I am Shamurai.

For we on 羊肉泡馍 hath fed…

Recently, I was asked if I had any New Year’s resolutions. Without giving it too much thought, I responded, “Not really, I prefer to make rash and whimsical life decisions year round.”  A few days later, after some consideration, I thought about “what would I like to do more or less of in the new year?”  There was one singular outlier example that I knew should happen more often; epic meals with friends.  I’m not talking about those great meals one can have often…I’m talking epic.

The 2011 meal involves a one Tricia Wang (who you might remember from the Great Passover of 2010) and Beijing (where she assembled a small six person crew of people to eat some Hui Chinese Muslim food).  I only knew one other person, so I knew 1/2 the group counting myself.  The stage was set.  James, Tricia and I met up in Beijing’s Embassy Row and headed out via subway to the western part of the city.  At the restaurant, we met up with Roger and Lydia (Lisa was going to be late) and sat down.  Tricia began ordering in Chinese at the speed of summer lightning and I, armed with a 10-22 mm lens, began snapping photos.  Now, right about here, Tricia said something to the waiter which caused me to freeze up:

In Chinese she was talking about 羊肉泡馍 vs 牛肉泡馍 (basically lamb vs beef). I stopped taking photos and said, “羊肉!” and my mind was transported back to 2001.  Stumbling around Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter, I found this man selling something from a little street shop.  I was hungry, whatever he was selling under 1 USD, and I knew fell into my dietary restrictions.  What I got was a big steaming delicious bowl of 羊肉泡馍 (or Yáng Ròu Pào Mó), served with some fat looking, kinda hard pita bread.  Instinctually, I tore the bread into my soup and began to eat. In the 4 short days in the dead of winter I was in Xi’an, I ate from this guy 7 times.  So many times that if he saw me at end of the street, he’d have a bowl ready for me by the time I made it to him.

For 10 years, I searched for this dish States side.  Never did anyone have it.  I was told by Chinese people that it doesn’t taste good or that it’s smelly.  Once, in a Milpitas CA restaurant, they told me they had it but what they handed me was so not Yáng Ròu Pào Mó.  I had resolved to believe this meal, this incredible mutton in a clear garlic broth, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, a distant memory of a dream I once had many years ago…up until Tricia said 羊肉泡馍 to the waiter. 

China being what is is, nobody orders just one dish and remember this is a Hui minority Muslim joint…there ain’t a slab of pork in sight.  What you get is an incredible variant of Chinese food clearly inspired by the arabian silk road.  Many things came out as our appetizers:  Two types of soup dumplings (one beef, one lamb), some pickles cucumbers, some greens, some rice & grain soup.

Then a platter of lamb kabobs landed:

And the wolves in all of us began to eat.

Once we started to slow down, we were brought individually numbered bowls and little pieces of hardend pita looking bread.  We were to break up our own bread into our own bowls for the soup to be poured over.  

Now, you might ask, “why don’t they just do this in the kitchen?”  Simple, to do it right, it’s a pain in the ass and takes forever.  You need to crumble it up into little even pieces—a process that takes some considerable time.  If they do it for you in the back, they have this little machine break and grind it down into a non-uniform glob of bread.  No cook respects that.  As Tricia put it, we can’t let the machines win this one…it has got to be non-cyborg 羊肉泡馍…humans still matter…people matter! Plus when you offer to do it yourself, the cooks will send you your soup with the best cuts of meat in the stew; it shows the kitchen that you know what you’re doing when you order this soup. Respect yo! Things being as they are, and we being who we are, James and I got super competitive to see who could do the better job (I won, Tricia disagrees).

And then we wait.  Thinking I was taking a closeup of Tricia’s nose, Lisa took my camera for a moment to check out the lens for herself:

“I’m moderately impressed” she responded in a very British quip. Then our soup landed and silence engulfed the table as the tide rolls in after a storm.

