Dream hacks + a “viral folk-rock sensation” goes to Berlinale
Dream hacks + a “viral folk-rock sensation” goes to Berlinale
+ inverted exoticism from Naxi artist Chunyang Yao
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thank you for reading.
Here’s what lies in store this time around: a Naxi minority musician grapples with the “exotic gaze”, a Shanghai post-punk band grapples with our (dis)connected future, and I grapple with some questions around live music and touring without reaching any proper conclusions.
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Indie inception: otay:onii embarks upon an avant-pop “astral projection journey” on third solo LP
Lane Shi’s vocals have earned her comparisons with Björk, Joanna Newsom and Janis Joplin and were once described as like “a banshee version of Amy Winehouse” by Rolling Stone. As otay:onii, she’s released two full solo records — 2018’s NAG and 2021’s Ming Ming — that twisted and turned their way through unpredictable avant-pop and experimental sounds. In between have been projects such as a 25-ish minute piece dedicated to a mole she was about to have removed and her work with Boston punk act Elizabeth Colour Wheel.
Recently, she took a road trip across the Tibetan plateau with “mystic folk wizard Wang Xiao,” with the pair improvising music out in the countryside and interacting with local musicians and singers there:
That trip didn’t directly influence her third solo LP, which was released on February 22 on bié Records, but it feels like a good complement to it. Entitled Dream Hacker, and dropping ahead of her SXSW showcase in March, the new album is akin to a spiritual voyage in and of itself, at least in the eyes of its creator. Shi describes it as “an astral projection journey in the overlapping space where reality collides with dreams, or a black mass of shattered truths fluttering and swirling high above the ground.”
Dream Hacker was made during Shi’s longest stay in China in more than a decade. She returned from New York in the early stages of the pandemic and decided to remain, basing herself in Shanghai for almost two years. Originally from Zhejiang, Shi left for the US as a teenager after becoming so disillusioned with school at home that she told the headteacher she’d “do something that would make him regret it his whole life” if he didn’t let her leave, according to this interview she gave to Tone Glow. The headteacher promptly expelled her and she ended up going to the US to study.
If that sounds like a slightly bumpy ride, there was a soft landing eventually: she wound up at Berklee College of Music.
Whereas her previous two albums seemed to delight in throwing in random twists and turns to trip up any listener in danger of becoming complacent, Dream Hacker feels a bit more measured in its use of off-kilter quirkiness. It’s still far from conventional, but there’s more of a cohesiveness to her sound on this record, a willingness to engage with more approachable rhythms without completely discarding her predilection for bursts of noise, oddball samples and abrupt endings.
There’s an emphasis on the relative there, on the comparison between this record and her previous efforts. For anyone coming in completely fresh to the world of otay:onii it’s still possible for the swirl of false starts and sudden cul-de-sacs to feel disorientating. It’s a sensation encapsulated in the album’s (anti?) climax, where ‘Good Fool’ spends half its run time waiting to get going and then, just as its skittering beats and ethereal vocal layering hit their stride, comes to a juddering halt.
This sudden full stop marks the end of Dream Hacker at the same time. It’s a slightly bewildering finale to a slightly bewildering record. But don’t bet against it also leaving you want to hit play again and sign up for another voyage.
otay:onii’s Dream Hacker is out now on vinyl and digital download on bié Records. There’s also a cassette version of the album available through WV Sorcerer.
Unmasked singers: Post-Covid zero, will we get a new era of festivals and touring?
Live music in China, as in much of the world, has had a rough few years.
“It’s been really hard,” Chinese Football frontman Xu Bo told me for the NME recently. “There were so many uncertainties and continuous tours became essentially impossible. […] Often you didn’t know whether a gig would be able to start smoothly until the day of the show. There was even a performance that was almost called off halfway through.”
Tours and festivals still took place in China in the age of Covid zero, it was just that travel restrictions, constant testing, and the looming threat of last-minute lockdowns made them unpredictable and expensive to execute. Omnipotent Youth Society devised a strategy of undertaking a nationwide tour that only announced one or two dates at a time, sometimes with just a week or so’s notice. That was fine for a band who could sell out venues in seconds (and whose gigs were arranged by Modern Sky, more on them below), but for smaller acts it was a trial. Even established labels struggled.
Now though, the wearying uncertainty of the last few years appears to have suddenly dissipated. Recent weeks have seen the launch of a raft of big nationwide tours (Stolen, Wang Wen, and Joyside among them) plus the announcement of a load of festivals across China. Importantly, this has included the return of indie offerings such as Chengdu’s Chunyou, which was unfortunately hit with cancellation at short notice last year. While all this comes with the caveat that Covid hasn’t really gone away of course, it does seem like there’s some cautious optimism about.
The question now is where do we go from here?
After some initial uncertainty and attempts to take live music online during the first few months of the pandemic, Modern Sky’s music festival juggernaut, which has dominated the market in the last few years, quickly resumed normal service in China. The Beijing-based label had the financial clout to swallow occasional postponements or cancellations along the way, helped by having a pretty standard festival set-up that it rolls out to cities across the country over the course of the year, featuring line-ups drawn from the same pool of artists.
Time was, those bills would see a sprinkling of foreign artists for the Shanghai and Beijing editions in particular, but with China’s borders largely closed in the last three years, homegrown acts have assumed the headline slots without any significant drop-off in audience or roll-out. They already have festivals announced for Wuhan, Xi’an, Nanchang and Yancheng, and it’s still only early March.
(Above: a recap video of Modern Sky’s Fuzhou Strawberry Festival from 2021. I was there and it was a bit grim to be honest — wasn’t a very good site for it and a certain beer brand limited their products to one tiny bottle per festivalgoer — but the local kids seemed to enjoy it)
So will China-based festivals still feel the need to bring in slightly past-it US and European singers or relatively obscure Scandinavian metal acts to round out their bills given all the hassle and risk that entails?
And what about Chinese acts touring overseas? Before the pandemic, Hiperson were lined up to play SXSW, 33EMYBW was booked for Primavera, and Chinese Football were among those plotting tours of Japan and Europe. Covid put pay to those plans and, with little choice, Hiperson and Chinese Football opted to pursue extensive domestic tours instead. Yet Xu Bo from the latter still talks of the band’s dream to tour the world and their “hope to bring our music and meet people from all over the globe in the live arena.”
Now that borders are open once more, will Chinese artists get those opportunities again? The geopolitical climate hasn’t exactly improved since 2020, but in many ways that makes it all the more imperative that audiences overseas get to interact with independent Chinese artists. Here’s hoping that can become a reality in the coming months.
Naxi artist Chunyang Yao explores ethnic minority traditions “on the margins of modernity”
Chunyang Yao is a Naxi minority artist from the ethnically diverse region of Yunnan in China’s southwest. Originally from Lijiang, she grew up in the larger Yunnanese city of Kunming and these days she spends much of her time in the megalopolis of Guangzhou. She boasts a fascinating body of work to her name, ranging over dance, film scores, visual art, and experimental and musique concrète performances that incorporate field recordings, noise, and drone.
Her latest release comes courtesy of excellent cassette label Dusty Ballz, who were responsible for the tape release of the beautiful Cycle by Mongolian folk musician Hugjiltu and whose back catalogue is quietly becoming an excellent introduction to interesting, experimental musicians in China.
Entitled Post-Oblivion, it stems from a 2019 residency curated by Lijiang Studio which saw Yao head to Shiraoi, a coastal town on Hokkaido that’s known as ‘the town of the Ainu’ due to its historical links to Japan’s indigenous population. As the introduction to the record explains,
“A peculiar sense of inversion struck her. Being a Naxi artist emerging from the southwestern city of Lijiang, Yao had become accustomed to performing under a certain exotic gaze in China. Yet, dipping into the arcane, almost bygone lifeworld of the Ainu, for the first time she found herself to be the curious spectator upon another ethnic group, in whom she saw, with profound ambivalence, the shadow of her own people. This moment of entanglement reverberates on, slowly translating into a delicate resonance between two ethnic minority traditions, both struggling for the right to remembrance on the margin of modernity. If memory is audible, does forgetting make a sound? This question drove the making of Post-Oblivion.”
