“From a deep pool of blue ink rises an image…” – this is written on Blueprint’s Neocha.com homepage, a digital collective that describes itself as a Chinese creative group with no artistic bounds. In an “Internet world” filled with many options for exploring different kinds of creative content, we find ourselves frequently entering Blueprint’s creative world. Their distinctive style comes from the ambient / “lowercase” electronic sound they produce as well as their visual works, which exude a subtle mysticism.

The depth and breadth of content under the “Blueprint” name actually comes from members who live in many cities, including Zhengzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, among others. It’s important to note here that the new generation of Chinese creatives can’t be neatly divided into the usual first tier city, second tier city, etc. classifications. As for their jobs and hobbies, they are just as diverse as the cities they come from: Bruce Lee researcher, UFO / extraterrestrial enthusiast, physicist, astrological expert, etc., just to name a few. It’s precisely this diversity of background among Blueprint’s members that provides the creative group with its unique vitality and indie spirit.

From the perspective of someone observing China’s creative community development, it’s fascinating to creatives across significant geographic distances collaborating via the Internet. This is part of a macro trend in China first seen with electronic magazines, later with electronic music, and now with multi-discipline artists – young Chinese creatives choose low-cost, high-efficiency means to collaborate across wide distances in order to fulfill their creative dreams. Over the near-term, we believe that the development of creative collectives will be a focus of discussion  for Chinese creatives, creativity platforms, and creative brands alike.

Take Blueprint as an example, along with their homepage on Neocha, they have also created profiles on Menllo, Douban, Last.fm, and other creative community websites. Each profile positions Blueprint slightly differently, allowing the group to attract different types of fans and potential collaborators, whether with music or visual arts. Additionally, the group maintains a QQ group (51649461) for daily communication. In order to achieve the overall objectives of Blueprint’s vision, each member has individual responsibility for managing the various departments and digital identities .

Some of Blueprint’s works may not draw you in immediately, and the group’s diversity may not be apparent on first glance, but their passion for creativity and their diligent sense of online community provides a model example for young creatives all over China. We will continue to keep tabs on Blueprint’s development as we see them providing great insight into how these geographically separated groups work and evolve together.

In the following interview, we spoke with Pipi, Blueprint’s music director and Yue Xi, Blueprint’s visual arts director. More than anything, from talking with these two we sense a genuine sense of the group’s seriousness and determination to achieve its creative goals.

We’ve also shared some of Blueprints music in the embeddable player below. Have a listen and let us know what you think.

For more from Blueprint on NeochaEDGE, link here. /// Voiceweekly

What type of group or collective is Blueprint? What role do each of you play in Blueprint?

Blueprint is a experimental creative tribe or sorts composed of artistically minded individuals who want to work together. Members communicate over the Internet to produce original music, illustrations / paintings, movies, and other creative work.

Our name, Blueprint, represents a fundamental belief we have about life that there is meaning in our existence and our mission is to explore that meaning and “complete” ourselves in the process. We respect the “sound” that each of us has in our hearts and in reality – art is just one way of communicating this sound. More importantly is that you can genuinely express yourself, while maintaining independence, originality, simplicity, and happiness.

Pipi: I can be considered as the one who more formally came up with the idea for Blueprint as I come from a formal art and music-obsessed background. From an early age, I started to feel this pull, so I’ve put in a lot of effort to organize my life and activities around these values. Actually, before Blueprint, I organized another small group of like-minded individuals that stayed in touch, but not in a formal group.

How many people are in the collective? What kind of backgrounds do they come from?

The biggest unifying characteristic of Blueprint is that we all collaborate and communicate over the Internet. We started doing this very early on, so over the past few years we’ve been able to attract some extremely talented people from different disciplines.

In Zhengzhou, there is me, esseNce, San Er, and Dou Dou, which make up Blueprint’s music production department.

I’m a middle school art teacher and while it might seem that I should focus mostly on art, I have found that I like to also work on music. It just brings me so much happiness.

esseNce is a professional video game player of Counter-Strike and is one of the central members of Henan’s SP.CLAN. Through this experience, he understands the importance of team chemistry and is looking for more opportunities to work with talented members.

San Er is a recording studio engineer. Overwhelmed by the amount of commercial music he works on, he hopes to release some of his own recordings one day.

Dou Dou is skilled at composing and recording music, especially due to his intimate knowledge and experience working with Chinese artistic elements.

In Beijing, there is Yue Xi, Lao Lu, Rainbow, and Tian Yun.

Yue Xi is a very talented. He produces an incredible amount of artistic work. He is especially curious about the relationship between art and people’s spirit, researching the therapeutic effects of music, paintings, and other art forms on people.

Lao Lu comes from an art background, particularly photography and video. Lao Lu is currently a photographer for a foreign company operating in China.

Rainbow’s background is in motion picture commercials. He focuses on motion picture production. Rainbow is also a dedicated scholar of all things related to Bruce Lee.

Tian Yun often translates foreign-language materials and other literary inspiration. At a very early age, he tried his hand at music production. He has a unique style of exploring multi-layered polyphony music.

There is also sense. He is based in Hangzhou and is a 3D game designer with a doctorate degree. He has extensive experience producing video game music. The feeling you get from his music is both delicate and rich. He composes according to his own mind and a lot of us think his music has a noticeable therapeutic effect.

Yu Jian is from Chongqing and comes from a graphic design background. He is currently working in the Internet industry.

Originally from Shanghai, but now getting his PhD in the US, City Sunlight (城市之光). He has always been quick to take in the newest foreign influences. He is also an expert on astrology and new music.

