Three shows in two days! We played Sunday afternoon at the much-vaunted Beijing Midi Music Festival at the Beijing Sculpture Garden after the whole thing was nearly cancelled due to complaints by neighbors. I grant it was quite loud: I could hear Reflector playing from 400 meters away in a cab on Chang'an Avenue. They worked out a compromise whereby all the acts would get compressed into a shorter time frame, wrapping up at 7pm. That meant that instead of going on at 6:30 and playing five songs we could only play three (we ended up doing four) and played with the sun still high in the sky at around 4:30. Xiao Kou and I collided 10 minutes before show time while I was warming up and he hit my whammy bar and snapped my D string. Astonishingly no one anywhere in the vicinity had the Allen wrench I needed to change strings so I ended up borrowing some guys shitty Strat knock-off and playing with that. Then just into our last song I broke a string on that guitar, so I grabbed the lead singer's from him while Kou tried to cover for me, playing a riff of mine; I jumped in just in time to play the main guitar hook of "Tianxia 天下" and it wasn't a complete disaster, though I was too rattled to really perform convincingly.

Monday there were two post-Midi shows -- first at Nameless Highland, 无名高地, where we played first so we could get to the other show, and then at New Get Lucky，新豪运. Thing is the Get Lucky organizers figured we'd be playing late in the lineup at Nameless Highland since we were the only well-known band playing there, so they lined us up ninth out of 10 acts. We went on at 2:30 AM -- we sat around backstage picking our noses, and me without a book! -- and finished our set well past three. But I have to say we played one of the better shows we've played, even if it was only five or six songs.

Afterward I had the unwelcome affections of Wang Yuntao -- Tao Ge, who I call Tony Soprano -- visited upon me. Hulking, powerfully built and quite drunk, the owner of the Get Lucky -- who I strongly suspect has not inconsiderable underworld connections -- has this touchy, man-huggy kind of enthusiasm that I find somehow extremely menacing. Tony Soprano. He actually scares me: I never quite know what to say to him, and I often can't understand what he says to me as his tongue is thick from drink. It's the kind of friendliness that could so easily turn to violence; he'd take offense, I surmise, were his 10-minute handshakes and bearhugs not reciprocated with passable earnestness. He does love Chunqiu, though, and insisted to his house promoters that we do a big full-scale concert there (meaning just one or two opening acts and a nice long set for us).

The highlight of the evening for me was meeting this awesome band from Shanghai called "Lengku Xianjing 冷库仙境," or "Cold Fairlyand" as they're known for now in English. (I gave them some other options, like "Frozen Fairyland" -- your suggestions are welcome). The band's fronted by a young woman who's a graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory. She plays keyboards and pipa -- both excellently, I should add -- and sings. They have another woman who graduated from the Shanghai (Peking?) Opera School (戏曲学院）who plays electric cello, and a guitarist, bassist and drummer who are all really good players. Their musical style I'd describe as "Heavy New Age," like Yanni but with big fucking balls and much cooler arrangements. I talked to the frontwoman for a long time about arrangement and composition; she's heard us a bunch and had all sorts of insightful comments and questions about how we write. My sense is she really likes us musically but isn't too keen on our vocalist -- something hundreds of people have told me. What to do, what to do....