'Illusions of the New Era' + Greek-language feminist metal

+ one of China's best artists tours Europe

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.

I also have tip jar running on Ko-fi, which you can contribute to here if you’d like to help me claw back some of the (too much) money I spent on Bandcamp Friday:

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In this issue: Intense Greek-language black metal one-man-band Hoplites is back with his third incredible LP of the year, Tibetan post-rockers Tation reflect on China’s Covid era, there’s a beautiful contemporary classical record (for something a little gentler), news of European tour dates for one of China’s brightest musical talents, a group of Chinese kids influenced by 1960s garage rock, and more.

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Twilight zone: Liu Yi-Wei dazzles on contemporary classical LP

That Shanghai-based producer Liu Yi-Wei is as comfortable performing at cutting edge clubs such as ALL as he is at performing arts centres such as Pingshan in Shenzhen speaks to the breadth of his work — as does his appearance on Unexplained Sound Group’s excellent Anthology of Experimental Music from China. On Twilight Diaries, he presents a collection of recordings mostly based upon his compositions for modern dance theatre works between 2015 and 2022, adding a pair of new tracks from this year to complete the picture.

Despite drawing together pieces from an eight year span, Twilight’s ambient textures feel cohesive, with the intro to the record stating that it represents

“a unique ring-structured musical narrative, that reveals memories in cinematic flashbacks. The music of the first chapter is a return to the last chapter. Tracing back seven imaginative scenes and time ballads that are endlessly cycling in eternity, and diving deep into the heart.”

But beyond this concept, it’s very simply just a lovely record. It works well as soothing background music, but also provides plenty of reward for those who take a closer listen.

Twilight Diaries is out now.

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‘Lost Way in China’: Tibetan post-rock band Tation reflect on the Covid era with new EP

After the striking video for lead single ‘The Waking of Insects’ that I featured in the last issue of Concrete Avalanche, Qinghai-Tibetan art-rock act Tation have now released their new EP Illusions of the New Era in full. It’s the band’s best collection of songs to date.

The above video was pulled from WeChat (seemingly after it was reported by someone), but allowed to stay up on Weibo. The EP then got an exclusive release on Tencent Music, the streaming platform owned by the same mega-company behind WeChat. Slightly mixed messages. Anyway, here’s how the band introduce their new music:

“You never wake a person who pretends to sleep.

“Illusions of the New Era have a tacit ambiguity about the strange social phenomenon that happened in the Chinese mainland from 2021 to 2022. These compositions are triggered by a series of current emotions and fragmented feelings, and the band wants to dub the strange era they are experiencing with four different styles of instrumental music.”

The four pieces pick up where last year’s ‘The Waste Land’ left off, that track having represented a “musical interpretation of current life, shuttling between real life, which is constantly facing lockdown due to COVID-19, and the virtual illusion of being locked down.” On Illusions, we find tracks that represent “getting lost in a place that shouldn’t have been lost”, “thunder [that] does not come from the sky but comes from the hearts of the people”, “people at the bottom [whose] thoughts are shrouded in the fog of the ruler”, and characters who “get drunk and don’t know where to go”.

‘Lost Way in China’ and ‘Brain Fog’ are the stand out tracks, but it’s a powerful work throughout, blending post-, art- and math-rock influences. The band have always had grand ideas (both visually and musically), but here they realise that paring things down a little can be just as compelling. It’s a record well worth supporting — ideally on Bandcamp rather than Tencent.

Illusions of the New Era is out now.

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Greece lightning: outstanding metal act Hoplites returns with part two of a feminist trilogy

Greek-language black metal one-man-band Hoplites is back for his third album of the year under this name, his fourth when you include separate project Vitriolic Sage. As if that wasn’t efficient enough, the ten songs on this new album were apparently written in the space of just five days in mid-September.

[More on the last Hoplites album below:]

Soviet Pop + a compilation of music for cats

What makes this productivity all the more astounding is the quality of the music. It’s going to be a tough choice as to which of these records makes the cut for the best of the year rundowns as we edge toward listmas. Maybe they’ll all go in there.

