The Illumin8tors’ Solar/Lunar – The Legend is now available for download on bandcamp.

It’s been a labour of love, to be a part of this record from its very inception to the finished product.

It’s at “name your price” at the moment. So please, get into our little tale of archery, love and rock.

We’ve decided to make a track available as a special preview. This is Pang Meng, the story of the wicked man who tried to steal the Pill of Immortality from Chang-E. Here. check it out.

The show will be a full performance of the rock opera and will feature The Horde in support, along with DJ Sal both DJing and reprising his role as our sitar player. It’s Sunday May 6th at Mao Livehouse. 50 RMB, plus CDs will be available for a very special launch night price.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to stick around for that final set by the Rock Tigers cos I’ll have to jet off to play with my other outfit, The Macaronians,  featuring Toshi and Sarah of Raw Deal fame and Dave with whom I also play in the Illumin8tors (and sometimes Hotter than Teppanyaki). We will be supporting visiting Norweigan’s Scampi, Chips, Dip & Campari. That’s at Yuyintang and it’s also 50 kuai. Sounds like a big night of retro rock to me.

And the rest of that interview with Eatliz really is coming soon. I must be the laziest blogger in all of Luwan . . .

Eatliz are a six-piece art-rock band from Israel and they’re in the middle of their first China tour as we speak. These guys play music that is a little left of centre, at times conjuring images of the two great heads of the past few decades: Radiohead and Portishead. There’s a touch of Muse in there, and some Kate Bush too. And just a little Mr. Bungle. Sounds good to me. And like so many bands here in Shanghai, they want you to hear their music for free on their bandcamp page. There’s three albums there and they’re all quite excellent and very reasonably priced.

They also do some great animation work  for their video clips – this is their song Lose This Child and a really neat stop motion clip all made with sand on a beach. This one is for the song, Hey, and it’s also quite cool.

You can catch the band at YYT this Friday 23rd for a mere 50 kuai as part of the JUE festival. They will be supported by Yourboyfriendsucks! from Guangzhou and Battle Cattle from LOgO.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Eatliz a few questions – here is part I of our interview.

LWR: Hey Eatliz, How did you meet?
We all met in the steamy music scene of Tel Aviv. Since it’s a small city, compared to Chinese cities for example, in certain circles everyone knows everyone. Guy, who formed the band, has his eyes for spotting talented musicians and bringing them to Eatliz so we all knew each other from the music scene.

What are the musical backgrounds of your members? Metal, rock, classical, jazz . . . ?
Exactly that and a lot more. It’s almost become a cliche to say that every band member comes from a different background but this is the story in our case. Or [Bahir, guitarist] learned jazz from Berkley graduate Dror bar Israel and rock from Erez Netz (The Israeli Steve Vai who plays with Infected Mushroom) and listened to a lot of Faith No More and Frusciante.  Guy [Ben Shetrit - guitarist] grew up on traditional Moroccan music his parent use to listen at home and later metal stuff like Melvins and Slint. Lee [Triffon - vocals] listened to classical, Celtic and Irish music. Hadar [Green - bass] grew up on a diet of 90′s grunge, Omer loves Tom Waits and sonic youth and Omry [Hanegbi - drums] digs Blonde Redhead.  Actually we all love them.

Where does the name of the band come from?
The name has 2 or even 3 meanings. In Hebrew it means butcher shop. In English it is a bit naughty and also refers to Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins.

Are you making a living from this, or do you have day jobs?
We all have day jobs and put all the money Eatliz makes right back in to the band, in order to let ourselves keep fulfilling every artistic idea we have for Eatliz. Omry is a promotions manager on TV, Guy is an animator, Or and Omer are music producers, Hadar and Lee teach bass and voice development.

How big is the art rock scene in Israel? Is it focused around the major centers of TA and Jerusalem or do the smaller communities also get involved?
The rock scene might be an easier scene to refer to, since it is much bigger than the art rock one. Rock is not the mainstream music in Israel, like almost any other place in the world, but lots of interesting stuff is going in the current Israeli rock music scene.  Tel Aviv is definitely the heart of the scene.   You can catch  tons of gigs every night, be it a free bar as Rothschild 12 hosting the upcoming acts for free, ultra underground places giving the space for hardcore and experimental stuff to indie. Jerusalem is the home for more electronic experimental sounds

What bands have inspired you or helped to shape your sound?
The Mars Volta, Radiohead, Mastadon, Stolen Babies, Queens of the Stone Age, Pixies… and that’s just  the tip of the iceberg.

What does it mean to you to be an art rock band? How does the art aspect find expression? Through the videos and on stage, or something more?
It basically means that everyone can bring his whole artistic world to the band, way beyond the music, which has always the artistic search inside of it. We bring our creative visual thinking into the band and we all feel it’s the place to try out things, dare and experiment. The videos and the stage are definitely an inseparable part of Eatliz and it brings the third dimension to the band.

Stay tuned for more later in the week.

It seems there’s another opera troupe in town – this one is called “Gei” (Give) and the man behind it is Xiao Jin of Acid Juice Studio on Fanyu Lu. This show will blend elements of rock, techno and Beijing Opera.

