天地不仁 by HOWIE LEE

from Howie Lee / Do Hits:

"Tiān Dì Bù Rén" takes its title from an idiom in the Tao Te Ching, a foundational Daoist text credited to the sage Laozi, where heaven and earth ("Tiān Dì") are merciless, leaving humanity to fend for itself. If Mù Chè Shān Chū was youthful vigour and idealism, Tiān Dì Bù Rén is clear-eyed maturity. A gaze back into the indifferent heavens.

Over 13 songs, Howie’s signature mix of traditional Chinese instrumentation and experimental soundscapes reflect on human will and human destruction. The interplay between capitalist greed and environment degradation, the conflict between human morality and scientific ethics, the tension between global movement and local pushback. Howie’s songs are conversations in dialectic, a synthesis of opposing positions, emotions and reactions. Tiān Dì Bù Rén tackles parochial nationalism and populist anger in China, observing both Howie’s homeland and the wider world as a dispassionate sage would analyze " tiānxià" (‘all under heaven’).

Taken as a whole, the album is nothing less than a new musical language, one that combines the ancient and the modern, the Chinese and the global. Starting from, but not restrained by geography, Tiān Dì Bù Rén circles constantly around the troubled relationship between people and nature. There’s no cynicism here – just a determination to break on through to somewhere new. The Dao urges us to "Wù Wǒ Liǎng Wàng" (forget everything including oneself), and Howie Lee’s new album is the soundtrack to forgetting – a meditative apocalypse.