There’s certainly no let up on Ἀ​ν​τ​ι​τ​ι​μ​ω​ρ​ο​υ​μ​έ​ν​η, presented as the second part of a feminist trilogy and currently available for pay-what-you-want.

The only real problem with this level of high quality productivity from the same artist is that certain Substackers who don’t have particularly wide vocabularies to begin with, start running out of superlatives and ways to describe the music. ‘Full throttle’, ‘exhilarating’, ‘epic’, ‘brutal’ and ‘blistering’ are all words used in this newsletter to describe Hoplites’ previous work and they all apply here.

Not that the new release is formulaic or repetitive — Ἀ​ν​τ​ι​τ​ι​μ​ω​ρ​ο​υ​μ​έ​ν​η finds some interesting new sounds, while maintaining the project’s agenda of critically examining social issues in contemporary China. It may even be the best of the bunch to date, though honestly it’s genuinely difficult to rank this artist’s extraordinary back catalogue. All you can do is hit play and enjoy — and look forward to more music, probably quite soon.

Ἀ​ν​τ​ι​τ​ι​μ​ω​ρ​ο​υ​μ​έ​ν​η is out now and, as stated above, is pay-what-you-want at time of writing.

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Do you remember? The 29th night of Casseptember

I found out on the last day that it was Casseptember last month. That’s what BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction dubbed their “month of programming dedicated to the history and legacy of the cassette,” something they put together to mark the 60th anniversary of the humble tape.

Part of this celebration included a segment where Mabu Li — founder of the excellent Dusty Ballz label — discussed China’s dakou culture. That episode is available until October 29th via the Beeb’s Sounds platform and features music from Deng Boyu, taken from the Dusty Ballz release Tractor Academy.

For more on Dusty Ballz, here’s a piece I wrote on the label for Bandcamp Daily’s Tape Report column a few months ago.

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Get back: young Zhejiang band channel 1960s rock on debut EP

Not sure anyone was really asking “hey, what would it sound like if a bunch of twentysomethings in China put their own spin on ’60s rock ’n’ roll, but here are The Hangzhou Wooshoo Boys with an answer:

Formed late last year, the Wooshoo crew describe their style as “mainly influenced by the underground garage rock music of the 1960s and contemporary Japan” and say their music “represents the remnants of the golden age of bygone garage rock.”

Their debut EP is fun, fuzzy and full of retro vibes.

Baby,Tobacco&Blues is out now.

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33EMYBW is on a major international tour ahead of her new album

Attention Europe: 33EMYBW is on tour right now.

33emybw

A post shared by @33emybw

The shifting sounds of 33EMYBW + bootleg "Chinese Gorillaz"

Still searching for some good video of 33’s Unsound A/V set with Joey Holder from last Friday, though from the clips Holder put up on Instagram it looks like it was spectacular. If anyone finds some decent longer videos please post links in the comments. And if you’re in London, you can go see it in person on Friday 13th as part of a party related to the Frieze art fair and hosted by Asymmetry Art Foundation. Hyph11e will also be DJing at that event.

In the meantime, here’s a video made especially for FACT, who have a juicy-sounding feature on 33 in their forthcoming A/W issue:

“Featuring digital-analogue hybrid images from artist Furmaan Ahmed, the feature explores 33’s singular approach to sound design, her constant oscillation between the organic and the synthetic, as well as the music she has been working on over the last four years, Holes Of Sinian, which features contributions from Forrest Gander, Marina Herlop, Batu and writer oxi peng.”

Holes Of Sinian is available for pre-order now and the lead track ‘Holes of Time’ is fantastic. There’ll doubtless be more on this record in a future Concrete Avalanche.

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Exit music

Thanks to a reader tip for this one: Absolute Purity have won some international recognition for the music video 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.

The video was recently given the ‘gold award’ for Best Music Video in Shots’ 2023 Asia-Pacific Awards. Which is as good excuse as any to post it here again: