China Music Radar is back behind its desk after a national holiday week cruising around China to a variety of musical spectaculars. We promise that there are photos and reviews coming, but first we need to get to hundreds of emails that need replies and thousands of RSS feeds and Twitter tweets that have to be read. Ah, the information age is upon us…
In the interim, we hope you will be happy with an article we penned about a month ago, specifically for a day like this. A few words about Damon Albarn’s opera in Mandarin, Monkey; Journey to the West…
We know China’s all the rage these days, so it should be too surprising that musical jack-of-all-trades Damon Albarn has got his hands in a project of the oriental persuasion: the spectacularly kooky “circus opera,” Monkey: Journey to the West, based on Wu Cheng’en’s 16th century story, Journey to the West.
The show, which opened last summer at Manchester’s Palace Theatre to glowing reviews, is a collaboration between Albarn (who wrote the score), his Gorillaz mate Jamie Hewlett (who designed the set and costumes), and Chinese opera impresario Chen Shi-zheng, who directs all the stylised, acid-trip family fun.
For those of you who can’t make it to Manchester to catch the show: you’re in luck. This month marks the release of the Journey to the West album, attributed simply to “Monkey.” The album is now available for download here, and physical copies started shipping on September 23. We haven’t had a listen just yet, but the Telegraph’s Helen Brown extolled the albums merit, its “propulsive retro electronica, Stravinskyesque strings and…dreamlike oriental twangs.” Sounds like vintage Albarn; that is, unpredictable.
Did we mention the 22 songs are sung in Mandarin Chinese? We’re anxious to see how it holds up against China’s first rock action musical, another riff on the tale of the Monkey King.