大家好。I was poking around on Bandcamp the other day, looking at what came up under whatever tag came to mind. While browsing the contents of the guzheng tag, I found the 梅酒晚风 Plum Wine Evening Breeze EP by Jarrelle Barton. For those of you unfamiliar with the 古箏 guzheng, it's a classical Chinese stringed instrument, like a zither with 21 or 24 strings, and it produces some of the most beautiful sounds that human ears have the fortune to hear.
I don't think the guzheng is a particularly popular instrument outside of China and other parts of East Asia, so I was pretty stoked to find a dude in Minnesota playing it. What I really dug, though, was the contrast betweene 梅酒晚风 Plum Wine Evening Breeze, a more traditional and quite lovely set of guzheng tunes, and Barton's latest offering, the two-song, 25-minute Zheng, which is more experimental. He's not the only person on Bandcamp doing interesting things with the guzheng—David Sait is also worth listening to—but Zheng is quite striking. Barton describes it as "meditation music on solo zheng," and it could definitely work for that, if meditating to music is your thing. It's not mine, so when I'm doing anything else other than simply listening, I've put on Zheng while reading.
The first song on Zheng ("A hug from the wind, kisses of the sun") is just otherworldly: deep, echoing, melancholy. It is unquestionably in the highest class of evocative music, stirring up traces of something you can't quite put your finger on. You simply have to listen to it. I'd have recommended Barton's work even if I hadn't heard this song, but after I did, I knew I had to write a little something about it.
So enough reading: go listen to Jarrelle Barton, to whom I say 謝謝您.
微臣
史大偉
