted of hanging out at Inferno, the clubhouse for Shanghai’s rock scene. Heavy metal, booze, repeat, over and over.

In the mornings I’d shower and then take a while shivering in the cold while looking at myself in the mirror. Grown out rockabilly haircut, unkept bushy mutton chops framing my gaunt pale face. I hasn’t even started the tour and yet I already looked like shit.

Aside from sneezing and hurting my eyes, I walked. The ground was far too wet to skate, so I just strolled around. I’d done the tourist thing twice before in this city and I was trying to hold onto my money for food and trains. So I’d mooch around, down the streets, between apartment blocks, through shopping malls, looking, searching. For what? Some sense of purpose in the city? In me? I sat on rooftops looking at the rain clouds and pollution. I’d sit in 7-11s ,drink a beer, and write in my notebook. Songs, poems, journal entries, sketches.

Walking those wet and drab streets gave a lot of fuel, a lot of inspiration. Not necessarily positive inspiration , but ideas nevertheless.

I wrote a about hauling ass across a country to sit around, a long walk for a small drink of water kind of deal, about dating zombies, about

hating the cold of Dongbei, about everything going on between my ears. Song titles appeared: ‘Nineteen Below Zero’, ‘Undead Blind Date’ ,‘Black Cat’...sitting in a park, watching the old folks tracing their hands through the air as part of their tai chi practice, my hand scribbling barely legible characters, trying to keep up with the super sonic broken rhythm that my brain seemed to be operating at.

Later I found out there would be no CDs coming down from Dongbei, as the earliest date of arrival would place me in Korea, having played half my dates without a release to promote. I told Lin to forget it and called up Mike Cupoli of Cloud Choir/Noise Arcade/Low Bow/KTR. He said he’d get on it.

Still having no Shanghai show and finding no bands that I liked available I booked a show at Live Bar to play alone.

The one structuring daily event, the reason to get out of bed in the morning, was walking with a dog called Little Mushroom. Mian Mian, the dog’s owner, was in Germany and no one else was around to walk her, so everyday I took her around the streets of the French Concession.

Being a Border Collie, known to some as an English Sheepdog, she was very smart ,very active, and loved to run really fast. When I felt like it I’d break into a sprint as fast as I could, with with her leading the way.

Together we scared the living shit out of a many a pedestrian, leaping into the road to avoid this black and white flash of lightening closely followed by a scruffy incarnation of the Monkey King.

I felt sorry for her. A sheep dog stuck in a big dirty metropolis without a sheep in sight. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just a hard deal for a dog like that living in a big city. After we’d go walking we’d return home and she would sit alone in a small room without much sunlight . She seemed a little like the people, stuck in their concrete boxes, only leaving to slave away in an office, their only escape being some virtual game world or an overpriced nightclub/KTV room/whorehouse. We belong in nature, but instead we’re prisoners in the artificial world we’ve built for ourselves.

As the dog led me through the streets, words assembled themselves and a rude melody formed over the rhythm of footsteps.

There ain’t no sheep in Shanghai, So it’s a hard ol’ life for a sheepdog, There ain’t no sheep in Shanghai, So it’s a hard ol’ life for you.

Life is strange and life is rough For some us it’s pretty rough, Especially when that old sheepdog, Has got to play on the hard mode.

There ain’t no sheep in Shanghai, So it’s a hard ol’ life for a sheepdog, There ain’t no sheep in Shanghai, So it’s a hard old life for you. (‘Lamp Post Blues’) January 6, 2013: Finally the show at Live Bar rolled around. This was in fact my second time playing at this particular venue as I’d played there in October of 2011 with my dad, supporting Pairs and The Smith Street Band. Xiao Zhong had returned from tour in South East Asia. It was the weekend after New Years so everyone had to work. For some unbeknown reason making it an afternoon show seemed like a good idea. As a result seven people and a cat were in attendance.

Two of the human audience members were female and quite attractive.

After the show it transpired they had only come to see my Dad, so they were sorely disappointed to find out only I was there. All that aside for the first time the songs I’d recorded for Dongbei Delta sounded like I meant them to. Xiao Zhong was there smashing the drum kit to pieces, fresh back in the PRC with stories and stickers from the Indonesia hardcore scene ,driving the songs along along and pushing them to the

edge of a ravine. We covered Nirvana and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It was raw and nasty. My fingers bled.

Maybe the set sounded awful. I guess if the seven people and the cat had walked out I would have known if it really was awful. Either way, it didn’t matter. I had fun playing with one the best drummers I know of, that was important. Xiao Zhong smiled. The cat licked its private parts.

Everyone won.

Xiao Zhong gave me a Pairs S.E Asia tour t-shirt. I’d already run out of clean clothes and to this day I’m sincerely thankful for that shirt.

January 8, 2013: I had just short of week left in Shanghai and I spent it with Zig, my best friend from Changchun, who’d moved down to be with his girlfriend in the suburbs south of Shanghai. I sneezed less down there and I had someone to hang out with all day as Zig was job hunting. We drank beer and talked about stuff, like that one time in _________ that we ______ with _______ and then laughed about it over ________. One day we were sitting out the front of his apartment complex in front of what appeared to be a fountain. As in if you’d never seen a fountain but someone described one to you and then insisted you design and build one on pain of death.

Drinking beer and playing guitar we watched a middle aged lady clean around us. We wrote a song for her there and then.

Worker lady’s got no time to chat, Her block’s way too clean for that, Worker lady, 我爱你, Worker lady, you’re the one for me. (‘Worker Lady’) January 10, 2013: I was excited to get on the bullet train to Beijing and get the tour underway properly. Better still Mike Cupoli had got the CDs done, so I would actually have something to tour. On my last night

I made dinner for the Zig house, my speciality: tofu burgers. In the process of cutting some onions I managed to slice my left index finger open. I knew instantly I would spend the next month pouring superglue into that finger.

January 11 ,2013: I arrived in Beijing feeling pretty exhausted but at the same time happy. It felt good to suck that polluted air into my lungs.

My bags felt like they were getting heavier and my hand was bleeding. I found my way to Dongcheng and made it to Mike’s house. Mike is one of my oldest friends in Beijing. I met him through Luke Hansford, the original editor for Jingweir zine. Every time I visited Beijing Mike was gracious enough to let me crash on his couch. He’s an energizer bunny of lo-fi noise, machine gun beats, and DIY antics, juggling ambient drone projects, drumming for multiple bands, and teaching, yet still finding time to put out a release every week. After I touched down we followed through with our standard operating procedure of chilling, drinking beer, talking music, talking equipment, talking music some more, and drinking more beer.

January 12, 2013: Things move in Beijing. I collected120 copies of Dongbei Delta, met with friends for drinks, and practiced with Mike.

Mike is always down to listen to a song and really learn his parts so we got the set sounding pretty tight. We even managed to bring in some Noise Arcadesque freakiness into some of the longer songs. Mike would throw down his drum sticks, and get on his knees in front of his Casio keyboard/calculator-FX loop and summon evil synthesized demons from his effects pedals,spewing brutish barrages of static and fuzz, a dark canvas over which to drip distorted globs of guitar. Our cover of TV On The Radio’s ‘Wolf Like Me’ was sounding dark.

The practice room we used before the show was run by some metal looking folks with two cats. The amps weren’t very good. To this day I still lurk around that practice room.

Chapter Three: A Church Today I went in to a church.

The first time I went into this particular church was when I was a child.

An obligatory school trip. An old man told my classmates and I about the history of paper making. He talked about Foolscap paper. The fool wore a cap and made paper. He wrote down some foolish things about his cap. He capped off his foolishness with a piece of paper. Something like that.

The old man wasn’t there today. No paper makers, no stacks of virgin white A4 begging to be hijacked and manufactured into zines filled with absolute nonsense, no class mates, no school trip. But I’m here, taller, older, a little wearier, a little hungover.A fool without a cap.

It was quiet in the church, save for a small gaggle of tourists muttering about the English civil war. It smelt musky in the church, the smell of the aged brick and stone, the floor with centuries of grooves and gullies worn by generation after generation of feet. Townsfolk who came to worship and ask forgiveness.