And we ate and ate and took group photos, and told fun stories:

Sported our serious shades and giggled even more:

The best part, yes even better than the food, was the incredible, smart and amazing diverse company.  Each of us totally unique, friendly, and funny.  I noticed our shoes and pants described the party well:

Oh ya, and we stopped for a Uyghur snack on the way back to Chaoyang, were all smiles on the subway:

And were still giddy and jumping for joy for the rest of the day:

So, for a 2012 New Years resolution…more days like this!

Friends Ruin Weddings - the album.

Over the summer, we started to debut the masters of an album.  The River Project is a set of songs Mike and I put together for the wedding of Ashley and Jeffery.  

While you may have heard some of the masters on SoundCloud, today we’re happy to announce the final masters are now completed and ready for download in an iTunes friendly format (46 mb).  To master these tracks I have listened to them on reference quality headphones, in several cars, home stereos, through MacBook/iPhone/iPad speakers, and in crummy headsets. Then I didn’t listen to them for a month or so, then listened to them again just to be sure things were about as good as I could get them. A couple of people to thank, in no particular order:

• Jeff and Ashley for asking us to play.
• Aisha for running the show during the wedding.
• Beckett for volunteering to remaster the tracks in 25 years.
• Nikhil B. for giving me my first lecture on mastering audio.
• Emily W. for suggesting and encouraging the band name “Friends Ruin Weddings”. 
• Anyone who let me listen to these tracks on their stereo.   

Alas, much like my last band & album, creative differences about where people should live has broken up the band…so unless you caught our one and only gig, you’ll have to settle for downloading the AACs as a single zip if you want to listen to our set.

Enjoy!

Civilized Chaoyang! on Flickr.

[JUMP] Civilized Chaoyang: Magnificent with ME!

triciawang:

Silly uncomfortable boys - breaking personal space rules ! @aymans and @landay china (Taken with instagram)

triciawang:

@aymans in beijing china r (Taken with instagram)

Hanging out in the Beijing Subway.

Track 7: [Bonus] Big River (aiff)

Did you really think this story stops there? I needed to take a little break from mastering because when Mike gave me freedom to do whatever I wanted, I came inches away from mastering that last track into something that should have appeared on Atom Heart Mother. But I digress; the days before the wedding, Mike and I were rehearsing the tracks on the shore of the upper Mississippi River in St. Paul. Our cover art was taken along those tracks at river bank. Between practice songs, Mike said to me, “Sitting here on the river bank and playing guitar is like that Johnny Cash song ‘Big River.’” The more we saw the river, the more we thought of the song and how it would make a great bonus track for our album. For the musical arrangement, Mike was inspired by the Grateful Dead’s cover of the song, yet for the vocals we chose to do the Duet of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Well we aren’t ‘impersonating’ but we are singing a similar melody and harmony. Between Mike’s guitar and our vocals and an egg we ended up with a pretty bright mix. To balance this, I recorded my guitar track without changing my strings first; leaving the backing guitar with more bass and boom to round out the track’s low end. Seriously, if you know me, this is something I would never normally do. Then again, neither is playing guitar during someone’s wedding ceremony. But, as I told Jeffery when he asked me, there was little chance of me turning down the opportunity at his wedding to play along side Mike. So this “bonus track” was actually only every played on the banks of the river by Mike and I with nobody else around. For the recording, we kept it as rough and scruff and click-track free as was our jamming by the river.

Track 6: We are going to be friends (aiff)

The wedding party has now left the building. The audience is still locked in their seats. Even after we had stopped playing. Fortunately, we were prepared for this; the audience’s exit music was “We are going to be friends” by The White Stripes. Right when we started this song, people got the cue and left the church hall. I don’t know what made them want to leave. But they did. We liked leaving the audience with the sentiment that we are all gonna be friends. The White Stripes are a two piece band: a guitarist and a drummer. In the church for this arrangement, I played the guitar part while Mike played the vocals on his guitar. For this album, similar in spirit to the previous track, I played both tracks. I used a Fender Strat Ultra to mimic the vocal track and an old Martin acoustic for rhythm. A percussive egg replaces the song’s four on the floor snare drum rim shot. And as this song came to a close, Mike and I were left in an empty church. After a brief pause, there was a high five.

