BaoJiaXiang considers themself an all-encompassing artist, with vested interest in the mutualities between the real and artificial and post-digital thinking. Actively engaged in critical thought regarding ethnographics and as a total synthesis of their existence on the technological and psychological planes. Their take on virtuality, a popular idea of the last decade, is more rooted in semantics. In terms of music, there lives an anxious echo of melodic tunes, backed by orchestral or traditional Chinese instrumentals. There often sees a balance between futurist and old, and western with eastern sounds. “I was not accepted as Chinese, American, or European.”

Your mixtape ‘Limpid Fear’ and album ‘The Recurrence of Infections’ released in 2018 introduced a halfway point between futurist experimental sounds and traditional Chinese instruments; how do you see the importance of blending the two sounds together in your music? Has this changed since?

Technology has shown us that the manipulation of the future is the same thing as rewriting the past, that to read is to write and to listen is to speak. What changed for me was nothing, for there was no “me” to change. I did not make any music. I was not accepted as Chinese, American, or European. There is no tradition to technology beyond increasing control and complexity, therefore there is no action to be taken at any intersection regarding it.

In ‘The Recurrence of Infections’, I feel a journey towards healing or breakdown, how do you allow this dramatic conflict of irregular movement of emotions to happen and how does this relate to its illumination in your personal reality?

I was dying. Then, I continued to live. As the diseases that tried to kill me returned, I continued to survive. I don’t know how I did it, but I’m writing this interview... so I guess something happened. Something that tried to kill me gave me the tools to make the art that gave me life.

**The Recurrence of Infections**, 2018, released on Danse Noire, photography by Nicholas Zhu, artwork by Niels Wehrspann

On one hand there’s this ritualistic tranquility to the melodies which are characterized by piano and orchestral sounds and on another it's transmutative distortions of anxious resonations. Do you ever think about where you and your music lie not only in the stratosphere of experimental artists but history?

No, I don’t. The point is that there isn’t music. If music is defined as the organization of sound and silence, then there are no musicians. Music never began and cannot end. I understand that I will be erased from the meta-narrative of human history. I don’t care. I just want to live a life where I can be appreciated for what I appreciate.

We saw the release of your album ‘Dear Diary’ in May of 2021 showing a clear ebb and flow of your ride on the hedonistic treadmill. What were the shifts which took place before and after its creation? How do you feel about monetizing your art? How do you approach the baring of your personal despairs & desires, thoughts on consciousness, art as a generator of risky fictions, the obscuring of reality, and desire for fame?

I will never change the fact that exposing suffering, pain, addiction, and loneliness is what generates the most profit for sensitive (upper) middle class consumers of culture. I’m sick of being perceived as psychotic just because I do research that is regarded as conspiratorial until my terms and theses are presented as the personal projects of white podcasters who make money off of the same ideas that I was berated for. People to this day question my sanity as if they were psychologists and I was an average person. I know who they are and I avoid them.

I no longer care that people are so stupid to think that anyone who looks and acts like me isn’t playing a character or constructing a theatrical performance. People like Mark Fisher and Nick Land are given the credit and funding for using ideas as a tool for analyses in conjunction to actually perceived as (non/anti) ideological, as being superior to and responsible for the things they create. People like me are told to shut up and listen. Anyone who can’t perceive where the art ends and my life begins is not worth my time as an individual, as a person, as a compassionate soul.

Could you speak more as to how your theses address the yin and yang of your daily life and its place in any upcoming ambitions, whether it’d take the form of music or something else?

I don’t teach anyone about eastern philosophy/religion/politics/poetry. If someone wants to understand it they can read all the books themselves.

Tell us a bit about your upcoming album ‘Music made by other people’, and the musicians who will be involved in its production?

As I said, I don’t make music. The album will have tracks that are literally titled and named after the artists that bod worked with to make them. A lot of geopolitically edgy and technologically diametric merchandise will be released.

bod [包家巷]

@baojiaxiang

interview HENRI P

@henrpi

mastery YANYAN

@y4n_y4n_

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