_ _ _ _ _ _ __ ___ __ _ _ __| | _ __(_)_ _____ _ __ __| | ___| | |_ __ _ | '_ \ / _ \/ _` | '__| | | '__| \ \ / / _ \ '__| / _` |/ _ \ | __/ _` | | |_) | __/ (_| | | | | | | | |\ V / __/ | | (_| | __/ | || (_| | | .__/ \___|\__,_|_| |_| |_| |_| \_/ \___|_| \__,_|\___|_|\__\__,_| |_| _ _ __ ___ _ __ __ _ __| | | ___ ___ / _| / __| '__/ _` |/ _` | |/ _ \ / _ \| |_ | (__| | | (_| | (_| | | __/ | (_) | _| \___|_| \__,_|\__,_|_|\___| \___/|_| _ _ _ _ _ __ ___ _ _ ___(_) ___ | |_| |__ (_)_ __ __ _ ___ | '_ ` _ \| | | / __| |/ __| | __| '_ \| | '_ \ / _` / __| | | | | | | |_| \__ \ | (__ | |_| | | | | | | | (_| \__ \ |_| |_| |_|\__,_|___/_|\___| \__|_| |_|_|_| |_|\__, |___/ |___/ ,__, ,__, | | | | | | | | | | | | ____ | | | | ___ | | ____ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ______________| |___| |_______| | | |___| |___ | __ ___ ____ //|\\ ____ ____ ___ / \ ___ ////|\\\\ //|\\ /////|\\\\\ ____ ____ \___///|\\\___/ __ \___//////|\\\\\\___/ o_________o /\ o_______________o /\ ____ _ _ | ____ | /\ / \ | _______ | / \ | |__| | / \ / \ | | | | | /\ / \ | |__| | / \ / \ | |__|__| |/ \ / \ | |__| |/ \/ \ | | | | / \/ \ A few semi ill-informed lines on music gear manufacturing in Guangdong Province of China, by our special reporter BoeufStroganoff. We've all heard about South China being the Factory of the world, the Mecca of electronics, the Vatican of consumer good, the Wall Street of plastic and metal processing,... You get the idea. But aside from these lousy stereotypes, what's the deal ? Is the bad picture usually depicted about work conditions any true ? How do you get something manufactured up there ? What is life like in the place that makes all our lovely music toys and tools ? All those questions won't get any answers, but chillax, pour yourself some spiced-up hot wine, open your shakras, and here we go. There is a massive probability that most items you own come from the Pearl River Delta. This ancient name is even more relevant today, as all cities surrounding that delta do indeed touch each other, like pearls threaded on a necklace. This area is forming de-facto a megacity of more than 120 million people and very soon, all the subway systems for each cities will be connected. You might want to take something to read if you ride the 130km subway trip from Hong Kong island all the way up to Guangzhou. Here's a schematic map of the place : o Guangzhou \ \ Foshan o \ \ / \ \ | o Dongguan (\ |/ _\\/ \__/\ \\\ \ _____ \' ~~~ \ __/ Zhongshan o _/ ~~ ~~~ \ \_ ~~~ ~~~ / ~~~ / __o Shenzhen\_ ~~~~ (_/) ~~~ ~~ \/ / /_ \___/ ~~~ ~~ Zhuhai o / ~~~~ ___/ \ \ /__ o Hong Kong ~~ ~~~ ~~~ /| o Macau ___/__ / ~~~ ~~ ~~~~ / | / /__ / \__/ ~~~ ~~ ~~~ \ \/ ' ~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ __________/ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~ Let's zoom into the Shenzhen area for a bit. 30 years ago the local water buffaloes and fishermen saw their place designated as a Special Economic Zone. Some dudes from Beijing clicked on the map like in SimCity, foreign capital poured in, and factories mushroomed from the rice paddies in the tens of thousands. Then millions of peeps moved in from all over China, creating the most cosmopolitan city of Chinese culture. It's cool because you don't need to travel all around china to try the different cuisines, it's all there. Because initially nobody was born in that place, the people of Shenzhen enjoy a strange sense of freedom. Eccentricity is not frowned upon, and the definition of what is socially permitted is much more flexible than anywhere else in China. When your family is 2000km away, there is less pressure to comply to social constructs. No heads will turn if you're shopping at the supermarket while cross dressing in a tight leather string and dominatrix boots. There is a few reasons to visit Shenzhen, especially if you like absurd surreal holidays. As a hardcore synth DIYer you would probably go to Huaqiang market, the now well-known electronic component neighbourhood. This place is made out of multi-story malls full of millions of booth selling electronic components. But it's also an entire ecosystem with a fauna and flora endemic to this place, feeding on the only available resource : ultra-spicy instant noodles, corn cobs, and hardcore cigarettes. After school hours, many kids join-in and wait for their parents to be done with their adult weirdness. Dressed like modern samurai's they are always at war, running around with swords made of integrated-circuit packaging tubes, discarded resistor boxes as armour, and helmets crafted with diode's reels. Close your eyes, imagine a deep winter wasteland. You can hear them, shouting like fierce warriors, you can hear the cracking sound of fresh snow under their steps as they rush to burn the enemy's village. It's of course just bubble wrap on the floor and the air-con jacked to the max because it's freaking hot outside, but what a childhood! This place can be overwhelming. If you're a bit too shy to ask for the price of these cool switches or this nice LED matrix, you can always go right outside and get some much needed sparkling hoppy beverages. A couple of those will work like a charm. Now you're quite mellow and tipsy enough to appreciate this wonderful environment and engage in the occult art of deal making with weird gestures and pocket