The Kiwi musician taking Chinese social media by storm

Musician Levi Patel is no longer dating a woman from Liuzhou in southwest China, but he remains a regular visitor to the city.

The usually Auckland-based composer fell in love, and as is often the case with lovers, followed the object of his affection to their hometown.

That love may have faded, but Patel is still in love with the city, he told RNZ’s Three to Seven.

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He embraced the culture and language during his first visit to the city of 3 million - relatively small by Chinese standards - which sits in the heart of the scenic South China Karst region, dominated by spectacular limestone mountains.

“It's quite close to Guilin, which is one of the famous tourist spots that has these very tall, slim mountains.”

And although in some ways it couldn’t be more different from his own country, there are similarities, he says.

“There are a lot of people, but on the other hand, the culture actually reminded me a lot of small New Zealand towns where, people might work hard, but then the pace of life is a bit slower as well.

“In the evenings, you'll see a lot of people just strolling along the riverside chatting with strangers. Yeah, so it's quite familiar in that way as well.”

When Patel posted a video of a trip be made in the region, mixed with one of his new songs, it garnered hundreds of thousands of hits on Chinese social media.

“The first video I just posted it and then woke up with 3000 notifications on my phone and found out that half a million people had seen it in a couple of days,” he says.

The attention led to him being invited to a music festival in that part of China, famous for its unique style of folk music.

“They have quite a lot of different ethnic minority groups, and each of them have their own distinct music cultures.

“And one in particular is called mountain songs. It came out of neighbouring villages needing to communicate, and they didn't share language, but they came up with this sort of freestyle, collaborative singing style to express different feelings,” he says.

This association with local folk musicians, has led to interesting collaborations, he says.

“There was one singer I met with recently. She's actually a teacher of this singing style as well. She gave me a tour of a museum about this type of music and then taught me more about how it's sung.”

Afterwards they sat down to play together, he says.

“I accompanied her singing on the piano. And for me, that was the first time trying to match this, to me, unusual music, and to her the first time she'd ever played with that style of accompaniment, or perhaps any Western chords.

“It actually took quite a while to find something that worked, but then when we did, we both felt like we had a kind of magical moment.”

Patel composes mostly with guitar and piano, and film music has been one of his fortes up to now.

But when he began to write a journal to express his sadness about his break-up, he realised he could turn that writing into song.

“I'm always playing instruments, and when I was playing around on the guitar or piano, some of these words started coming to my head.

“And next I had melodies, and then I knew they needed to be sung. And then at some point, I realised I had enough of these songs that I would probably have to learn to sing.”