Black Midi x Li Zenghui + bug zappers and pop rocks
+ music for an imaginary body of water near the Taiwan Strait
Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thanks very much for reading.
If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. This Substack turns one year old next week, so I’ll probably do a playlist for that too.
I have tip jar running on Ko-fi, which you can contribute to here if you’d like:
Alternatively, please consider simply telling a friend or three about this humble Substack — I really appreciate any support in helping this thing grow.
In this issue: punchy post-punk, super chill hip hop, lots of videos (including Black Midi on tour in China), a reel-to-reel tape release, two doses of black metal, silence is shit, an old Nova Heart performance, and “a vessel for carrying imagined memories.”
Post-punks The Fallacy are back, in a big way
A few months ago, Henan band The Fallacy livestreamed an hour-long set from Omnipotent Youth Society’s Cable Temple Studio. With their rhythmic post-punk sound embellished by bursts of rousing saxophone courtesy of experimental artist Li Zenghui (now an official member of the band), it was a mouthwatering appetiser for their fifth album, which finally arrived late last week.
(The band have kind of a knack for interesting livestreams incidentally, having performed at one of Modern Sky’s online festivals during the early Covid lockdowns in full PPE gear.)
That Cable Temple set felt — and this new record feels — like a strong return to form for a band who have been around for 15 years but to be honest slipped off my radar a bit of late. When I first saw them in their early years, they excited me, but it felt (to me at least) like their sound had lost some of its urgency and potency. That’s not a sensation you get from this new LP.
The sense of a new beginning is resonant across the record, perhaps also why they opted to go the eponymous title route this far into their career. The band’s dark, pulsing post-punk rediscovers its edge thanks to Li’s wild card insertion into proceedings. The rest of The Fallacy in turn bristle with a reinvigorated confidence in their sound. Li’s recitation of their discography to date on the closing track ‘Never Island’ feels especially significant in this regard, a sort of ceremonial summation but also the closing of a chapter — and the exciting beginning of a new one.
This is the best The Fallacy have sounded in years.
The Fallacy is out now. For more on Li Zenghui, check out his jam with Black Midi at the bottom of this newsletter.
Xiamen producer Knopha gets in on First Floor
There are few better Substacks about electronic music than the renowned
’s First Floor, so it was great to find Fujianese producer Knopha showing up in a recent edition:“Mood Hut has released a lot of great records over the years, but Kwong might be the first one that feels a little bit mischievous. A genre-blurring effort from Knopha—who hails from Xiamen, China—the EP dabbles in syrupy downtempo, avant-garde soul, weirdo pop junglisms and choppy house grooves.”
Kwong is out now.
Feelin’ Blue: Lu1 (gently) drops a new ambient hip hop album
It’s taken rapper Lu1 seven years to come out with Blue, his second album proper. If that sounds kind of slow, then it’s appropriate: Blue is a distinctly laidback, ambient-infused hip hop record.
The LA-based artist hasn’t exactly been silent since his 2015 debut LP a portrait in time, appearing on a slew of compilations and tracks from other Mintone Records artists, and that spirit of collaboration prevails here too.
Previously categorised as a nu-jazz rapper, Lu1 brings in a genre-permissive list of guests for Blue. These include Xu Bo, guitarist in Chinese post-punk godfathers PK14 (and now in PK14 successors Lygort Quartet), talented jazz guitarist Zhang Xiongguan, electronic producer Luo Keju (also known as Broken Thoughts), Mintone R&B-ish singer Li Dingding (aka MIA AIM), and Tel Aviv-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter and multi-hyphenate producer J Lamotta.
In places the record can feel a little stretched and it possibly could’ve benefitted from losing a couple of tracks. But overall it’s an absorbing, calming listen, with Lu1’s observations on love and loneliness sprinkled across largely ambient textures. It’s also a reminder that there’s much more to Mandarin language hip hop than the Rap of China.
Blue is out on Mintone Records now.
For reel: you can now own a set of experimental Chinese saxophone recordings on reel-to-reel tape
Not long until Christmas now, so if you’re looking for a gift for the stubborn fan of obscure music in your life, why not this $300 reel-to-reel tape recording of multi-talented experimental musician Lao Dan?
The saxophone solos are part of a series of reel-to-reel tape sessions produced by Shenzhen record shop and label Old Heaven Books together with Liu Ying Studios. While the vinyl revival of recent years has pointed to a trend toward more physical formats for music in certain circles, reel-to-reel tape is still fairly rare when it comes to Chinese music releases. But it’s not just a gimmick, at least according to the official blurb:
“The more ‘left-field’ the music is, the better quality of sound we need to present it with: the recording process is not just a mere reproduction of the music content, instead, once thoughtfully designed and executed, it can supply our ears with richer details.”
If you’re after a more affordable (and more convenient) way to consume Lao Dan’s fascinating music, check out his bamboo flute-focused Empty Mountain Calling Suite.
Light music: new releases from metal acts Luminescence and The Illusion of Dawn
Three minutes into the second track of Shyness, you begin to wonder just how post Shandong-based post-black metal project Luminescence has gone. After a gentle piano-propelled opener and the slow-build guitars of ‘Mizucho’, it’s not entirely clear if this is just the record winding up or if this is… well… it.