calculators. While you're there, just ponder a bit about the economy of the world that is happening in front of your very eyes. Everywhere you look, packages are being sent around the world. It's almost like every time your hear that typical schrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitchhhh sound of wrapping tape being pulled, the stock market goes up! But I digress. After fiddling with modular synths I realized that, as awesome as it is, the complexity of having millions of modules in a big case was not really helping my musical output. I wanted a minimal set-up, and a way to turn this austere format into an expressive instrument, especially for the cool new digital modules. So why not trying the adventure of manufacturing a device/case just like that ? Let's bypass the design process, irrelevant here. But once you're fairly confident that it will work, it's time to find some cool people that will help you building it. You need to find two factories. One for the metal, and one for the circuit boards. After firing a bunch of pre-formatted emails to weird companies having retro flash-based websites, some will reply. After this initial contact, you must perform the traditional seduction dance together, to see if they can do what you want, and if they want to work for your puny project. You're not exactly the perfect client for them, since you won't need to make 10.000 piece of your cool gear. To improve your chances of making a deal, why not avoid saying the total truth about the exact numbers ? They kind of expect you to do it anyway, so make it look like a big order ! Once you have successfully hooked a few of them you can now send schematics of your design for a precise quote. Some will not answer, some will be ridiculously expensive. But there will be like 2 or 3 of them you could work with. Now comes the best part : Going up there, meet them in person, and check if the factory looks cool and uses eco-friendly soap in their toilets. It usually goes like this : You arrange a meeting with the guy you emailed with, somewhere right after the border or at the airport. After an hour of driving on urban highways and realizing communications in this customized English might be more difficult than envisioned, you will get to a gated compound filled with hundred of small factories. Your cell phone case, hispter-bike's rubber tire, bamboo furniture, flamingo neon sign, and all your LED stuff come from a place like this. Factories come in all flavours. Even if you can determine quite quickly that you might not work with them, it is always an adventure to see the conditions and the way the workers are doing their thang. In the worst ones you will see dudes smoking over vats of highly flammable chemicals while wearing underwear only, because the boss think that air-con is too expensive. Some of those visits feel like they are very well rehearsed, North Korean style. Workers fake it to make the floor look super busy and professional. Sometimes you can even get a glimpse of fear when their eyes accidentally look at yours, because the boss forbids interacting with visitors. Go with your instinct, go for the ones you can truly communicate with and where the workers are smiling and laughing in your presence. The PCB factory I ended up working with has a neat program to help their workers own a car and an apartment. They even send their staff to university to keep them interested and happy. You'll see the worse and the best. It is also fun to check the "sample room", a place full of shelves where you can see products previously manufactured by the place. It gives you a lot of ideas. You can also recognise some products from other brands. Ha ! So this famous audio compressor brand is doing things here ! Oooooooh but I recognise this drum-machine enclosure ! After the visit, tradition has it to take you to dinner in the compound and get you drunk on booze that the EU labs would rather classify as industrial window-cleaning chemical. But close your eyes and take it in like a man. The price of your product might suffer if you don't comply. I must mention here that my first visit to a factory and what eventually led to this project, is totally linked to this very cyberzine. Because of an article in the second issue of Shadow Wolf, I was able to meet a cool Swiss dude travelling to this part of the world for work. He took me to a LED factory he was working with, and we had a blast. I still fondly remember the exoticness of being constantly burped in the face by the factory owner, downing beers and baiju on little plastic chairs like there is no tomorrow. It was hard to remain serious, but that boss gave me plenty of very good advices, and my factory contact. Other memories are more bitter-sweet. Like that time rushing out of a meeting with a power-supply manufacturer without the luxury of giving them an explanation, running around the factory with a livid face. That face being a ISO9001 international standard, you'll be quickly pointed to the nearest gentlemen's (or lady's) room to release the dangerous Szechuan food / baiju mix your body was naively trying to process. But those visits are mostly fun and you'll collect many cool weird memories doing it ! Most worker spend their only day-off playing League of Legends until way too late at night, crammed in the unisex