Before the altar, before the magnificent stained class window depicting Christ in his dying moments of torture and pain, I crossed myself. I crossed myself before the son of God preparing to reunite with the Holy Father. Yet I did not cross myself out of some deep rooted belief, I crossed myself merely out of ceremony.

Around the church the stained glass told stories, faces and names immortalised in glass. As the sunlight filtered through martyrs and heroes were illuminated and brought back to life. Dead soldiers of long forgotten wars , whose feet once scuffed the stone floor as they came to worship, before they marched off to some foreign field to spill their blood as Christ once spilled his. Spilling their blood for something that seemed important at the time.

The old man with his paper is almost certainly gone now. Did he get a window in the church? A chance at resurrection and immortality in the retinas of others every time the sun shines? Â Turritopsis dohrnii, a species of jellyfish, is able to avoid death by repeatedly reverting to an immature state. Some scientists think this means they can live forever.

Maybe the jellyfish should get a window in the church too.

No one was around to answer my question about the old man and if even if they had been this would have been an almost impossible question for them to answer. I turned my back on the stained glass Christ and his apostles. I left the church.

Chapter Four: South of Siberia January 13,2013: The show at XP was another Sunday show. Nevin Domer of Maybe Mars/Genjing Records and Josh Feola from Pangbianr had done a good job setting it up. Not many folks turned out, but it’s important to be thankful for the people that do. Chen Long, the sound man gave us a good sound, and in a more fan-out moment, a younger more naive me got all excited about playing XP, hub of Maybe Mars and the spiritual successor to D-22. Love or hate that operation, it’s undeniable it has played a huge part in shaping the musical landscape of Beijing and beyond. The choice to have Low Bow as the other band was inspired for sure. Richard Deorian is the perfect partner in crime for Mike, once being described as “the guru of the Beijing DIY scene”.

Before the show we had a great conversation about garage blues and Mississippi Delta legends. He knows his blues and he can play like a motherfucker.

Low Bow killed it that night. Dirty garage blues on overdrive, full throttle rock and roll. I was seriously amped on their set and frothing to get on stage. Mike and i played hard and had a blast. The noise parts were great, I shouted my lungs out at ten people and bled over my guitar. At the end Richard jumped up on stage and grabbed his guitar.

I rocked The Diddly Board and he wailed away on his SG and we jammed off into oblivion.

Beijing was good.

January 15,2013: Armed with CDs, clean laundry, and a renewed sense of enthusiasm I got on a sleeper train for Dalian and arrived pretty damn early. By this point my suitcase had eaten shit far too many times and the missing pieces suggested it had seen far better days. Finding my hostel was a mission,I got dropped off where I thought it was, but it actually wasn’t.

A Dongbei city at 4 a.m, when it’s really, really cold, and the wheels are falling off your overloaded suitcase. Standing in the frozen street,

wondering what the fuck you’re doing. One of those little slices of cold, harsh reality, where you look at all the moments in the journey up to that point and try and remember how you reached that place. Soon enough you start to wonder about what will come next. That’s when you get really worried.

I finally got to the hostel but it was too early to check in so I slept on a sofa with a big old dog sniffing round my bags. The day consisted of getting my boat ticket and doing my hair for the show. At night I got a taxi out to the ferry port on the harbor. Next door is a shopping mall with Echo Books inside, which is run by Xie Yugang of Wangwen and his wife, Lin Lin. They also sell records there, a large chunk being Genjing releases, and it’s easily the coolest shop I’ve seen in China.

Everyone was super nice and generous and the stage was waiting for me. Jiang Hao of Doc Talk Shock lent me his loop station. There were a bunch of people. I was a little scared as this was one of the first times I’d played alone. Now I do it all the time, but then, being on a stage, alone, naked with nothing to hide behind save for my instruments, was a challenge.

It didn’t help that I broke a string right before I was about to go. Added to that, I am a big fan of Wangwen, hands down one of my favourite bands in Asia, so I wanted to do well but I had to take a string off of Xie’s acoustic and put that on The Suburban Ruffian. Despite some nerves the set was fun. I was joined by a harmonica player who lurks around Dalian shows and turned out to be a harmonica hero, all fast and flash. On one song he was trying to lead a bit too hard so I had a good old time playing hard and fast back at him, really pulling off and hammering the strings, like turbo Ry Cooder, pushing the fucker.

That went places. Some punk and skate kids came up and bought CDs afterwards.

After the show Xie, myself and some others talked about music and drank, and talked, and drank. Lin Lin gave me a book of Raymond Carver short stories. That was an amazing gift. Razor blade cold winds were blowing off the ocean and howling outside the window.

It was beautiful.

January 16,2013: I woke up with a massive hangover and found I had lost the keys to my locker in the hostel. It was really cold, even for Dongbei. I spent most of the day getting lost on buses. Eventually I didn’t feel so hungover and made my way back to the ferry port. I ate some food in a shitty little place next to the terminal, full of gnarly looking old Chinese men in military jackets. I guess they were merchant seamen. I thought working on a ship might be pretty cool. I went through immigration and then went off to board the ship, a big hulking white giant, passengers entering through the cargo hold, between the grimy shipping containers.

Just as I got onto the boarding ramp the wheels finally fell off my suitcase. Somebody helped me to pick it up and put it on my skateboard, wheeling it into the hold and parking it amongst the other passengers’ luggage. * There is a lot to be said for traveling by plane. It’s fast, it’s convenient, and these days it’s not always so expensive. Yet there is something I really dislike about it. It’s almost too fast. It’s unnatural. No creature on our planet can travel like that. The time to ponder your point of departure, your destination, your journey, the act of going, going, going, is taken away. Instead you just sit too close to someone you don’t know and shoot unspoken hexes at the people in first class.

Traveling by boat is slow. You have time and space to move around.

There is no rush and there is no weight limit. That time on the boat was good pondering and wandering time. I watched Dalian’s water front slip out of sight, into the darkness, raising a hand to Xie even though I knew he couldn’t see me. The air on the deck was pure Dongbei, colder than anything you’ve felt before, frozen dark waters beneath you. One slip and you’d be gone and forgotten, frozen at the bottom within minutes.

Zen under the darkness of the night, time to take stock of where I’d been and where I wanted to be going. Not just in terms of this tour but also in life. We spend so much of every waking day running headlong at some imaginary goal post, rarely stopping to look around and decide if we’re even running in the right direction. Where should we be running?

Should we be running at all? It’s all a journey, a journey from the cradle to the grave, and what comes next, well, a bunch of different books will tell you different things , but none of them deny that everyone dies.

That is the conclusion of every journey. Are you happy? Are you having fun? Are you who you want to be? Boats are where such questions can be asked and (maybe) answered.

This pondering time was also good for preparing to return to Korea. It had been a while since I’d been there and spoken Korean to Koreans, so simple things like buying cup ramen and beer were good excuses to train my brain into speaking a language I’d half forgotten and never even mastered in the first place.

At first I slept well in my tiny cot, but after a while I awoke and couldn’t sleep any more. I wanted to get drunk to pass the night away, but the only thing on offer was Korean beer from a vending machine. I hate Korean beer and I hate the nasty hangovers it inflicts even more. I stood staring at that vending machine in the empty lounge area for some minutes, contemplating my destiny. I decided I didn’t want to wake up in Korea with a pounding headache so I creeped back to my cot.

Chapter Five: Return of the Morning Calm January 17,2013: When I woke up the port of Incheon could just be seen on the horizon. I wandered out on deck. It was cold, but not as cold as it had been leaving China. The boat passed under a huge bridge out in the water, seemingly stretching from one point in the ocean to another.

I stood on the bow, gulls circling over head, as we creeped towards the harbor. For the first time in memory the Land of the Morning Calm was living up to its name.

