Cold Fairyland: Seeds on the Ground

This a review is of the cd released in 2007.

Lin Di is the main writer and has released 3 solo records as well as three with Cold Fairyland since 2001. I only discovered the band in 2009 after reading the book "China's Creative Imperative" by Kunal Sinha.
See the website at:

Coldfairyland homepage

I have been seeking out new music from China moves beyond local traditional forms and also avoids copying Western genres. This is the best I have heard, mixing influences from West and East using an unusual range of instruments: pipa, drums, bass, guitar and cello.

Agile and dynamic, Cold Fairyland has the dextrous fluidity of a jazz ensemble. Lin Di's pipa deftly picks its way across the langorously extended legato lines of cellist Zhou Shengan. This layering of pizzicato and arco sounds gives the music a clear and transparent arrangement, with a variety of textures and the means to articulate subtle changes in tempo and metre. The presence of both bass guitar and cello sharing an overlapping pitch range also enhances the interweaving and interleaving nature of the ensemble. This highlights the novel use of cello in a non-classical ensemble and possibly also helps to inspire interesting arrangements and novel bass lines.

In the manner of some traditional Chinese music the overall effect is of a subtle ebb and flow through complementary group interaction, rather than the tension and release structure of most western classical and rock music. The shifting dynamics of the drums / percussion are notable in this respect. Part of this pattern is for tracks to end fairly abruptly in a way that to a Western ear sounds "unfinished".
Melodically I sense an influence from folk music, but whether this is mainly from the Chinese or European variety is not clear. In combination with the use of varied and unconventional metres this lends an approximation to some folk inflected progressive rock from the UK in the early 1970s.