Shakespeare one of the stars of Europe's Renaissance immortalized the "Music of the Spheres" in his plays, reviving an ancient Greek belief that the Earth, Sun and stars created music as they revolved.

In the new-millennium renaissance now taking off worldwide, the spinning Earth is being transformed into a massive musical disk that mixes ideas and influences, sounds and songs from civilizations across the planet.

And a Web generation of Chinese musicians, raised on MTV and The Matrix, is starting to become enmeshed in the world's ever-changing soundtrack and perform on the globe's ever-expanding stage.

While the first phase of China's opening to the world allowed McDonald's, Madonna and Mickey Mouse to rush into the country, young singers here initially found it much harder to catapult the Great Wall in the opposite direction.

Yet Beijing Music Radio DJ Zhang Youdai, whose cool culture shows have exposed ever-widening circles of Chinese youths to cutting-edge music from across the planet, said the tides of the cultural times may be changing.

Net-savvy singers

Zhang said China might be on the verge of becoming a new world music force, with its musical avant-garde using the forces of globalization to launch a counter-invasion of the West.

When singer-songwriter Sun Lingsheng studied centuries-old classics at the China National Song and Dance Academy by day, at night he led a double life, rocketing through music stations in cyberspace and leading his alternative band, Super VC, at university gigs China-wide.

Sun, whose influences range from the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai (AD 701-762) to the cyber-age anime band Gorillaz, began scoring his globalized micro-worlds into his music and weaving his works into the Web (www.supervc.com).

In his newest English-language single, "Athens Calling," Sun transforms the mythical Greek youth Icarus into a Matrix-era hang-glider who is saved from his fated crash into the sea by an angel-avatar called Nike.

"On one level, this song is about a modern life-taunting youth whose future is changed by an ancient spirit," said Sun. "But 'Athens Calling' is also about the meshing of the classical past and the techno-future in a renaissance that is spreading out across the planet."

The song symbolizes the cross-over culture that is now being created in China; it is one of a handful of tunes included on Apple's first special edition iPod for China.

Shen Lihui, head of the Chinese Modern Sky music label that co-created the special iPod, said: "Apple is using the iPod to explore the Chinese market.

"It is probably just a matter of time before Chinese artists are integrated into Apple's Web-based, world-spanning iTunes music and video distribution network."

Sun and his band are also part of a new wave of Chinese musicians who are recording in English and competing to score on global music charts.

While some cross-cultural Chinese composers and bands prepare to invade the West, other musicians here have already taken their first steps onto the global stage.

DJ Mickey Zhang said when he started performing at techno parties in Beijing, "it sometimes felt like I was in the Matrix," with agents popping out of nowhere to warn there was no future in the neo-century music.

He said State-owned music companies and other cultural forces initially boycotted digital music "because they did not understand electronica, and therefore couldn't produce or profit from it."

Back then, no one could have predicted he would one day be drafted to become a diplomat of Chinese digital dance halfway around the world.

But Zhang, who performs in Beijing at the clubs Tango and Yen, became one of China's youngest envoys as part of the Year of Chinese Culture in France.

The DJ, who studied at the Beijing Academy of Dance before abandoning classical for digital music, performed at the Lille music festival two springs ago, along with other representatives of new wave culture from one of the world's oldest civilizations.

He said he was overwhelmed by the ever-presence of music in France, and by the peaceful coexistence of genres ranging from classical to chill out. "In France, everyone likes music and likes to dance Throughout Lille's streets, on bikes and on buses, all kinds of people wear headphones and move to music," he said.

He added that culture shock waves moved in both directions, such as at a gig at Berlin's Tresor club. "Many German youths were surprised that I was from Beijing and that China had such cool techno music."

In Europe, he added, techno has already morphed from a subterranean art form into mass-media music: "German kids can listen to techno every day it's part of their lives."

Back in Beijing, when the French and Chinese organizers of the Year of French Culture in China staged a private party/showing for the fantastic French Impressionist exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, they asked DJ Ben Huang to paint the Soviet-style structure with the cool colors of chill out, or electronic ambient music.

New cultural colors

DJ Ben was the perfect choice to build musical bridges between the Chinese and French sides.

An admirer of French House music and a pioneer in China's alternative music scene, DJ Ben has a web of cultural contacts that stretches from Asia to Europe.

Three years ago, Radio FG (www.radiofg.com) asked him to join the global DJS 4 PEACE assembly in Paris, which was aimed at demonstrating a united artistic front against "war that threatens the world."

Radio FG later invited him back to do mixed sets with a popular Paris producer.

Shanghai-based DJ Ben, who has played at venues ranging from the Parisian Elysee-Montmartre and Amsterdam's China Festival to Shanghai's Fabrique and Beijing club Zub, said "music can help people break through the walls between countries and cultures."

A digital culture without borders

Pioneering musicians and artists are using the winds of globalization and the wings of the Web to criss-cross the continents and to create a culture without borders.

Yang Bing, one of China's best young digital DJs, said this fast-forwarding of cultural globalization "is like a revolution a very good revolution," and added he welcomed the movement to help the electronic musicians and fans of the world unite.

Two years ago, Yang played at Germany's Fusion Festival, on the outskirts of Berlin on an abandoned Soviet military air base.

German youths staging the festival reveal at www.fusion-festival.de that they took over the airfields shortly after the Russians pulled out of the former East Germany, and have held a multi-nation cultural celebration every year since.

Yang said these are ways of using electronic music to create a "one-world civilization," part of the spirit of the new century. He said he watched that spirit flood Rio de Janeiro during the city's first digital dance parade.

Organizers say at www.rioparade.com: "Everything began in 1989, when like-minded people got together in Berlin to demonstrate for love, tolerance and peace ... with music and dance. The Love Parade was born." Berlin's Love Parade later started marching across countless cultural frontiers.

Electronic festivals mark milestones in the journey digital dance has taken from rebel upstart to music for the masses across much of the globe.

Indeed, Quebec's Mutek Festival (www.mutek.ca/), which staged its first China shows last spring in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen, was brought here under the banner of the Canadian Embassy, and its list of backers reads like a Who's Who of Canada's cultural establishment.

Beijing Radio's Zhang Youdai predicted: "Beijing might see its first musical street parade in the run-up to the Summer Olympics here in 2008."

Music for the Matrix masses

Zhang said filling the streets of the ancient Chinese capital with new wave anthems to the digital age would create a common cultural platform for the countless athletes and explorers expected to descend on Beijing from every point on the planet two years from now.

He also said the information revolution now transforming China is providing an explosion of new media for Chinese musicians to explore and enter the global future.

The cyber-broadcaster Real Player now features dozens of Chinese stations among its 5,000 planet-spanning channels, and Apple's rival iTunes is likely to follow suit.

And Super VC's Sun Lingsheng said he was preparing to add his band's avatar and music samples to www.myspace.com, one of the most popular Web stations for youth worldwide.

Nearly 1,000 Chinese bands have already joined the Internet-based showcase, which is evolving rapidly across the world.

Zhang Youdai said: "China is the last major country to be integrated into global fashions, global music, global trends and global times." He added that "there will be a perfect circle of cultures linking the planet Earth" when the process is completed.

(China Daily April 18, 2006)