Halfway through ‘Mizucho’ the vocals come crashing in however, confirming what probably should’ve been suspected all along. The introduction of rasping howls and evocative lyrics of heartbreak, longing and loss may belatedly expose the record’s black metal DNA, but Luminescence’s creative force Bureauty doesn’t completely abandon the sense of melody established in those first few moments. Ok, there’s no great reinvention of the quiet-loud-quiet-loud formula here, but album centrepiece ‘Scar’ in particular shows Bureauty’s talent for combining more euphonious moments with brute force.
Wuhan’s The Illusion of Dawn, who first got into the metal game two decades ago, aren’t quite so subtle. Their new album In Extremis gets right to it: grinding guitars and swarming vocals set out their stall right from the very start.
Middle track ‘Autumn’ provides a brief respite in its opening stages, but you know it’s only really a matter of time before they bring the noise again. Having only been able to hold their crunching guitar sound at bay for part of that track, they then kick things up a notch on the following number ‘Fade Into the Wilderness’, which seems more concerned with burning out than fading away, and closing track ‘Beyond the Darkness’.
For me, Shyness is the better record of the two here, but they’re both being put out by Pest Productions — a label who I’ve mentioned before are always worth paying attention to and are a reliable marker of quality when it comes to Chinese metal.
Shyness and In Extremis are both out now.
Watch it: a bunch of videos to goggle at
Mentioned this briefly last time, but the new Hualun / bleed Air split is very good:
Amid a lot of fuss around Nova Heart and singer Helen Feng thanks to a certain TV show, GeekShootJack (who make high quality videos for a bunch of bands in China, see The Fallacy one above) have unearthed an old bit of concert footage of the band playing at Beijing venue Yugong Yishan back in 2013. Product placement not included:
A noisier GeekShootJack offering here featuring Mei Zhiyong and Liu Pi at the second edition of Xi’an’s Sonic Jam festival, held last month in the city’s Shaanxi Opera House:
And finally, for something more chill, Shanghai-based Sichuanese producer vii M (one of Voision Xi’s picks for the best music to come out of China in the first half of 2023) recently played a track for the Homegrown crew:
Strait shooting: Kai Luen sets sail for an imaginary area off the coast of Taiwan
Soulspeak is the producer behind some of my favourite Chinese hip hop tracks. His collaborations with J-Fever (aka 小老虎) are especially memorable and are still on regular rotation at Concrete Avalanche HQ to this day.
His releases as Kai Luen are quite different. For 2016’s SVBKVLT-released The Hollow Ghost he opened the door on a darker collection of supernatural-influenced sounds. Seven years later, he’s performed another about turn with a new project released via Eating Music, one which finds the now LA-based producer embarking upon an exploration of ‘The South Manna Sea’, “an imaginary body of water near the Taiwan Strait.”
Seeing that the music is inspired by the sea might invoke thoughts of calming ambient waves, of gently lapping synths and wide open soundscapes. But — perhaps in a nod to the constant, err, activity in and around the Straits — these drifting seas are busy. ‘Bullets Shot Into the Sky’ and ‘Metal and Heartbeats’ feel apt as track titles. Songs like ‘Southern Stars Slap’ are more fidgety than I was anticipating, but they’re no less engaging. And all of this is not to say that For Drifting Seas isn’t an interesting listen — it unequivocally is — just that it’s more upbeat than I had expected from the title.
As someone who not that long ago was living right on Fujian’s coast, this shifting energy feels fitting to me. It makes even more sense when you read that
“Through sound composition, Kai-Luen is exploring water and islands as a metaphor for the constant changes in the everyday. How the sea moves is like the biological functioning of the body, never in a static state, always active, moving, changing even when it appears to be still.”
There’s a seven track digital version available on Bandcamp (embedded above) but also a cassette version that “contains 60 minutes sound materials, which is a longer sound journey into the colors and details of the South Manna Sea. It looks closer at the body and human voice as a vessel for carrying imagined memories.”
For Drifting Seas — both digital and cassette versions — are out now.
Silence is shit: a quick run-through of recent experimental and noise releases of note
The first part of that sub-heading comes to you courtesy of long-running Beijing label Sub Jam’s latest compilation. Don’t miss Yan Jun’s warped choir take on ‘Internationale’:
Zhao Cong, who incorporates sounds from micro-cassette players, bug zappers, pop rocks and more into her works, has a new EP out on experimentalist Sun Yizhou’s Aloe Records:
Mamer, an artist I wrote about in more depth here, has released a 21-track collection of experimental, noisy improvisations:
Naturally, all of the above are available on cassette.
Exit music
Black Midi played a handful of dates in China last month, including at the aforementioned Sonic Jam festival where the British band invited Li Zenghui on stage for a… well, for a ‘sonic jam’. Here’s how that went down:
Great content today, from top to tail.
Loved the Nova Heart clip, which made me mad nostalgic for now-defunct Beijing music venues.
Rest in Power, 愚公移山
What was the fuss about Nova Heart?