Experimental Musician GayBird Returns With Bewildering Space Oddity

Last fall, The Creators Project interviewed musician, GayBird (ne Leung Kei-chuek) on his live performance, Digital Hug. The Chinese artist utilized new media and homemade digital instruments to create the most bizarre sounds perceptible to the human ear ina performance that mixed live instrumentation with visual effects. It's easy to fluff a forward-thinking musician as "one-of-a-kind" or sui generis, but there really isn't anyone like GayBird…

One year later, he's back with a new epic titled CouCou On Mars that's so peculiar and challenging that calling it "experimental" feels like a hideous understatement.

In the seven minute video trailer above, we see instruments futuristic enough that they make Daft Punk's arsenal look like the tools of Luddites. There are theremin-meets-xylophone structures, instruments that could only be described as space harps, Newton's Cradle toys, and more. It's too fitting that this performance has a extraterrestrial theme.

CouCou On Mars and Digital Hug both sound like an amalgam of Stereolab, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Cornelius, if those musicians utilized custom keyboads modulated by iPhones, water as a drum machine, and iPad facemasks that emit sounds and samples when touched.

The piece is challenging, though the artist may be taking sound and instrumentation to its next frontier. In our interview with GayBird last year, he told us, "With the invention of new instruments comes the invention of new music genres." This couldn't be more true, though we're not quite sure what to call GayBird's otherwordly symphony. If you have a suggestion, please share and let's create a new music subgenre meme. Or let's not and just compare GayBird to his true contemporary… the one and only Gaybird.  See more of the sonic weirdness in our 2012 documentary, below:

@zachsokol