Once I cleared immigration and was released from captivity the first task was to get to central Seoul. If I’d flown in I could have caught an express train straight from the airport, but being at a port on the edge of Incheon, an industrial harbor city, I instead had to catch a bus, then get on the subway, transfer, and eventually land myself in Hongdae, Seoul’s university district. All of this was made more difficult due to the fact that I had four pieces of luggage to carry, the largest of which no longer had any wheels. When it came to wheeling it on to subway trains time and time again there was a gap between the platform and train just big enough for my skateboard’s wheels to get stuck in. Then came getting the bags up and down flights of stairs. On one occasion I tried to pick up the bag and instead it fell on top of me. I lay there, exhausted, laughing at the bitter comedy of the situation. Blessed be those two Korean students who helped me up and carried my bag down the stairs.

Their Mandarin was exceptional.

Eventually I made it to Hongdae station. Always a hub of activity, the myriad of exits sending you out in any number of directions, all of them leading to neon drenched excitement. Art schools and universities within spitting distance from one another, a nocturnal paradise of dance clubs, live venues, soju houses, and high heels. This truly was a one place to lose oneself.

New years eve...which one? One of them. Meeting Ollie Walker in a

7-11 and rushing back to Joker Red. Sprinting and sliding along the long slivers of ice reflecting the flickering neon lights that painted everything in sight, Korean girls in miniskirts squealing and jumping out of the way, heels going clickity clickity click. We slid all the way down the street, like something out of a comic book, sliding on just the soles of our shoes . Down the stairs, into the darkness where the bass made your teeth rattle, into the arms of somebody new and then off into the night.

Things had changed a little since I’d last been here. I tried to get change for a pay phone from an ajumma but she pointed to a phone on a computer terminal. It turned out it was a free web phone. That was new.

I took out my notebook of songs and scribbles and in the front found a phone number. I dialed, waited, and then heard a click. “여보세요?”

The voice didn’t belong to a Korean person. A hint of a Southern U.S. drawl gave it away. Ripley.

Ripley Torres aka. Turbo Torres aka. Ripley Tao aka. Radarboom...a living , breathing embodiment of art and creativity in its most pure.

As a painter he’s shown work all over Korea, as a performance artist and drummer he’d been all over Asia and the U.S., shared a stage with Melt Banana, and written and performed a rock opera. I first Ripley when I was working in Seoul as a copy editor and generally hating a job that paid poorly and demanded a lot of work. I decided at that time writing wasn’t getting me off. Ripley opened the door for new kinds of expression: skateboarding through puddles of paint over canvases and calling it art. Jackson Pollock gets rad. Deciding I wanted to do some exhibitions, Ripley was the pied piper that led this rat down a path that changed things. We worked all night hanging , organising, drinking ,smoking, and out of it came art festivals and concerts. Ripley was the emperor of the night and I saw how much fun the world could be had if you just chose to hoist a metaphorical pirate flag over your life.

Up on the street I waited. Seoul seemed strange, cleaner than I remembered. Ripley appeared, the same but a little different. He still had his white Doc Martins, but he’d cut off his dread locked top knot.

He was wearing a Korean volunteer police jacket. He helped me with my bags and pretty soon we were unloading my luggage at his apartment. Ripley’s house was small, a room on top of a roof, where you can almost touch two walls at once. Some how he managed to compact his life within this space and for almost two weeks we both managed to fit in there.

January 18,2013: We got in a practice room and ran through the set. It sounded great, Ripley is in no way a cookie cutter behind the drums, and he brought all his flair and aggression to the songs. As we worked he wrote down the names of songs and notes on a coffee cup. He brought that coffee cup with him for the whole tour.

When the sun dropped behind the mountains we went to some bars and clubs. If you’re ever in Seoul check out Boys Don’t Cry in Hongdae, a bar themed around The Cure. The Korean owner even looks like Robert Smith, though he allegedly claims his hair naturally stands a foot off his scalp, no hairspray being used whatsoever. We checked out Club FF to catch Gogo Star, probably my favourite Korean band, and then we hit up Yogiga, where the first show was scheduled. After drinking a gin and tonic while listening to ‘Love Cats’, you should go to Yogiga and give Han Joo Lee a hearty handshake and then buy him a drink.

Yogiga and Han Joo are seriously important components of the Korean underground, where musicians and artists from all over the world can come together and create regardless of genre. The Yogiga basement space is a canvas for inspiring ideas and happenings without spoiling it all with profit margins. It’s people like Han Joo that make this world worth living in. Always smiling, always creating, always helping others create.

We ended up in basement reggae bar a few doors down from Sunrat Kim’s tattoo studio, drinking rum and cokes and talking until the sun started to drag its self over the horizon.

January 19, 2013: Saturday show time. Even though a live show may only take up a few hours of the day it can suck up all the time around it because everything else takes a back seat. As a result the day didn’t consist of too much; eating Korean food, writing a set list and restringing, doing some last minute shout arounds to let people know about the show. Ripley was so into the idea of playing shows and going on tour again he had gone and cut his hair into a red mohawk, although what resulted was more like a giant red horn sticking out the top of his head.

We got the venue early and sound checked. Han Joo had laid on the Yogiga speciality of makgeolli — milky white korean rice wine that comes in plastic jugs. For some it’s the recipe for nights of absolute insanity , for others it just leads to a vomity hangover. Either way it was a little slice of the Korea I know and love, so it was a welcome guest at the feast. We also got a chance to meet the other act of the evening, IanJohn and Summit.Ian-John is a Kiwi harmonica player, and a seriously good one at that. While I can wail out a few notes this guy can really blow, straight up Chicago blues style. Summit is an eighteen-year-old Korean beat boxer, who happens to be Ian-John’s student ( Ian-John being a high school teacher).Together they create a fusion of hip hop beats and Chicago blues harp the likes of which I had never heard before.Hats off to Han Joo for pairing GUIGUI with Ian-John and Summit, it showed that he’d listened to my music and really thought about an act that would work well on the same bill.

Soon enough people started trickling in, friends and faces I had not seen in years...artists, musicians, room mates, drinking buddies, and everyone else in between. Yogiga filled out and makgeolli flowed liberally. Ian-John and Summit took to the stage and mesmerized the crowd with haunting, phantom notes. Strange sounds coaxed from some kind of a flute with balloons sticking out that I never would have even dreamt of in a thousand years, and then Summit’s ten ton beats dropped and got the bodies moving in no time. Hands clapped hard in appreciation and I remember feeling a little bit uncomfortable about

touching a harmonica on stage after witnessing Ian-John’s playing.

Ripley and I were up there soon enough. “하나” “둘” “셋” “넷” First number, ‘Fix Me A Drink’. We tore through song after song, Ripley pausing long enough to look at his coffee cup of song notes or to sip his drink, jumping right back into punishing the drum kit, pounding the bass, and attacking the high hat like it was going out of fashion. The only sizable break was when a shirtless Ripley ran into the crowd to sell CDs. “오천입니다!오천입니다!”

I hollered my lungs out, ran my brass slide up and down The Suburban Ruffian’s neck like an olympic relay, and coaxed screaming feedback from the amp to make some truly horrifying sounds. We ended on ‘How To Reply To A Shanghainese Street Vendor’ ,where we got the entire crowd to sing along with the chorus of “我要招财猫” (lit.“I want lucky cat”) ,but we should have finished with ‘Four Pairs’, my noise-punk sea shanty tribute to F and Xiao Zhong of Pairs. That night it was second to last in the set and it really went off. Everybody had a great time, I lost pounds in sweat alone, and Han Joo and Ollie recorded the whole thing.

These recordings resulted in It’s a HARD MODE when you’re ON THE ROAD with dem particle board blues.

The rest of the night was boozing and chatting with people. At some juncture I went back to Ripley’s place and passed out on the floor, disappearing to a place where past and present meet and intertwine.

Chapter Six: A field Today I visited a field.

It was the field behind my grandmother’s house. Years before, back to childhood,walking from my grandmother’s back gate to the top of that grass slope felt like scaling Everest. Walk the dog and keep it on the leash because if it sees a squirrel there will be no stopping it.

Those ancient trees had seemed so tall in those days, ancient trunks erupting from the earth and reaching for the heavens, having the gall to try and wrap their gnarled branches around the divine couple of the sun and the moon, dragging them down to the ground, only to have them sneak back high into the sky.