Track  5: Harmour Love (aiff)

This is it. The wedding is over. We just have to play something for the wedding party to turn around and happily walk out the church. To us, nothing seemed happier than Harmour Love by Syreeta (go ahead, look up the lyrics…I’ll wait). Now, when we were arranging this song, Mike was whistling the lead as we strummed some chords. This was saved to a Dropbox folder where Jeff and Ashley would monitor our progress. I’ll just say, when planning a wedding’s music; it’s probably advisable not to share every last demo or scratch take with the couple. What you hear here is the final arrangement on two guitars. On the wedding day, Mike and I swapped the lead and rhythm roles. For the album, we decided that this song would be performed entirely by Mike. One evening he came to my apartment and laid down the tracks: one rhythm and two lead tracks. I mastered the song a few days later, swapping the lead tracks a few times back and forth.

Track 4 : In My Life (aiff)

You know, when you play in an old church, they often don’t want you there. To guys in their 30s showing up with guitars in hand to play a wedding in a very traditional church. Let me back up a moment. As I understand it, the church where we played “only allows classical instruments to play during services.” I’m not sure what this meant aside from no CDs and no bands: just strings and piano. Ashley, somehow, got them to accept having us play. And when she mentioned we were her friends, they told her to reconsider: “Friends ruin weddings” so they said (that’s also our working band name).

During rehearsal, this was obvious. The church lady did not like having us there. She told us there was no PA system. And that we shouldn’t be on the church stage. And that we won’t be able to put chairs by the alter for us to sit. It went on and on…till the Priest showed up. This man came up to us. Said hi. Shook our hands and asked if we could play “Blister in the Sun” for him. Then he proceeded to tell us where we can get chairs and provided us with a single microphone and a boom that ran into the church PA. We went through the songs and worked on our timings. During the candle lighting ceremony rehearsal, we were told we’d have 1 minute to play. We had arranged The Beatles ”In My Life” to be cut into 1 minute pieces, so this was great. We were to play for a minute and they would light the candle, and the priest would turn and look at me and nod as the signal to finish up. All was good in the world.

Wedding day arrives. We just finished the bride’s march. All was well; we were on the home stretch. Candle lighting ceremony begins. Mike and I start playing. They light the candle. The priest turns and nods at me. Um. Did you know this took all of 18 seconds? Now Mike is playing and is in the zone while the priest is nodding at me. Panic stricken, I swing my foot out and nudge Mike out of his zone and whispered “we have to stop.”

“No way, we just started,” he hushed back at me.

“No No! We have to stop now, go out after the D minor.”

“Really?”

“Yes, now!”

And on a very shaky A chord, we faded out the song some 24 seconds after starting. I’m not sure if anyone noticed what happened. People seemed to be smiling. For this album, we thought to record just the short 24-second clip we got to play…but decided to offer the full arrangement we had worked up instead.

Track 3: Bride of Theme from Blinking Lights (aiff)

Perhaps the most nerve racking part of any wedding is the bride’s march slowly down the aisle.  If it’s not, it is for the musicians playing while she takes each step with all the slow cadence of a steep bicycle climb.  Fortunately for us, Ashley is a faster walker than most.  For her walk to the altar, we wanted something simple and delicate.  For this we picked another Eels song: Bride of Theme From Blinking Lights.  This is a rather simple song with a 3/4th time signature.  Mike came up with this lovely arrangement of a lead guitar backed by a ukulele; the higher pitch of the uke makes for a cherubic feel to her march.  Course this meant I had to learn to play a ukulele which I had never attempted before.  On this recording (as on the last one) you’ll hear I’m panned a little to the right and Mike is a little to the left.  This matches the sonic persecutive of the bride and groom as they were standing at the altar.  You did know I always perform live at stage left/house right, right?