Cat No CE06

On this highly original album, “Ting Qiu - Listen to Autumn”, which was recently featured on BBC Radio 3’s Saturday Review, composer and conductor Mr. Fung Liao, also known as Lars Fredriksson, directs 108 singing Chinese crickets. Such ensembles have a long & honourable tradition in China, where Swedish-born Fredriksson lived and studied during his student years in the late 70’s.

From the nineties and onwards, he specialized in breeding crickets and organising live performances. The crickets usually consist of species like Bamboo Bells, Purple Bamboo Bells, Heavenly Bells, Golden Bells, Small and Large Yellow Bells, from various provinces in China. Due to the limited lifespan of a cricket, of little under a year, there are new ensembles formed in each year with the coming of fall. This is Fredriksson’s second ‘crickets’ CD, and he recently held a launch concert at the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm with 324 Chinese crickets (3 ‘rosaries’) plus improvising jazz musicians : Christian Spering, bass, Jonas Knutsson, reeds, and Bengt Berger, drums.