There were stories in the knots of those trees, scars in the bark, history in the living sap. My mother had been born in the house in which my grandmother lives at the bottom of the field. At that time the fields had been heavily wooded. Many more trees, rank after rank. There hadn’t been as many cars on the roads in those days but the woods had been dangerous. My mother had been led to believe that a witch lived in the darkness between those trees, a necromancer, a trickster, a patron of sorcery and black magic.

The year in which I was born had seen a heavy storm hit England.

Roofs were torn off houses, trees were uprooted and thrown like javelins across the fields, over into the towns and villages. Many of the trees that had stood behind my grandmother’s house met this fate, those left standing being generously spaced apart. Therefore I never needed to hear fables of black magic in the darkness.

The field didn’t seem as big as it once did, the trees not quite as tall or as ancient. Once upon a time this field had seemed like the world, a canvas on which a boy’s imagination could create wonderful dreamscapes, but having seen the world it no longer seemed quite so vast.

There was no one in sight, no sound except the wind rustling through the leaves,making waves in the long grass. I reached my arms out and savored the feeling of nothing and no one. Then I as I passed I picked a leaf from the low hanging branch of an oak. It’s colour, texture, its perfect symmetry was both beautiful and real. * I remembered the first time I took notice of the ability to create being more powerful than the ability to destroy.

Do all people remember that? Maybe some forget, or come to unlearn that creation is more powerful, or maybe never learn in the first place.

With the way people carry on in the world maybe the latter is true.

Voting in favour of war and execution, imprisoning billions of animals to living hell in order to harvest their flesh, dumping toxic waste into the oceans, tearing down fields and forests to make way for high rises. A global society of twisted little people who never learnt that the power to love is greater than the power to fuck, who never learnt that it’s not OK to pull the wings off of butterflies.

If a butterfly beating its wings in Rio De Janeiro causes an earthquake in Tokyo, what is going to happen if you tear its wings off?

When I was a child my family lived in a village outside the town in which my parents now live, the town in which my father was born. We lived in an English village. How idyllic that sounds. Country lanes, misty fields,horses braying in the stables, traditional pubs, churches and graveyards cradling the souls of the parishioners, generation after generation being of that place, being of that land.

How idyllic.

Except it wasn’t.

The village had some of these idyllic things, but it also had many components not associated with such genteel fantasies. Teenagers experimenting with syringes filled with Gods knows what in parks, bleak tenement housing for the unemployed who had no chance of finding work, streams of plastic bags and aluminum cans that would never rot littering the banks of the little lanes.

Across the street from the village’s central park was a row of bungalows, the type that are almost exclusively inhabited by the retired in Britain. Neat little single story houses with brightly coloured doors across from the rose bushes of the park, neighboring the graveyard and just down the street and around the corner, a church with its ancient legends of how men of Kent defied William the Bastard and were not conquered. Invicta.

On looks alone this strip of bungalows was a nice enough place to retire, to live out your remaining days in peace and serenity. It surely would have been the perfect sanctuary if it wasn’t for those bleak, almost terrifying council flats. A cluster of them, right next door. Dirty grey concrete, unlit stairwells drenched in spray paint and piss. Hood up, head down, loitering. Darkness and grime sat next to this heart warming postcard of village life.

Andrew was one of those wrong side of the tracks kids. His parents had split up, his father had been in prison for something or the other

and didn’t seem to have much luck finding work. Andrew lived with his father and his father’s girlfriend and his half sister in a little flat. It wasn’t idyllic village life. I was with Andrew on that day. We had our skateboards. We must have been eight years old. We’d go to hills and ride down them sitting on our asses.When we reached the bottom we’d go back to the top and do it all over again.

At the end of the row of bungalows there was a final attempt at an idyllic postcard of an English country village before the well intentioned concrete tombstones came and took over and made the whole thing an ugly fucking mess. The concrete loomed over the modest little bungalow. It’s front door was painted a bright colour. I can’t remember which but it was bright, like a toy building block. There was a small green lawn, cut in two by a pebble dash path leading up to the front door. The little lawn and the path were identical to all the other bungalow’s lawns and paths. Maybe they were also built by the council, still owned by them even? I didn’t know, no eight-year-old thinks about such questions, let alone goes seeking an answer. What I did know about were the flowers planted alongside the little path.

The flowers were a bold shade of purple, running from where the green lawn met the street up to where the lawn stopped beneath the bungalow’s window seals, like a landing strip to guide any guests to the neat little front door. With Andrew watching I crossed the street and stood on the pavement in front of the little bungalow. Without much though I lifted up my foot and brought it down on the first flower of the row, crushing it into the pebble dash path. Lifting up my shoe I giggled as I saw its sad, flattened remains, squashed into the concrete.I crossed the street back to Andrew and off we went, laughing, before the flower quickly left our minds to be replaced with the carefree thoughts of eight-year-olds.

Sometime later I returned to the scene of the crime, once again on the other side of the street from the bungalows, skateboard tucked under my arm. This time I was alone. The sun was setting and Andrew had already gone home, climbing up the darkened stairwells of his drab

tower.I was heading home too, taking swigs from a bottle of fizzy sweetened chemicals. Christ only knows what that was doing to my teeth.

As I passed the little bungalow on the end I looked up to witness the arrival of an elderly couple. Moving slowly but robustly, the old man supported the little women on his arm. They started up the path, this must have been their home. Yet they stopped, looking at something down on the ground. The flower, crushed into the path, which I had thought no one would notice. No one would see, no one would care about it, so it wasn’t a crime. Seeing that somebody had noticed changed everything.

There was some conversation between them. They did not move, while I slowly creeped alongside the other side of the street, drowning in my guilt. Maybe they were talking about what had happened, about how they had put time and effort and care into raising these flowers to make their pretty little postcard of a bungalow just so. Maybe they were talking about who would do such a thoughtless thing, who would try to shatter the semblance of idyllic life they were desperately trying to cultivate in the twilight of their lives.I should have gone and admitted my crime. I should have apologised. Instead I kept walking, dragging my shame down the street as I went.

That day I learnt that an act of creation outweighs an act of destruction tenfold. * Standing in the field, feeling the leaf between my fingers, I felt the gentle breeze in my hair. I slipped the leaf into my pocket. I walked between those ancient trees one more time and headed home.

Chapter Seven: Tigers in the Mountains January 20,2013: I met up with Ripley and his girlfriend Minji at Seoul station in the afternoon. Added to CD sales Yogiga had paid enough to get us to Daejeon and back, plus to Daegu a few days later.We jumped on the train,a bit tired, a bit achey, with our cases of gear. Riding the KTX once again.

난 어때요? 멋있어 시간 있어? 아니에요 음식 괜찮아 맛있어 넌 예뻐요 고마워 If people don’t meet people because it rains Then I forgot your name because it sounded better that way I like you wear jade you like me every fourth day So I’ll get wasted because you won’t waste some time on me (It’s all the same song) 내일 어때요? 바빠요 모래도? 그래요 알아서 하지마 뭐라고? 대답하지마

상관 없어 If people don’t meet people because it rains (I’m still waiting on you) Then I forgot your name because it sounded better that way (I’m still waiting on you) I like you wear jade you like me every fourth day (I’m still waiting on you) So I’ll get wasted because you won’t waste some time on me (I’m still waiting on you) (It’s all the same song) 난 어때요? 멋있어 시간 있어? 아니에요 알아서 하지마 뭐라고? 대답하지마 상관 없어 (‘KTX’ by Danny Arens) The mountains whizzed by out the windows, hulking emerald giants that roll endlessly into the horizon. Shrouded in mist, temples, ghosts, demons, and legends worth remembering.

