幽冥 (UFO SPACE, OMNI SPACE) is a collaborative album between Li Jianhong and Yan Jun.
The album consists of six tracks, the first and second tracks are from the 11 June 2021 live performance at UFO SPACE in Beijing, and the remaining four tracks are from the 14 January 2022 live performance at the bar Jiangjinjiu. The title ‘UFO SPCE, OMNI SPACE’ refers to the name of the two venues on one hand, and on the other hand suggests the mysterious space that the album opens up.
幽冥 (UFO SPACE, OMNI SPACE) is not an album of free improvisation in the usual sense of the word, but is closer to futurism and ‘noise’ in the Dada sense of the word. In the six tracks on the album, Li Jianhong plays guitar, while Yan Jun uses feedback systems, heartbeats and vocals.
The titles of these pieces, ‘Invisible Place’, ‘Negative Space’, ‘All Worlds’, ‘Anti-Space’, ‘Dimension of Object’, and ‘Shattered Realm’, all signify the discursive themes of space and subject-object.
In the album, Li Jianhong’s and Yan Jun’s performances are stripped of the usual dialogue structure, with the duo acting as a backdrop for each other, yet highly abstracted, with only a hint of overlaying rhymes or intertexts in the direction of contingency. The ambiguous syntax and obscure weave greatly expunge the pleasure, the hedonism and clarity of the experience is viciously undermined, the subject-centred myth is here dismembered, and the free non-identity is what this record presents. The netherworld, space …… as self-existent, which does not follow our understanding, is chaotic and relentless, and the harmony of the universe in Kepler’s sense is here denied. In the specific performance, the treatment of sound on Spectre is also destructive in a sense. The vocals in Dimension of the Object, which are processed with contact microphones, are manipulated by an almost Dada-like approach, brown and even tattered, and the scarcity that follows the destruction reaches a completely new kind of usurpation instead.