They are doing a show tonight at TZ House on at 525 Zhenning Lu near Wanhangdu Lu. 10pm kickoff.

We managed to secure a pretty good band for the party. It was a Shanghai all-star band featuring members of all the Luwanrock favourites – Break for Borneo, Friend or Foe, Hotter Than Teppanyaki, The Beat Bandits, The Illumin8tors,  The Dovetail Joints and The Cardinals.

(You can’t see him, but Dave ‘Beat Bandit’ Hampson is in there too)

In other exciting news, there’s another Sunday afternoon show coming at YYT in two weeks. Sunday 19th Feb sees Biubiu, Death to Giants, The Riot Experience and a secret special guest band playing from 2pm. At a measly 10 kuai I hope to see all of you there. Douban link here.

This weekend sees the double launch party of the new compilation, We Are Shanghai. This set has been put together over the past few months by myself along with Ivan and JC from Twin Horizon, and Bren and Nichols of Zang Nan Recordings. We got a great response to the initial call for tracks, so good that we had to cut two tracks from the CD release, though they are all available on the digital version, found here. You can download all the tracks for free, or pay what you want for the whole record.

If you come to one of the two launch shows, you’ll get a free CD too. Entry is free though a donation is requested.

Tonight at Yuyintang there’s compilation openers Duck Fight Goose, along with Dragon Pizza, Pairs, Naohai and DJ Eurotrash Atheism.

Tomorrow night at Logo the lineup is: Battle Cattle, The Horde, Monochrome Safety Society, and iAmalam.

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The River South Arts Festival is this Thursday through to Sunday and features a bunch of really cool shit. Most notable is the final performance (at least for now) of Solar/Lunar – The Legend, that fabulous rock opera by The Illumin8tors (which I am in, for those who are new to the blog). If you’ve already seen it, come on down for one last hurrah. And if you haven’t caught the spectacle yet, why not come on down for one last hurrah.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s on, night by night.

Thursday December 1st, 7pm – Shanghai THRONES

Redic is both a singer and a visual artist, and he’ll be exercising both facets of his personality on the opening night of the festival as he puts on a show, and shows of his artwork – 12 reclaimed chairs. The show is called Shanghai Thrones and will be on display until the 15th. It’s free.

Friday December 2nd, 8pm – Solar/Lunar

Yup, this is it, the big one, the final rock opera performance. There will be a support set from Hello Money as well as some collaborative performance poetry from Renee Reynolds. 80 RMB, and worth every jiao.

Saturday December 3rd, 7pm – H.A.L. Publishing Book Launch

Those crazy cats and HAL are launching their new book, Middle Kingdom Underground, and they are also hosting a poetry slam event, SLAMHAI 3. For 100RMB you’ll be entertained all night and you’ll also take home a copy of the new book.

Sunday December 4th, 2pm-6pm – Brunch, open mic and poetry.

120RMB.

Full details on the flyers, I hope you can make it down there.

Sun Dude, Emperor Yao, Wu Gang, Moon Lady and Chang-E singing Chang-E Takes the Pill

Wu Gang, Moon Lady, HouYi, Chang-E, The Queen Mother of the West, The Cassia Tree performing the finale - The Moon Always Comes Around

The Cassia Tree performing Cassia Tree

Xiao Zhong of Pairs fame was good enough to record a few songs on his infamous camera. He has uploaded it to tudou – check it out here. The songs are the end of Climbing the Stairs, a brief interlude, Cassia Tree and Allende (Houyi has it) featuring Jamalla.

So the good news is that if you missed the show last week, or if you saw it and just can’t get enough, we’re doing it all again this Friday at Dclub on Changyang Lu in Yangpu Qu. And we’ll be filming the show for posterity and a DVD release. So if you’d like to be immooooooortalised , come on down and dress to impress. Before you freak out at the distances involved in getting there, I read somewhere that if you show them your taxi receipt for 40RMB or more, they’ll give you a free drink for your troubles. It’s also very close to Dalian Lu station on line 4 – google maps link here. And that’s not all – we will be joined by the extra awesome DJ Global Ruckus from Portland, Oregon. This is his soundcloud. And here’s a killer set he did a couple of months ago in Sydney, Australia.
Dialectic Radio 180 feat GlobalRuckus (Portland) LIVE at Uber Lingua Sydney by uberlingua

He plays crazy, eclectic shit from all over the world and really brings the party.

]]> http://www.luwanrock.com/rock-opera-updates/feed/ 1 http://www.luwanrock.com/november-is-now-being-shared-with-the-illumin8tors/ http://www.luwanrock.com/november-is-now-being-shared-with-the-illumin8tors/#comments Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:54:01 +0000 gunsella http://www.luwanrock.com/?p=1399

That’s right – contrary to my previous post, November this year is being jointly occupied by Friend or Foe and The Illumin8tors. In less than a week my band, The Illumin8tors will do a full scale performance of our rock opera, Solar/Lunar – The Legend. This performance will be massive – we are going to take over Mao Livehouse and totally rock out. The last show we did at Logo was a huge success, and things are only going to get better from there. There will be support from Upnavala Groove and Jammalla. Not to be missed.

This Thursday 10th November. 50RMB on the door, 9.30pm. Mao – 308 Chongqing lu near Jianguo lu.