It didn’t take long to arrive in Daejeon, a smaller provincial city that you would never know about if you only stayed in Seoul. The show was at a place called Santa Claus and it was set up by my old friend GT Arpe. I’ve known GT since around 2008 when I lived in Daegu, and he would come down to play shows. His music is an odd mix of pop, experimental noise, performance art, and theater. For example, he

had a song called ‘Escape From Hell’, where he would cover himself in a blanket and scraps of paper with “hell” scrawled across them, and emerge from underneath this hamster nest chanting “I’m in hell” to a simple loop repeating in the background. When Ripley and I organized the DRIPAN art walk in 2010 one of our favourite parts was that we brought GT up to play. He really weirded some people out, but also got a lot of laughs and applause. I was happy to have him crash on my couch that night.

When we got to the venue we were greeted by a drum kit that consisted of pieces from three or four different kits and no guitar amps, with everything going through the house PA. The Korean owner seemed a little bit unsure about us, an unknown Chinese band, of which neither members looked very Chinese. Ripley didn’t seem very happy about this.

Being a Sunday show we didn’t expect many people, so I was grateful for those people who did come out. The first act was GT and this big drummer named Curtis, who had brought the drums. They played a mix of jazz and surf rock. I knew GT could play guitar but I had never actually heard him play pieces that intricate. After that Industrial Country, a local four piece, took the stage. They played some covers and frequently swapped instruments , which is always fun to see.

Our set was difficult and raw. Running The Suburban Ruffian, The Diddly Board, my harmonica mic and vocals through the same amp made it difficult to hear what was going on, especially for Ripley as there were no monitors. Then the bass drum kept moving across the floor, meaning he had it kick it back into place every three or four beats, and due to the layout of the stage I had to jump over my effects board to get to The Diddly Board. All that aside it was good when we got into it. That evenings version of ‘Mr.Jack’, a dark murder ballad in the vein on early Black Sabbath (which has its roots in my first ever band, The Neon Pirates), was especially macabre . I picked up The Diddly Board and brandished it like a weapon, launching into death metal machine gun riffs while Ripley fired back with blast beats. It sounded like a

battlefield of demon soldiers screeching for one another’s blood.

All goddamn hell broke loose on the last song. I broke a string and managed to cut open my hand, but I insisted we close with ‘Four Pairs’ nevertheless. The song belonged at the end of the set and I wanted to make it happen. While we were tearing through that number the white paper glued to my guitar was slowly turned dark red from the blood pouring out of my hand. Then Ripley accidentally kicked over the snare drum mid song. Attempting to reach for it he proceeded to kick over the rest of the drum kit, scattering it over the stage. Somehow we kept playing and finished the song stronger than ever, with Ripley hammering across drums littering the floor while blood dripping over the strings of my guitar.

Blood.

Makes.

The. Grass.

Grow.

Well we dropped our anchors, We swam to your shores, Didn’t know what we were looking for, We hiked through your forests, And we climbed up your mountains, Didn’t know if anyone was home, Gotta, gotta, gotta get back to the ship, Gotta,gotta, gotta get back to the ship... (‘Four Pairs’)

To the dozen or so people watching it must have resembled The Who blowing themselves up or GG Allin giving one of his more mellow performances.

After the show Ripley was bummed so he and Minji went back to Seoul. I stuck around and drank with the locals. The owner had come around big time and bought a load of our CDs. Afterwards I went with GT and some of the guys from Industrial Country went to a hookah bar.

I ended the night sleeping on GT’s floor. The whole night he had been wearing mismatched shoes. One dress shoe and one sneaker. I never did ask why.

January 22,2013: After a day or so of rest we decided to do an unplugged thing at Bar Carmen in Kyungridan, Seoul, my old haunt.

When I first moved there it was like any other Korean neighbourhood.

Green grocers, real estate agents, mum and pop stores selling beer and cigarettes, the occasional karaoke joint, hair salons. There was one barber’s shop where the old man lived in the back room. You’d go in and he’d slowly get up on put on a shirt over his pristine white wife-beater. His hands were old, wrinkled, gnarled but still skilled and steady. From the wrinkled leather of his face bright eyes shone, life burning bright within. He’d do your sideburns with a straight edge razor. One slip and you’d be dead, your windpipe sliced open and your lifeblood redecorating the walls, but he wouldn’t do that. His hands never slipped. Not once. That barber shop is gone now, like so many of the green grocers, hole in walls, and so forth. Replaced by boho coffee shops and craft breweries. As Vonnegut once said, “So it goes.”

A Tuesday night isn’t the best time for a show, but I thought it would be fun anyway. We knew Carmen, the owner, from the DRIPAN days.

Ripley and I had helped bring a lot of her future clientele to a her bar. It’s unfortunate that she has short memory with regards to such favours, as she managed to talk through or else ignore our set and Jen Waescher’s. That aside I was really happy to see Jen, she’s an amazing singer-songwriter and a really inspiring person. Nobody came to watch, except my friend Carys ‘Matic’ Jones. That in itself, made the

night worthwhile. Carys is a firefly of creativity, writing, drumming, speaking, reading, living, breathing. Many times we’d share a drink in the days that I lived in Kyungridan and she’d tell me about all the projects so had on the go. Too many she thought at times. No, never too many, because one day maybe you won’t be able to have any projects.

Blood makes the grass grow so make hay while the sun shines. Carys is far from me now in physical terms, but our shared vision means she’s never far from me in spirit.

January 24,2013: A few more days off and it was time to get back on the tour. We got things moving with a Thursday show at Powwow, right by Noksapyeon station, the gateway to Kyungridan and Hipsterbangchon, where a lot of heads in the scene are to be found.

Once upon a time Powwow was a practice space that frequently flooded in the summer, then it was taken over as the Laughing Tree Lab by friends of mine including Ripley as an extension of the vibe that seemed to come out of DRIPAN. It even hosted the AWEH launch party. After the Lab imploded it became Powwow, the only venue in that little neighborhood. That too is now gone.

Powwow was one of the most enjoyable shows of the tour. A tight basement set up, bring your own booze, twenty of our friends hanging out. The other band that night was Root, a project Ripley had been working on with a guitarist named Oh Dee, who is currently sky diving in South Africa I believe. Their sound is a little hard to categorise, but space-math rock might do it. A lot of textures, layers, complex riffs, shifting keys and time signatures, very clever and deep to get into.

Root were also going to be along on Busan and the final Seoul shows.

They brought the house down that night, people hollered and hooted as they mathed out hard. Next Ripley and I hammered hard and made our friends scream. Afterwards we went and got drunk and Ripley walked into a sign.

January 25,2013: We got off the KTX in Daegu...Jesus, it was so small. Daegu was the first placed I ever lived in Asia. Arriving aged twenty one, being out of university for no more than three weeks, the

streets of Daegu seemed like animated explosions of neon light and fantastic sounds. The train station was a huge, sprawling affair, the bars mysterious realms of unknown pleasures, everything new and exciting.I remember the first time I went to Seoul, coming home blind drunk at 6am only to grab my camera, jumping on the KTX to the big city. I slept for maybe four hours that whole weekend.

I suppose a fish only grows as large as the pond it’s allowed to swim in, as now the train station suddenly seemed minuscule, the buildings small and flat, the streets narrow and plain.

Our hotel was right downtown and Philan Jung, the owner of Horus Music Garage, had been really nice with accommodation. We ventured out into the streets, passing Gukjae Gongwon, also known as Big Bell Park, that been home to the skate ramps, where I met my first Korean skater friends. The ramps and the skaters were gone. Some things were the same, but others were different. More Starbucks for a start.

We got into Horus and sound checked. Philan was all smiles, and I met Clayton of Mr. Headbutt, who had been largely responsible for putting the show together. Clayton is a really good guy and an ardent supporter of the punk scene, a shit hot guitarist/bass player to boot. Mr. Headbutt are no more, but I’m proud to say I played with them because they were fun, tight , and overloaded with energy. Their drummer, Matt Ormita, is a brilliant player who has been involved in the Daegu scene for years.

His old band, Zentaffy, were an amazing noise rock band and one of the best groups in the city for a long time.

The other band on the bill was Heimlich County Gun Club, a G.I punk band from Seoul, the closest I’ll probably ever come to seeing Social Distortion play live. Playing with these punk bands was awesome, and though the crowd wasn’t big it was enjoyale. I saw a lot of old friends there, like Adam Lunsford, Scott Fusion, and Hami Yang. Yet maybe the biggest surprise was Brutal Lee. Brutal Lee is the vocalist/guitarist for AXcutor, Daegu’s only grindcore

band. I remember seeing them play regularly at Club Heavy, which was behind my old apartment circa 2009. Brutal was a huge man covered with piercings — as in all over his face — tattoos up his arms, drenched in fake blood on stage, playing the most savage music to an audience that averaged three people, often on a Sunday afternoon. He had changed a bit since I’d last seen him four years before. He’d taken out his piercings and now had a job for the city helping old people to board subway trains. Nevertheless I recognized him instantly and he remembered me, from those shows at Club Heavy and the time I was in a Korean hardcore band for about two weeks. I was so amped that he had come to see us. I made sure to thrash my guitar as hard as I could in dedication to one of the gnarliest musicians I’d ever met.

Chapter Eight: Water Dragons January 26,2013: We rolled into Busan beginning to feel broken and bruised. There had been some major fuck ups on my end, as I’d thought I’d been communicating with the owner of a venue ,but in fact had been talking to another band , so we arrived not knowing where we had to go, where we were staying, or what the hell to do. We got off the subway at Gwangalli Beach, which is famous as it has this big bridge stretching across the bay that they light up at night. Busan is a seriously beautiful city. It’s all beaches, mountains, and bridges connecting them.

Without any direction we could at least go somewhere that looked nice.

We trekked along the sidewalk overlooking the beach, hauling our suitcases, looking at bars, looking for places to buy guitar strings. One nightclub caught our attention; it sure looked lavish, a two story affair right there on the beach, prime real estate, like some kind of beach front rave bar...except it was covered with particle board, making for the most spectacular eyesore imaginable. Ripley’s words will remain in my mind forever: “Nothing says hoochie mommas like particle board.”

Finally we got in touch with the venue owner. Oh Dee and Minji had arrived from Seoul and were already with him over at his bar/steak house in the PNU university district. We got back on the subway and hitched over there. We were just a little bit frayed by the time we dragged our suitcases up the stairs. We met Liam Cullivan, another seriously nice venue owner. He had been in Busan for years, had roadied back in the states, and now ran Thirsty Moose where he served top quality steaks, as well as running Basement, the dive bar were to play. He got us nice and comfortable with food and booze, sorted us some hotel rooms, and then we walked over to Basement.

A dive bar is exactly what Basement is, and the best kind. Writing on the walls, hard liquor behind the bar, a bathroom you wouldn’t want to spend too long in, and a small stage stacked with amps. The bands

that night included Say Sue Me and Three Summer, both Busan bands who each had a really fresh sound. As Busan is a beachside city it was awesome that these bands were able to fuse surf rock and Korean psych to create their own vibe you couldn’t really touch.

Root played next, and despite a long set up time things didn’t go so well. Oh Dee’s laptop fell off his amp a bunch of times and he broke a string mid song. Nevertheless, they soldiered through. Finally I got up with Ripley somewhere around midnight. The drums were set up facing the stage, so Ripley and I were looking at each other the whole time, the crowd behind Ripley or up on the balcony looking down on the stage.

Ripley also happened to be next to a pole, so some pole dancing was thrown in from time to time, but only in order to sell CDs according to Ripley. It was dark, sweaty, and loud. I remember it really took off, there was no painting by numbers that night, it was all on edge, pure inspiration, bodies meeting the night. After the show I kept drinking at the bar, that one girl who had been there the whole time piqued my interest. Sometimes nights like those seem written.

January 29,2013: After the show I decided to stay on in Busan and rest a few days before heading to Japan. Ripley, Oh Dee, and Minji went back to Seoul. I stayed in a bath house and slept next to a big heater with thirty other people in a room for around $6 a night. I managed to get in an argument with some old Korean guys about washing my clothes in the shower and then drying them with hair dryers. I could have pointed out that they wouldn’t want their countrymen standing next to me in that shirt with the cocktail of bodily fluids splattered over it, but that argument probably wouldn’t have made me many friends either.My DIY antics were evidently only going to go so far in Korean saunas.

My gear was stashed at Basement, so I was free to do as I pleased. I met some friends for dinner, and I walked. I walked from Haeundae beach, up through the forests, around the bay and into the city.

Walking,walking,walking, on sand, on pavement, on concrete, stopping at 7-11s to buy beer and roasted eggs. Seeing places I hadn’t seen in years, seeing places I’d never seen before. Walking, thinking. I stopped

by an art gallery of moving Korean paintings on LCD screens. I went to the Busan museum of art and enjoyed these huge installation pieces. I wrote in my note book, I hummed songs to myself. I played harmonica, I walked, I breathed, I lived.

The whole time I’d be using a borrowed suitcase of Ripley’s, since mine was completely immobile. I knew I needed a new one to get my stuff back to China, but I really didn’t want to drop too much cash. When I found one for $5 at a luggage stall tucked away in an old market I knew I was on to a winner. The best $5 spent that month without a doubt.

Across the ocean from Busan lies the Japanese port city of Fukuoka.

For around $100 you can ride across on a ferry and spend a few days or launch into a full Japan trip. It’s a favourite of those looking to renew tourist visas in South Korea, as all you need to do is exit the country and re-enter, the boat being far cheaper than plane.

Having grabbed my gear from Basement, made my way to the port, cleared immigration, all that remained was to ride another boat across another ocean. While the Dalian to Incheon boat provides you with your own bunk, the economy of the Camilla Busan to Fukuoka line favours communal rooms with sleeping mats. While I left my suitcases down by the passenger entrance I brought The Suburban Ruffian in it’s soft case with me into my cabin, stashing it in the corner behind the door. I have no idea why.

Having nothing to do for the ride across I looked over my notebooks to refresh the few Japanese phrases I know and a couple of new ones Ripley and Minji had taught me. I also drank Asahi from the vending machine...while the Dalian-Incheon ferry provided only some of the worst beer known to humanity this line offered up a much better selection to make the time fly. Half drunk and excited to be returning to the Land of the Rising Sun I ended up chatting with two Japanese girls for hours. I can’t remember if I managed to get either of their phone numbers or not.

Goddamn those half Japanese girls Do it to me every time... (‘El Scorcho’ Weezer) Something like that anyway.

Happy drunk on dark beer and smiles. By the time I returned to cabin I was pretty toasted,tip toeing over people to get to my mat, crawling into a fetal position. My guitar was still in the corner of the cabin by the door, I remember that. I also remember waking in the night when somebody got up and bumped into something. Nevermind that. Back to sleep, back to dreams of church bells echoing down damp cobblestoned street, back to England.

Chapter Nine: A Friend Today I met a friend in the street. I had not seen him for maybe seven or eight years. Here I come up the hill, a ragged scarecrow, past where Mr.Wood’s camera shop used to be, when I see Joseph coming down the other way. There I am thinking about that twin lens reflex I had bought from Mr.Woods and where in the world I might have left it, when I see this face I hadn’t thought of in years. Not just Joseph, but a pram and two small children: a family. And then there is me, alone by myself save for the ghosts I’d dragged and kicked around with me all night long.

Sitting with Zig outside a pub behind Waterloo East station, downing pints of bitter, telling the same haggard couple that we didn’t have any spare change, over and over, eight times in twenty minutes at my count. Old well before their time, dying, dying for a drink. Fast forward to some trendy bar full of young professionals, dying to be noticed, shots of hard liquor, hand over fist. Out into the streets, dancing in the London moonlight with the very best and the very worst to be found south of the river Thames. Somehow finding my way to the Southbank, dirty, dirty, hallowed ground where I’d spent so many days of my youth. An argument with some hood rats almost boils over into an altercation. Little fuckers will get theirs I say to myself; won’t be so smug and cocky when they’re weeping into a puddle of their own piss with a needle hanging out their arm. I don’t know that will happen. I’ll never know. There is no warmth in my heart for strangers when I’m staggering along the Thames at 4a.m. Welcome to the big city.

