This is our first album. All the songs have been planned, composed and recorded during the college days. Classrooms, flood control tunnels and even shabby houses waiting to be pulled down were turned into our recording room, while the recording devices were also scraped up from borrowing and renting. Wandering through difficulties and setbacks since the band was formed six years ago, we finally put a belated ending to our college days with this album.
Six years. The world has changed a lot. What have been unimaginable and unacceptable: vicious strife, empty bubbles and extreme exclusion of dissidents, now become the norm. In such a carnival-like world, we have also changed. The three cynics debating how to resist the absurd world in the dinning room become five rat racers wandering between the burden of life and the pursuit of dream. Six years rid us of some anger, of some youthful spirits and of some metaphors and ridicules, but our will to express ourselves has never changed or ceased and will never change or cease. I believe this is the best way to communicate with the world and people.
"Jingtang Road" is a bystander’s narration of a foretold murder where every seemingly irrelevant onlooking witness is actually a part of it. Sometimes, tragedy is nothing but topics to chat about at leisure.
"Present and Past of the Beaten and the Crazy" is a ridiculing and unreconciled expression of the wandering between reality and imagination, where the metaphor of life can seem serene and peaceful.
"The Banality of Evil", a term originally proposed by Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in a report on Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann's trial, refers to the crime of being an unthinking and irresponsible person under the control of the ideological state apparatus. With this term, we imagined and narrated the story of an earth deficient in awareness.
Fortunately, my youthful earnestness has been preserved until today, which becomes an outlet, an emotional outlet. When a sense of depression from the outside world creeps all over myself, I would close my eyes and look back on those lyrics, on the shyness of us on the stage when we showed our “children” to the audiences for the first time, on the moment when I stood on the stage, cleared my throat and sang:
"I'm a mediocre masterpiece; I sing the song of the dark night."
Now, I decide to dedicate the little blessings and sufferings hidden in the songs to you.