The result is a composition in five movements that weaves together Yao’s field recordings from her visit with a collage of different sound textures, plus a longer improvisational piece. Traces of “onshore breezes, a raging geyser, cries of the seagulls, and crows hovering above the seaside town of Tomakomai” are layered together with Yao’s chanting of an ancient Naxi proverb, ‘All food and clothing arise from the soil’.
“Participating in these projects and creating through these projects made me more assured in my position and direction — to be a minority musician and sound worker,” Yao told Josh Feola for The Wire of her time in Hokkaido and her involvement with the Found Sound China residency project.
And though at times the record may appear bleak, as Dusty Ballz’s introduction states, “Unlike what the title suggests, listening to Post-Oblivion demands emotion.”
Chunyang Yao’s Post-Oblivion is out now on Dusty Ballz.
College rock: Members of Wutiaoren and New Pants hit Berlinale
Last time out, I mentioned the anniversary of An Elephant Sitting Still screening at the Berlinale, soundtracked beautifully by Hualun. This year’s Berlinale also offered up a Chinese film with some interesting indie music links: Liu Jian’s Art College 1994.
The follow up to Liu’s acclaimed animated gangster caper Have a Nice Day, his new effort features Wutiaoren’s Ren Ke, who Variety kind of appropriately calls a “viral folk-rock sensation”.
The Cantonese band had built up a cult following over the course of more than a decade when, in 2020, they went on the second season of iQIYI’s ‘Rap of China for rock’ The Big Band. The band gave the show its slacker jester figures, while Ren Ke’s tendency to pepper his speech with simple English words (“No problem, just do it”) was instantly memeable. He’s since been catapulted fully into the mainstream, becoming something of a TV variety show regular.
Now, he’s voice acting in a Berlinale film alongside Jia Zhangke, Bi Gan, Zhou Dongyu, Papi Jiang and Peng Lei, singer in long-running punk-turned-pop band New Pants, who won the first series of The Big Band in 2019. (Incidentally, joining Ren Ke and director Liu on the red carpet in Berlin was Shen Lihui, a producer on the film and the founder of Modern Sky.)
As for Art College 1994’s soundtrack, it opens with a new song by Chinese-American duo The Shanghai Restoration Project. Entitled ‘The Artist’, it’s composed by Sun Yunfan and features vocals from Dave Liang’s parents.
This song and one other from Art College 1994 will appear on The Shanghai Restoration Project’s new album Sketchbook 94, due out on March 17.
Exit music
It’s the start of March so only feels right to mention Zhang Weiwei’s beautiful track ‘Rice Shop’, which opens with these lyrics:
In the misty rains of March
In the swaying south
You sit in your empty rice shop
In one hand you hold an apple
In one hand you hold fate
Here he is performing it with long-term friend and brilliant folk maverick Xiao He on iQIYI’s latest music contest, a folk-themed TV show that was eventually won by musician and poet Zhou Yunpeng the other week:
For something a little less sedate, here’s a new music video from Shanghai-based post-punk act Absolute Purity. It’s for their track ‘Crime Fiction’, one of the highlights from last year’s We Fought Over the Moon album, which was produced by Angus Andrew out of Liars.
Update: Chinese Football just announced that they'll be playing Arctangent Festival in Bristol this summer alongside Swans, And So I Watch You From Afar, Deafheaven and lots more.
Hopefully more European dates to follow soon!
"The geopolitical climate hasn’t exactly improved since 2020, but in many ways that makes it all the more imperative that audiences overseas get to interact with independent Chinese artists. Here’s hoping that can become a reality in the coming months."
Amen.