The night bus that used to run from Charing Cross wasn’t running or had changed stops. Too drunk to figure it out either way. Back to the Southbank, the upper levels of the Royal Festival Hall. A nice comfortable bed of concrete a bench will make. Curling up on the cold stone, my belt wrapped around my fist, in case some night dwelling ne’er-do-well thinks he’ll give a try. Dozing off to the sound of the river.

The devil moon took me through the alley, Down by the kardomah and the centrale, To the mews running through the backstreets, Where the blacks sold fire and sleep, The devil moon took me out of soho, Up to camden where the cold north winds blow, Sucked along by a winter shower, To stand beside your shining tower.

(‘London Girl’ The Pogues) First train out of Charing Cross at the crack of dawn, the hard seats making for a slightly less painful slumber than the concrete bench. Isn’t it time to pack in this drinking lark? The hangovers never used to hurt this bad...

And there I am, a tattered wretch, Hindu silver and Buddhist prayer beads jangling up the street, while this upstanding family man is coming down the other way. I was so wrapped up in the idea of sliding my key into the lock, running a bath, putting the kettle on and actually sleeping in bed that I didn’t notice him straight away, but he recognized me instantly. We meet and greet, hearty handshakes.

How many times had we walked up and down this very hill together?

On our way to and from school , pawing at our top buttons and dragging our collars open, slackened ties and dirty navy blue blazers. On our way to a house party, tins of contraband lager in our backpacks, on our way to a show to throw ourselves into a mess of bodies and sound. How many times had we walked this hill talking about what the future might hold? The future is now so how far off the mark had we been?

What am I doing? What is he doing? The kids hang off his shirt tails , looking bored. Pleasantries exchanged, broad smiles, and then that inevitable, deathly silence. The sound of the void between us, the chasm of our experiences of the world since we last set eyes upon one another.

Where is the common ground in that chasm? There is none. I want to try and relate my experiences, talk of what I’ve seen and done, the streets of Delhi, the markets of Marrakech,the subways of New York, the basements of Seoul, the art galleries of Paris, the flamenco bars of Jerez de la Frontera, the izakayas of Tokyo, the hutongs of Beijing! I want to ask how he can shoulder the responsibility of those tiny lives.

How does he cope with giving other human beings a moral compass, a direction in life, being a father and a husband. Should I be doing this too? Am I am just some Peter Pan waste of space, bumming around the East wrapped up in daydreams about Beefheart and Basquiat? But there are no words, just silence. The family man must get going, ballet class starts soon for the kids. We shakes hands once more and talk about getting together before I abscond out East again.

We both know that is highly unlikely to happen. * I met a friend today and it reminded me that I’m a ghost in this town.

I’m not a normal Englishman, with a nine two five and a mortgage to pay: on the lash on Friday, taking the kids to football on Sunday, lounging around Sunday in anticipation for the ritual cremation of some God forsaken animal, then up on Monday to sit through five days of mind numbing boredom until I can do it all over again. I’m none of those things, so all I can do is pick up and get back to where I seem to belong. Where? Anywhere. Anywhere the breeze is strong, the nights are long, and the music is loud.

Any damn place but here.

Chapter Ten: GUIGUI Rising January 30,2013: By the time the sun had risen the boat had docked and everyone else in the cabin had cleared out. I waited and kept sleeping.

No point in hurrying just to wait in a line. When I finally got up I checked on The Suburban Ruffian. Unzipping the case I discovered a tangle of strings and broken wood. The neck was snapped clean off, only the truss rod was still attached. The bump in the night had been the death of The Suburban Ruffian. I had just spent around $170 to come to Japan for one show, easily the most expensive show of the tour, and now I didn’t even have a guitar. How on earth was I going to afford another one with my finances dwindling? My Chinese bank cards certainly weren’t going to work over here. Blood pumping through my forehead, dry throat, a sinking a feeling in my gut. A panic attack clouding over my consciousness. I crossed my legs and tried to mediate.

Think of something calming. What? Teachings? Teaching of what? Tao, that will do...

One less thing to carry makes the passage through life easier.

We cannot bring material objects with us once we return to the universe, so do not mourn their loss.

Everything that is made is eventually destroyed.

This is the way of Tao. Clearing immigration I found myself in Fukuoka at 8a.m. with the realisation I didn’t really know where I was going. Soundcheck wasn’t until 5p.m. and I had only a tourist map to help me find Club Utero.

It had been a few years since I’d visited and I’d never known the city particularly well. I knew the club was near a hotel on the map called the Herotel, so I caught the subway in that direction. My guitar case suddenly weighed a lot more knowing that the contents were now good only good for firewood.

Walking around, Japan started coming back to me. The streets are clean; everyone is very polite: the subways are brilliant, everything has an LCD screen, everything is expensive, food in the 7-11s is actually nice.

I found the Herotel but as to Utero’s exact location I had no clue, just an address. I went into a convenience store and asked the clerk if he knew.

Studying the address he pulled out a laminated map, trying to look for it. A man approached me.

“Do you play guitar?”

“Yes...”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m trying to find this club.”

“Let me help you.”

De ja vu? Didn’t I meet you in Changchun? No, that was somebody else...yet seeing as I was in a hopeless place I decided to be social, to be open, to be human for a change. I took a chance and it paid off.

Noboru Hiromura is of Japanese-Korean descent and it turned out he had lived in Canada for a number of years. He spoke good English, and told me how he had been into snowboarding and Metallica back in the day. It turned out Utero was just a few streets away and he drove me to it. Seeing as I had time to kill before the sound check and it was his day off from running the family restaurant he volunteered to give me a little tour. He had planned on going surfing, but with blue skies above the waves were flat, so he had time on his hands. What followed really turned that day around, from being lost and bummed out about the guitar, to fascinated and excited by Japan all over again.

He took me to meet his brother,Satoru, who skates, builds bikes, plays guitar, and was even in a psychobilly band that had quite a following in Fukuoka. He was excited to meet me and even more excited by The

Diddly Board when we brought it into his workshop and plugged it through the 200 watt amp he had in there. The fun thing about that thing is that everyone plays it a little differently and it’s easy to get new ideas from watching others give it a try.

We visited Ruff and Tuff, a clothing store centered around dub and reggae. The owner is a dub enthusiast and he told me about how Jah Shaka had come to play shows in Fukuoka, and how there were regular dub nights. For a city of maybe a million or so people Fukuoka has some awesome things going on. Then we went to a famous ramen restaurant, out of the city centre, in the suburbs. The kind of place that you would never find and only locals know about. That was some of the best ramen I’ve ever eaten.

After a few hours Noboru drove us back to where we had met. His wife and son were waiting for him and it was time he went. I gave him a hearty handshake, my spirits higher that they’d been in days. I walked round to Utero and waited outside for it to open, sitting on my suitcase, playing one of my harmonicas. The key of A if I remember correctly.

It’s a lower key for harmonica, the sound is more brooding and mean, but it matches the key of E on the guitar, the key of rock and roll.

Sitting in the street, playing the no guitar blues. Eventually a young Japanese kid walked up. He didn’t speak much English but I managed to communicate who I was and what I was doing there. It turned out he was the barman at Utero and he opened up the gate, leading my down into the club. His name was Takumi.

Utero is a tight little space, but has one of the best sound and lighting systems I’ve seen anywhere in Asia. At most it could stand 100 people, but the atmosphere is awesome, a great back line too. The sound man soon arrived and though he also didn’t speak much English I showed him that my guitar was no longer functional and he got the message.

While I had picked up a beaten up Strat copy upon entering, hoping to use it, the sound man presented me with a customized vintage Fender six string, explaining that it was his and I could use it. That’s probably the most expensive and amazing instrument I’ve ever played.

The original plan was for me to do a solo set, but after all that had gone down I really wasn’t in the mood to be doing a Woody Guthrie thing, so I asked Takumi and the sound man if there was anyone they knew who could play drums. It turned out Takumi played in a local punk band. We ran through a few songs: I would kind of beatbox what the drums could sound like before each one. It worked. That kid really hit those drums.