We also have some members in Guangzhou, Nanchang, and other places, but I won’t introduce them all.

The main members of Blueprint don’t just communicate or get to know each other in isolated instances or because of their jobs. We don’t limit anyone because of their background and encourage a wide range of versatile people.

What type of standard do you have for accepting new members or content?

In terms of finding members, we have group pages on all the major websites, blogs, and BBS forums to act as a window for communication. This is an unobstructive way that we can attract and influence people. We rarely take the initiative to seek out people; most are just attracted to the group by themselves.

In terms of standards for members, Blueprint focuses on enthusiasm and talent, rather than specialty or academic record. Anybody who has true passion and gets along with us can become a member of Blueprint. Through our interactions, information sharing, and “spirt of collaboration across distances and age,” talented individuals are allowed to grow quickly with us.

In terms of standards for content, we most value originality and truly authentic expressions of oneself.

We’re most interested in how Blueprint is organized and how you are able to use the Internet to stay connected, etc. Do you have some words of wisdom that you can share with us?

First of all, we were all probably pre-destined to communicate in this way as we were all very early adopters of the Internet as a communications and information tool. We all use the Internet today to share our thoughts and focus on common goals; also to share information and the experience of creating pieces of work we are proud of. However, we have also found that we still need to create together as that brings us true happiness.

In terms of organizing ourselves, we haven’t given this much thought at all as our existence is a very natural one based on common values. We only organize ourselves around a common objective, which happens in a spontaneous and direct way that we all benefit from.

Our understanding of Neocha.com and NeochaEDGE may not be enough, but from the perspective of both websites, we still get the feeling that it is different from other platforms. We like the focused positioning, bi-lingual structure, Chinese and foreign members, and of course, the most important thing is your attitude! In the future, when we have a great idea or piece of work, Blueprint will certainly want to share it with Neocha.

What type of creative events have you participated in? Any recent plans that we should know about?

In the fields we are interested in, we are always on the leading edge. Every day we are out discovering and finding inspiration. For example, three years ago we launched the first Chinese website dedicated to Jiddu Krishnamurti, and also started the first Chinese language forum for discussion of WingMakers. In addition, Rainbow and I also like martial arts and dance, so we previously have participated in underground music and dance groups.

However, we have not participated in any large scale creative events yet, which might have something to do with my / our personality. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we are all pretty low-key. But, at the same time, we are still always thinking about creative events and how we can get involved with them.

In terms of upcoming projects, we are working promoting our album Matrix of Fireflies.

Tell us a bit more about Matrix of Fireflies. How do you plan to promote it?

Pipi: This is an experimental album that we started promoting right after summer. The album was mostly done by myself and Dou Dou. In terms of production, I mostly stayed along the same course as previous experimental albums, using software as the main audio source, complemented with real instrumentation. Most of the creative process can be found in this article.

We have come up with a new way to mix vocals – everyone will have to wait and see that. Overall, we think that music in the future will have a new structure not just limited to the usual harmonics we are all used to. It will include more sounds, chords, rhythms, and rules from different cultures. In the future, music will be increasingly delivered and develop electronically. As technology progresses and people’s spirits change, music will emerge that none of us could imagine.

Matrix of Fireflies is a continuation of JIGSAW PUZZLE in which we’ve once again tried to experiment with our understanding of music, but it’s nothing too extreme or un-listenable.

In terms of promotion, we will stick to our tried-and-true channels and haven’t put more thinking into it. In any case, Neocha has a lot of experience with this and we fully support your platform to help.

At the moment, we are still observing and researching China’s creative industry. Today and in the future, we will still rely on the Internet as our main promotion channel.

We’ve seen a series of Blueprint artwork named after numbers. Can you tell us a bit more about this work?

Yue Xi: This series is called Evolution’s Journey – Mandala Life Notebook. The work is divided up by each quarter of the year and is a diary of work that relflect the most direct and genuine parts of life. The numbers are just there to chronologically order the work.

We couldn’t help but notice you have a “UFO department” – is this to research extraterrestrials?

Haha, I knew you’d ask about this! But let me turn it around and ask you, why can’t we have this department? Who can guarantee that there aren’t aliens in this universe? While this all might sound like a joke, we are quite serious about it.

We currently live in a multi-cultural world and exist in a interstellar universe. Have you seen the most recent alien movie District 9? We are very fortunate to live in these times and in this universe. Discussing UFO questions are really a way to re-examine our society and place on earth and to help humans better understand our civilization and history. Rainbow and a couple others in Beijing are friends with China’s UFO Society so they made up this department. It’s also designed to appeal to some of Blueprint’s post-90s “indigo children,” who are interested in science fiction.

Pipi, you are in Zhengzhou, can you tell us a bit about the local creative community there?

Zhengzhou is a fairly commercial city and is only in the early stages of thinking about art and culture. The creative community / culture is no better than some other smaller Chinese cities. Unfortunately, a lot of people with potential left long ago.

However, Zhengzhou does have some unique characteristics and influence in the geographic center of China. I think after commercial and consumer culture develops, there will be a new generation of creativity and strength in Zhengzhou, including from passionate underground musicians and “hermit”-types who have long had fresh ideas and thinking but never any sort of channel or platform. When the time is ripe, these “older children” will walk to the front of the stage!

What kind of grand blueprint does Blueprint have for the future?

Haha, this question was actually recently brought up in one of our online discussion groups.

Art is a mirror – you can look back at yourself and get to know yourself.

In sum, Blueprint is a blueprint for everyone. As long as everyone contributes what is in their heart, then in the end we can achieve a beautiful blueprint!