dorm provided by the factory. It's not so comfy but they can save more money staying there. I'm still not totally aware about how they fulfil some of their more primal needs, I should investigate. After spending many days with some of them, I'm glad that this experience allowed me to befriend cool people in China. Those guys really feel like they are improving their living standard for themselves and their families and are happy to move forward in their life, compared to where they came from. Of course you will always find people who think that Shenzhen industrial suburb is a hell hole, where everything is dirty and where people live shitty lives. But this conclusion is held most probably by people who fail to see things from a worker's perspective, in a company that is not crushing them. It's not all rosy, and there's some harsh conditions, but so far there's still plenty of jobs and it is easy to leave yours and get another one next door if you'renot happy. Then comes manufacturing time. First rule : Everything that can go wrong WILL go wrong. You must quadruple check everything, and nothing works better than photoshopping red circles on pictures, when being present physically is not possible. The factory is not fucking-up the production on purpose but there is a charming sense of clumsiness to it all. Communication-wise it is important to remember that they are not trying to rip you off. Manage your frustrations. From their perspective, the quality of their work is way ahead compared to the local competition. But they won't tell you exactly what they do, and they themselves use other subcontractors to do processes that they are not equipped for. This is usually where problems happens : because it is your baby and not theirs, they don't have the same level of quality control than you would, when stuff comes back from the subcontractor. One cannot avoid being horrified by a trip to the region's countryside. Or what's left of it. The landscape is a never ending forest of chimneys, electric poles, bizarre pseudo Greek-looking property developments and skyscrapers lost in the middle of nowhere. Quite dramatic at night with a loud drexciyan soundtrack. A few dark rivers lay sandwiched between all this grey concrete and destroyed ruins of old villages turn to rumbles. Some very optimistic people even farm vegetables where there is a bit of space left. Those rivers look more like an open-air oil transportation system actually, so I wonder what those veggies taste like. Industrial development is the only thing that matters and its cost is tremendous for the environment and people's health. Working hard and giving better education and life opportunities to your kids is priority number one. But the price they are willing to pay to allow that may be considered far too expensive in the future. Their kids will probably despise the previous generation for their choices. Having a good diploma is no use if your health isn't good enough to make the best out of it. Is it because they feel like that they can always go back to the beautiful countryside of their childhood, a nice and comfy 1000 km away, that people seem to have no sacred connection with the land here ? Of course, all of this is easy to say when you come from a European background, where the same process occurred during the industrial revolution, so far away in time from now. Do we curse our ancestors who cut the forest to build coal mines and steel processing plants back then, so we can enjoy pondering about what eurorack module we want to buy next, instead of having our mind crushed by labour intensive manual work ? Politically, things are moving forward, but it seems pointless. For example the Shenzhen prefecture, suffocating on weird chemicals, has banned PCB manufacturing industries in its area. The growing middle class wants to live in nice pollution free districts, so the pressure grows on officials to make things change. Gentrification is also going on at full steam. Understandable, the money is good. But just a little further away, in places still not affected by pollution, there are countless smaller cities, eager to cash-in on industry tax. So in this example, instead of regulating what chemicals can be used, cities who have "made it" just ban those chemicals and the problem moves on to a new area where it is perfectly fine to use them. Seen from above, polluting industries move in a similar way to bacterias in a Petri dish, leaving a corrupt land behind them. The future seems grim, so being able to work with factories that can prove the non-toxic nature of their processes is a priority. It is not something that we usually think about when we give-in to our gear addiction syndrome, but whenever you buy anything making blips and boings, remember that you are the most powerful actor of this whole chain of events. Consume with a clear and well-informed mind. The project is now done, it works and I forgot the frustration of all the things that went wrong. It took almost 2 years from start to finish and now it's time to make some real music again ! But part of me can't wait to sit again on a plastic stool shooting anti-freeze down my hatch and exchanging google-translated jokes with some cool crazy Chinese boss. If you're interested to see what that machine ended up looking like, it's here >> www.mtblsm.com