A little later Seiji, Utero’s booking manager, turned up. He probably spoke the most English out of any one in the club and we had a chat about how the tour had been.As already mentioned just about everything is expensive in Japan so that night I ate some rice snacks from a 7-11 and chatted with Takumi about blues and punks bands and what it’s like to be a teenage bartender in Fukuoka and a touring musician in China.

When we got back to Utero the other bands were sound checking. I couldn’t get my head around the sheer amount of equipment each band had brought along. With a guitar, The Diddly Board, and a effects board consisting of five pedals I thought I was overloaded, but these guys really had a lot of gear. For example Warsawpact a.k.a. Sinya Hamati is a one man band, a really shy guy who played a Fender Jaguar through a heap of effects, and had another case just for his drum machines.

He kind of looked like a Japanese Johnny Marr, and smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank orange juice when he wasn’t on stage. Seismic Charge were a boy-girl duo who brought their own mixing desk on stage, cables and all, and played super tripped out dub music. The girl even played the melodica for that classic Augustus Pablo sound. Finally Pieuvre Echotalk were two exceptionally well dressed young men who both played guitar and/or bass with a drum machine, giving them a groove to ride over; dreamy,surf inspired reverb drenched jams that they would noodle through.

For a Wednesday night I was pretty impressed with the turn out. I had a fun time trying to communicate with the other bands and the people in the bar. It turned out nobody spoke much English, Chinese,or Korean, so it was an opportunity to use what little Japanese I had.

“Wo da shi wa GUIGUI des.”

“Ae ee koku gara kitan desu.”

“Bing biru kuda sa ee.”

Those three bands were great. Warsawpact really made a full sound for one guy and it was never unbalanced. It was noisy, melodic, and layered, like Modest Mouse doing a dark psychedelic thing. I have no idea what he was saying between songs, but for a guy who spent the rest of the evening staring at his shoes he was a real entertainer on the stage because he had the audience laughing their asses off.Seismic Charge really were like a sub-atomic depth charge, so much bass and delay, so dub. Combined with the psychedelic light show Pieuvre Echotalk were pretty captivating in the dreamy surf pop web they wove. When I finally got up on the stage with Takumi it was all up in the air, but over the next hour or so we had so much fun. He didn’t know the songs so I’d just give him a clue, like saying AC/DC, and then start playing.I didn’t bother with any of the break downs or stops but that just made the jams all the more frantic.

When I got off the stage everyone was a lot more willing to try communicating. Warsawpact wanted to buy a CD, but I insisted we trade.

After the show I went to stay with Seiji’s friend. He had an interesting collection of music (check out The Romanes) and odd pornographic manga. In fact his tiny apartment was basically a mattress and piles of CDs and comic books. It was really nice of him to let this stranger stay in his tiny place, I gave him some CDs and he gave me a Fukuoka hardcore (punk) compilation in return. Seiji had told me he would help me to do a full Japan tour next time. Fukuoka was a roller coaster but ultimately awesome, which is why I helped Roundeye and Daikaiju stop by on their tour later on. I slept deep that night.

February 2,2013: I’d got back to the cold of Seoul with not much cash left in my wallet and a broken guitar that joined the broken suitcase in the graveyard of bicycle parts and half finished paintings outside Ripley’s apartment.We had one show left organised by Loose Union at Moon Night in Itaewon. Moon Night is an interesting venue as it lies on a backstreet off of Itaewon main drag, the multicultural crossroads of Seoul, where you can get just about anything if you have enough cash and a lack of morals. Moon Night’s exact location is in an alley off of Tranny Hill, down from Homo Hill, which intersects with Hooker Hill.

No prizes for guessing what goes on in these locales. Moon Night itself is a basement club with a big oval stage reminiscent of some kind of Vegas show. They definitely have nights catering to those with more eclectic tastes. The neon lighting and shadowy corner booths said it all.

Ollie lent me his guitar, given to him by Adam Brennan of New Blue Death. I had actually noticed it many times on the wall of Lance Reegan-Diehl’s guitar shop in Hipsterbangchon when I’d be walking up or down the hill. Adam had bought it, fixed it up, and had given it to Ollie to say thanks for all his work at Loose Union. Run through a Fender amp and turned up loud it sounded rude.

One last Saturday show was the way to do it and go out in style. People came out, a decent amount of people in fact, and I had good company.

Root played again, things went a lot better for them than they had in Busan, and people dug their mathy jams. I also consider it a particular pleasure to have shared a stage with Dan McKay aka. DMCK. Introduced to me as a straight up renaissance man, he is like a lightning rod for creative work,playing, drawing moving, seeing, doing. Backed

by New Blue Death’s rhythm section of Adam Hickey and Paddy Walsh, it amazed me how he managed to coax phantom notes and such brilliant melodies from his Danelectro. His songs are really strong, like a Neil Young vibe, great with or without a band. What’s more he made some amazing sketches of Ripley and I later in the night.Another personification of creativity if I ever met one.

The other act that night was Stay Dead, with some former members of

the band Yours including Jason Tarnowski on vocals and guitar. I’ve known Jason for years, he would come up to me at shows and ask to have a go on my skateboard. Things had got out of hand for him and he had to leave Korea for a while to straighten out. He was back at that time, with a haircut and a new band, but not long after things fell apart again and were looking really bad, sleeping on the beaches down in Busan and busking for change kind of deal. Thankfully he is now safe and sound back in the U.S. Stay Dead rocked it that night and their songs about aliens were a lot of fun. Jason also gave probably the best set closer of all time.

“Yo, don’t listen to what they tell you, man. Drink the tap water, it’s safe. Don’t believe the lies, drink the tap water, man.”

Ripley and I got up and went at it one more time. We set up facing each other and played hard and fast. We covered ‘기타로’ by 산울림 (“Echo in the Mountains”) one of the great Korean psych rock bands. We smashed through ‘Wolf Like Me’. We played every goddamn song off of Dongbei Delta. It was loud, fast, aggressive, and so much goddamn fun. We played ‘Four Pairs’ for the last time and degenerated into a meltdown of feedback and drums being kicked over.

After the set a Korean couple came up to me with a copy of Dongbei Delta. They had been at the Yogiga show. They asked me to sign it and come back soon. That is probably one of the single sweetest things anyone has ever said to me.

Afterwards we went to a party at Exit, a parking garage converted into a nightclub. Everyone else drank and got drunk, but all I got was sleepy.

I had just channeled so much energy and come down from such a high.

Feelings like that are hard to top, no matter how much sauce you pour on, it’s those experiences that will get you higher than ever.

February 8,2013: The last few says in snowy Seoul had been a wind down. Together with Loose Union went to see My Bloody Valentine the day they released MBL. They were awful live that night, but it was

cool to hear the songs in person. AWEH business was taken care of, goodbyes were said, hugs were exchanged and then it was back on the boat. Back in the Middle Kingdom, back where I started, standing in Dalian station, waiting on another train, as if I hadn’t waited on enough for all of 2013 already. Waiting with far less equipment than I’d left with, headed back to Changchun, to the freeze, with a notebook full of ideas for new songs and a tape of live recordings...songs that would end up on the Nineteen Below Zero EP and It’s a HARD MODE when you’re ON THE ROAD with dem particle board blues.

On the way into the station I’d stopped and bought a few cans of bad Chinese beer, something to take off the edge of the boring journey home through the frozen Dongbei wastes. Standing in a line, surrounded by people, I tugged on the ring pull without considering the fact that the beer inside the pressurized can might be frozen. Semi frozen slush exploded out of the can in a fountain, spraying over me and those in close proximity. I received some truly evil looks instantly. I said sorry and then I began to laugh. Once I started I found it hard to stop, despite people shooting me daggers with their eyes, as the frozen beer slush dripped over my hands.

I laughed hard. You have to laugh because you only live once, and won’t get a chance to go back and laugh at all those times you didn’t!

Because when all the CDs are gone, all the guitars and suitcases are smashed and broken by the road side, every inch of your body aches, and your wallet is lighter than ever, all you have are the memories to smile and laugh at. Keep laughing, keep moving, keep meeting people, and keep creating.

You only live once and the streets are your canvas. *