Greater Than The Hum Of Its Parts: Musings On Music-Making In The Middle Kingdom

There comes a time (usually an hour or so after rehearsal, during the top half of that third beer and in the dwindling

afterglow of a moderately jazzy cigarette) when conversation between musicians can take a turn towards the philosophical. This is particularly true of songwriters, but anyone who gets up under the lights to do their thing can also feel justified in a little dewy-eyed musing about what it means to try to “do something”.

If a new band plays to an empty room, does it make a sound? Sure, they’ll make a noise, but as every long-suffering sound engineer will attest, it doesn’t matter if it’s a racket or a hit record when no-one’s there to clap at the end. This is the most quantifiable measure of successful music making; if you’ve no audience, you’re doing it wrong.

The labours of live performance extend far beyond the stage. Getting booked, promoting the gig and pounding it out up there are far from perfunctory, but hundreds of technically competent cover bands have played countless classic rock floor-fillers without making a Shanghai sound. I know. I played in one. The audience had a good time but, ultimately, we perpetuated the much-maligned view of a Shanghai scene perennially in Beijing’s creative shadow.

Even the biggest hitting locals, original bands like Pinkberry and 羽果 (Yuguo) to name just two of many, have laboured long to bring wider credibility to the Shanghai live scene. Supplement this with the enthusiasm and genre diversity of the expat enclave and hopefully, in their coming together, stuff starts to snowball. This genre expansion opens up the scene for mid-level touring acts to stop in Shanghai, facilitating support slots and a bit of borrowed interest for domestic acts.

The act of creation was at the heart of getting our band together, and it’s reflected in our name; Parts&Labour. It’s the guile

and the graft and the... other thing. It’s something else, elusory, which somehow augments during the creative process. We’ve only just got it together, so these formative few months of music making in China have been as much about camaraderie as self-expression. Each musician takes their part, blends it with their toil and somehow, in those coolest of cases, it comes together. Then, when you finally offer up the fruits of your labour to an audience, it can grow into even more.

The first peak under the hood of a new song build - and this is something particular to bands starting out – comes in the rehearsal room. All your labour has so far been, to paraphrase Bowie, kept in quiet seclusion. Hopefully, the nuts and bolts are there and catchy enough that, in the coming together, they become greater than the hum of these parts. You put these things together with a lot of hard work and you get a well-oiled music machine. You get Parts&Labour.

Parts&Labour make rock’n roll music. The band is built on a solid rhythm section. On top of that groove, you layer tight guitar, howling solos, handcrafted melody and well-honed harmonies. You put these things together with a lot of hard work and you get a well-oiled music machine. We build it. We bring it. We let you have it. That’s how we work. That’s how we play. That’s Parts&Labour. Web: www.facebook.com/PARTSandLABOUR