CHi2 know what it is like being on the road. Having just finished a European tour with Moby, British-born Chinese violinists and composers Liz and Sarah Liew are off again, traveling to selected cities around the UK with their latest production; Monkey King - A Modern Beijing Opera.

Yet, the sisters are no strangers to the international stage as they have previously played and recorded with artists such as Lamb, Boy George, Nelly Furtado, Goldfrapp, Gnarls Barkley and KLF/Orb to name just a few. In fact, as Liz recalls, “we first started working with Moby about 10 years ago. As his latest album (Wait For Me) has strings on it, we got the call to do this tour.”

On the set, CHi2 play as part of his backing band and they do all the string arrangements. “It’s quite an eclectic show musically from disco to acoustic numbers to dance to rock tracks so it’s quite a fun show to play. Recently we’ve done more acoustic ‘unplugged’ gigs, including an exclusive art gallery gig – just Moby on guitar, singers and Sarah and myself on violins. We pretty much improvised our way through the set as we didn’t have a set list as such!” Despite their prolific career to date, both Liz and Sarah are very down to earth and never really planned on being professional musicians. For Sarah, it just happened naturally. “I got involved in lots of projects and one thing led to another musically, and projects seemed to flow…” As for Liz, she started off wanting to get into music journalism and gigging on the side. Gradually, she found that she was getting more and more gigs so she decided to ditch the day job. Both Liz and Sarah started playing the violin around the age of 5. They learned the piano first (Liz: “as most Chinese kids do!”) from their mother whilst their father taught them the violin.

By the time they became full-time musicians, they had spent many, many years of playing, writing, improvising and bouncing ideas together, and as sisters, there is a special intuition that they have developed when they improvise on stage. Seeing them perform live, there is certainly chemistry between Liz and Sarah as they tend to feed off each other and kind of know what the other person is going to play. Liz describes their style as “a musical cocktail of traditional and modern sounds - our own British Chinese; blending Chinese instruments erhu, jinghu) with electric violins and beats.”

Apart from having Beijing opera inspired costumes made, Liz and Sarah worked with 2 filmmakers and visited China to film a lot of the video pieces featuring British Chinese actor Tom Wu as the Monkey King. On the music side, Sarah was able to infuse her studies of Beijing opera, jinghu, erhu and Chinese percussions into CHi2’s style. She adds, “that led us to explore Chinese tonality and the opera sounds of clashing gongs, piercing jinghu etc… and our sound developed from there”. In the album recording, they included various Chinese instruments such as guzheng, dizi, souna, jinghu, erhu, liuqin to add to the texture.

Collaborating with them on this project was award-winning producer and co-writer Tom E Morrison as well as featuring tabla/Indian percussionist extraordinaire Kuljit Bhamra as a special guest. Speaking to Liz, she was evidently excited with both the result of the full-length album, and the possibility of touring on a global scale.

There have already been interest from a few European festivals in booking them for next year, and the sisters are hoping they can take the production to South East Asia as well. “We’ve played there before and the audiences seemed to love what we’re doing. The Asian communities especially are really supportive, as perhaps they could identify with what we’re doing – the fusion of cultures”.

When asked about what to expect from Monkey King, she cheekily replies with a mischievous smile, “I don’t want to give too much away… come and see the show! Hopefully, they’ll be inspired by our music and see something that is fresh and exciting which mixes the traditional with the modern, acoustic with electric.” CHi2 will be performing Monkey King – A Modern Beijing Opera (featuring special guest, tabla/Indian percussionist Kuljit Bhamra) on 2 and 3 October at East London’s Richmix.

For venue details and tickets visit: www.richmix.org.uk

The full-length album is available on: www.chi2.co.uk

WIN A DOUBLE PASS TO SEE MONKEY KING –A MODERN BEIJING OPERA. One lucky Dimsum reader will win a double pass to see Monkey King – A Modern Beijing Opera on Friday 2 October. To enter the competition, simply answer the following question:

• Name one of the Chinese instruments used in the recording of the album. Email your answers to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it . All correct entries will be put into a draw and the winner will be notified by Tuesday 29th September. Competition closes at midnight on Monday 28 September.