JUE, an annual art and music festival held in Beijing and Shanghai, is back for more this month. While last year’s festival featured 25 events and attracted more than 12,000 attendees, in 2010 there are double the number of local and international events.

Archie Hamilton, managing director of JUE’s promoter Split Works, says the festival’s name comes from jue (觉) the Chinese word for ‘sense’ or ‘feel’. Getting to know some of the main acts landing in our fair city this month, we took JUE’s name a little too literally and asked them about their feelings and sensations.

Feeling Technicolour: St Vincent

By April Fong

Have a listen to St Vincent’s melodies and your ears will be tickled by music that’s somewhere in between pretty and creepy. On her latest album Actor, Annie Clark (pictured above) – whose stage name was inspired by the hospital where Dylan Thomas spent his last hours – began writing each song as a secret film score for some of her favourite films, like Badlands, The Wizard of Oz, Stardust Memories and Sleeping Beauty. 

“The Disney films from the 1930s and 40s were hugely important to this album. I wanted to make music that sounded Technicolour,” she says. 

The multi-instrumentalist and former Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens band member has garnered acclaim from Pitchfork, Spin and The New York Times, and also won Plug Awards’ female artist of the year in 2008. Catching her breath on a frenzied US tour last month, Clark told TALK how she’s feeling lately.

Humour, beauty and darkness are what life is all about. I hope to put all of that into my music.

My emotions are heightened on the road because I am dealing with the energies of different crowds every night. And I tend to take on their excitement, pain and every emotion in between. So my highs are high and I have to work to process the lows in a constructive way.

The most intense show I saw was My Bloody Valentine in New York City in 2008. They had 20 minutes of such loud and penetrative noise that I almost fainted. But I loved every minute of it.

The most satisfying tactile sensation is playing a 1920s Steinway piano.

Exuberant, joyous music I love is the Dirty Projectors’ latest album ‘Bitte Orca’ and Igor Stravinsky’s Russian Period.

I cried on a recent flight. There’s something about the altitude that makes you more sentimental and emotional than you normally would be. They were showing the film Marley and Me which is a typical Hollywood popcorn film about a couple and their golden labrador. The film features a 30 minute montage of the dog’s best moments, after the dog is diagnosed with a terminal illness. I wept. But they were cheap tears.

RMB 120. 13 March. Yuyintang, 851 Kaixuan Lu, near Yan'an Xi Lu

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