Two years ago, at the dawn of 2010, Time Out met Shanghai musician ChaCha. ‘I’m not that good really,’ she tittered at the time. ‘My level’s not that high – I still have a lot to learn.’ A scant 730 days later, we are waiting for the singer in a café. She arrives with business-like self-assurance. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ she says briskly, taking a seat next to her manager and husband Gareth Williams, co-founder of The Shelter, Shanghai’s leading underground dance club. ‘I’ve just been sending my a cappella to a producer and it took ages.’
We start by reminding her of her earlier comments. ‘Back then, there were so many questions,’ she says, smiling. ‘I wasn’t really sure of what kind of singer I could be – or whether I could even sing professionally.’ Now, though, she’s much more confident about her talent – happy, at last, to call herself a musician (she quit her job late last year to go full time). ‘It was very confusing, I was struggling,’ she says. ‘Then suddenly, it happened, it opened up.’
‘It’, of course, has been a heck of a ride. ChaCha has not only cemented her position as one of Shanghai’s most-feted underground singers, but has performed in Europe and produced tracks with the likes of Hyperdub’s head honcho Kode9 and Finnish dub maven Desto, as well as a debut album, as AM444, with Amsterdam producer Jay.Soul. Last year, on her second attempt, she was inducted into the coveted Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA), a two-week workshop in Madrid for some of the world’s brightest up-and-coming musical talent.
For musicians worldwide, the RBMA is a huge deal. But she waves away the significance of being the programme’s first Mainland entrant. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘There were all kinds of nationalities there. It was like the most amazing high-school party’.
Lecture schedules and workshops became performances in the evening. ‘We partied pretty hard. I was getting two hours sleep a night, max,’ she says. Again, it’s a stark contrast to the shy, pixie-sized songstress we met in 2010. ‘I like being quiet and staying in,’ she said back then. ‘I’m not a party girl.’
But despite her newfound confidence, not to mention the professional highs of the past two years, the singer insists she remains grounded. ‘I’m not proud of anything I’ve done just because it was with a big name from a big label,’ she says. ‘I don’t care about that.’ Instead, it’s Eye Wonder, the jazz-tinged, trip-hop AM444 EP released last year with Jay.Soul that she calls her most important work to date. ‘Before, I was working with different producers in different styles. If you put them all together, there’s no concept there, nothing that represents ChaCha’s music.’
As a self-proclaimed devotee of trip-hop over reggae and dub, Eye Wonder was the album she always wanted to make. ‘For the first time I had 100 percent freedom. With Eye Wonder, I released a lot of things I’d been carrying with me for a long while,’ she says. ‘When it was finished, I felt I could go forward, lighter.’
Currently working on tracks with Jamaican rhythm-section legends Sly & Robbie, alongside Beijing’s MC Webber, the offers keep coming in. But it’s AM444 that will be the focus of 2012, with another EP out later this year. She hopes it will help her connect with a local audience she feels is mostly indifferent to homegrown talent. ‘Yeah, I’m happy that lots of Western people are interested in my music,’ she admits. ‘But I’m a Chinese singer. I sing in Chinese. All these stories are hidden in my lyrics; if you can’t understand them, you can’t understand my music. I need that connection with the audience, and foreigners can’t give me that.’
ChaCha speaks passionately about her upcoming projects, but shuffles uneasily at being described as a success, or even a leading beacon of Shanghai’s underground music scene. ‘I don’t like to promote myself,’ she says. ‘You know, I’m not going to sit in front of a computer all day asking people to like me.’ Instead, it seems she’s trying to navigate her career on her own unhurried terms.
As we end, she smiles broadly and leaves with the same endearing sense of underplayed, whispered optimism as the last time we met. ‘I’m just lucky,’ she insists with her trademark modesty. ‘I’m just doing the right things at the right time. Hopefully things will work out, little by little.’
Admission: 50RMB
Time: 10:00pm March 23
Address: 2 Kolegas, No.21 Liangmaqiao Road, Chaoyang district
朝阳区亮马桥路21号(汽车电影院内)
Tel: 64368998
