Many of you will know him for his current band Spring and Autumn, and no doubt nearly all of you will know him for his role in China's original metal band, Tang Dynasty. Musicwise, we'll also be starting with some unreleased demos from Spring and Autumn, before moving on to some old songs from Tang Dynasty. Sounds like a strange chronology? Well, my history's not good, but I always thought the Spring and Autumn Period came first. Anyway, over to Kaiser Guo, with whom I began by asking about the musical styles of his two bands.

Kaiser: Progressive metal for people who are familiar with the genre, they would expect that we would be doing something chopsier than we're actually doing. Progressive metal bands in America would include bands like Dream Theatre, Symphony X, Everglade from Sweden, Angra from Brazil. These are bands that are a hell of a lot more technical than we can ever aspire to be. That said there are definitely elements which would definitely suggest progressive metal. Our song structures are much more traditional but there's definitely the aggressiveness, and the tightness and the melodicism that's in progressive.

I think that they are very similar genres of music. You'd have to lump them together. As much as I've wanted to do something different, it's what I like it's where my roots are., and since I do so much of the composing and did so much of the composing for the bands, there's going to be some continuity. I would put them in the same category. I've heard so many funny descriptions of us, Melodic Mando-Metal, Progressive Hard Epic, Metal With Chinese Characteristics; those are all fair characteristics of both bands.

First Spring and Autumn Song

We have a lot of people who are there because they want to see Tangchao Redox, and some of them don't walk a way disappointed. There are enough similarities in terms of the composition and musical style. We don't invite the comparisons, but I don't shun them either, of course there are going to be comparisons. I'm really interested to hear what Tang Chao fans have to say about what Spring and Autumn's doing. And when they come to the shows, we occasionally will give them a little bit, there are some songs that I wrote entirely during my days in Tang Chao that we will occasionally pull out and perform.

They never know. I can feel like we've played the crappiest gig in the world, and the fans never seem to … there's a hardcore in the front who watch our fingers and watch us step on every pedal, and they know exactly what notes we play, they've listened to the stuff so many times, you can sort of see them wince when you miss a note, but the vast majority of them don't.

Second Spring And Autumn Song

What I love the music I still do this day I'm crazy about is the stuff the critics hate the most, which is the putatively bombastic prog from the 70s very crusty stuff. But I really did, I grew up listening to a lot of old Yes, old Genesis, Peter Gabriel and the few albums immediately after him, King Crimson. But I also love the classic stuff, Zeppelin and the Who are two of my very favourite bands to this day. I also like a lot of newer metal bands and something of the old classic heavy metal bands, some of your Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. And the band that probably influenced me most when growing up, probably the most reviled band in history in terms of the music critics, is Rush from Canada. I love them and I love them without the slightest bit of embarrassment to this day.

Tang Dynasty Heaven

To this day, I think that most Chinese people are just not prepared to accept rock. It's so antithetical to what most Chinese people want out of music. They don't want to listen to music to feel aggression or any emotional aside from relaxation. They want relatively simple melodies, relatively slow rhythms, they like familiarity, they like the pentatonic scale which has inherent limitations. That's fine with me. I understand that it's always going to be something on the periphery, rock that is, and that it's biggest obstacle is that people simply don't like it. That's fine, there are people who do, I'm not out to convert the world.
Return to Tang Dynasty

Two of them I had nothing to do with, and I still love them to this day, one is the eponymous song, Return to Tang Dynasty, I didn't write a note of that song, it was all Laowu, and I love that to this day. And The Sun, another one, lyrically terrific, all sorts of great rhythmic things going on.

The Sun

It was written by a Frenchman in the time of the Paris commune. It's been the International, the Communist International. We had some time in the studio when we were doing the demos for the first album. I hit upon the idea to record a version of it. I thought it was just a great little song that lent itself very well to a metal reinterpretation. I still have a tape somewhere way back in a box of the original demo which is more raw more raucous and a lot more fun I think than what was finally recorded on the first album. The first album, that only went on the Taiwan and Hong Kong versions of it, the mainland version didn't have the International on it

The International

When I first heard the album when it finally came out, I was totally prepared for it, because we were sorely disappointed with how it ended up. The last day when we were mastering it in the studio, it sounded terrific to us still. Something happened between that mastering and the actual pressing of the album. First of all it's at a very low volume, the album was recorded at an extremely low volume. There's some knob in the factory that somebody turned too low. You can listen to it at a very high volume and I think it sounds a hell of a lot better. I made a lot of mistakes for sure, in the mixing I was going for a humility in the guitar, I wanted it lower in the mix for a lot of things, and I think that was a mistake. I think the drums and the bass were recorded very well, I'm still very proud of a lot of the composition but the guitar sounds I think are crap. We were pressed for time, but we really should have spend a little more time in the studio. I'm not proud of a lot of what happened in the final product.

There are none that I'm entirely happy with. Probably Ashes to Ashes is probably the only one I'm about 85% happy with that one. The rest of them, there are things I really don't like listening to them later. There were a lot of production problems, and I don't blame the producers. They referred to us on a lot of these decisions. It was our experience that sank it.
Ashes to Ashes