Fresh from Berghain, 33EMYBW drops new LP + a Chinese spin on Nick Drake

+ Liars remixes otay:onii

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:

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In this issue: Internationally-celebrated Shanghai producer 33EMYBW releases a new album, there’s laidback grooves and psych-ish rock from Wuhan, a storming remix from Liars (Angus Andrew), Shanghai jazz, a wild rap record, and a new KTV classic to work into your karaoke repertoire.

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Cutting-edge producer 33EMYBW shows off her latest evolution on new LP Holes of Sinian

Back in June, I wrote about the ‘shifting sounds of 33EMYBW’ — the outstanding Shanghai producer’s journey from alt-rocker to dance music doyenne. I went too early. Turns out that Symbiosis Codes / Mandala, the release that prompted me to write a bit about her musical journey so far, was really just whetting the appetite for 33’s new album, Holes of Sinian.

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

The album drops today as 33 prepares for the final two dates (one in Lisbon, one in Barcelona) of a European tour that has seen her perform at hallowed dance music institutions Unsound festival and Berghain. (She also has a string of dates lined up across China before the end of the year.)

This is far from 33’s first taste of international attention — she’s played in Berlin before and was selected by Aphex Twin for his Warehouse Project in Manchester pre-pandemic, for example. But the tours and coverage, including a major feature in FACT magazine, are nods to her status as a standard bearer for Shanghai and China’s electronic music scene and testament to her fascinating, envelope-pushing sound. A new album from 33EMYBW is a big deal.

Featuring guest spots and collaborations with Marina Herlop, Batu, Forrest Gander and oxi peng (plus a visual link with Joey Holder, who worked with 33 for her Unsound set and helped create the video for ‘Conjuring’ embedded above), Holes of Sinian is 33’s fourth studio album.

The name — and the record’s central idea — comes from the porous ‘sinian’ stones, elongated, conal pieces of rock that resembled petrified bamboo:

“The mystery of the Sinian stone lies in the "holes" rather than the "stones" - these holes constitute the beauty of the Sinian stone, forming overlapping gaps and penetrating scenes, and also constructing the existence of the Sinian stone itself. The mysteries and contingencies of life are like holes in stone, densely covered in time, leaving fractal paths and jumping clues in the evolution history of the earth. Ghosts of the oldest Ediacaran biota wander among them - "Evolution Failed!" But instead of dying, they drift from rocky crevices into another dimension, from hole to hole, haunting them in nonlinear time, replanning another arrival.”

Lead single ‘Holes of Time’ (featuring peng) is an exhilarating track that pinballs through traditional- and futuristic-sounding instrumentation, off-kilter club beats, cooing vocal bursts, and shifting atmospheres that leave you unsure what’s coming from one second to the next. It sounds like 33 on top form (as do the other tracks I’ve heard) and had me excited enough about the album to want to push it to you before having listened to it properly in full.

Holes of Sinian is out now.

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Channel Orange: Wuhan’s A Wordless Orange win hearts and minds with their funky, poppy debut

Wuhan’s A Wordless Orange have only been around two years, but they’re already causing a stir. Their debut album’s opening track is a sleek and synthy laidback pop number that almost feels primed to be a mainstream hit. Yet at the same time their music has been deemed interesting enough to attract a collaboration with avant-garde saxophonist Li Zenghui, who described their music as “a kind of love”.

More on the latter further below; here’s the poppier opener, being performed live on a city rooftop:

The band’s infectious sound fuses funk, pop, psych-ish rock and more. Enough to tempt Li Zenghui — who’s worked with Omnipotent Youth Society and The Fallacy and who last popped up in this newsletter thanks to his appearance with Black Midi — to join them in a park in Wuhan for a special version of their track ‘IIIR’. Apparently they only just managed to complete this recording before the park’s guards arrived and kicked them out:

Those bao’an should’ve stayed and listened. A Wordless Orange’s music is pretty hard not to like. As Li said, it’s a kind of love — and with Burt Bacharach’s words on what the world needs now feeling as resonant as ever, this Wuhan band’s debut album is a welcome musical balm.

Sleepwalking Nap is out now.

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Don’t sleep on new Wuhan rock band Bedtime Conversation

Speaking of interesting new acts from Wuhan, Bedtime Conversation have recently put out two rough and ready releases: one eponymous collection of five tracks that sound as if they were recorded live and another set of six tracks that definitely were recorded live (at Blind Lobby).

Both releases bristle with energy and are full of ideas, as the group mix post-punk, psych- and art-rock influences. The latter release also features lashings of saxophone for good measure.

Don’t expect highly polished recordings here, but the tracks possess an exciting energy and are coming from a band with lots of potential. One to keep an eye on.

And if you want even more new music out of Wuhan, gig venue mainstay VOX recently released their tenth annual Voice of Wuhan compilation. Focusing on young bands, the albums have featured now-established acts Chinese Football, Panic Worm and Frankfurt Helmet over the years, so are worth paying attention to. I’ve not managed to track it down on an international platform yet, but you can find it on NetEase here.

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Liars’ Angus Andrew remixes otay:onii

Having previously produced the debut album from Shanghai rock act Absolute Purity, Australian-American art-rock auteur Liars (aka Angus Andrew) has recently teamed up with another Chinese artist, this time Zhejiang-born otay:onii. His take on her song ‘W.C.’ is great and — like all good remixes — adds a whole new dimension to the track:

For more on otay:onii and, coincidentally enough, Absolute Purity, have a look here:

Dream hacks + a “viral folk-rock sensation” goes to Berlinale

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Shanghai knight: Charity SsB assembles army of clout rappers for debut LP

For his debut album proper, screamo singer-turned-alt-pop rapper Charity SsB has amassed some impressive features. Regular collaborator Billionhappy makes an appearance alongside spots from emo cloud rap hero Bloodzboi, Hong Kong hip hop artist YoungQueenz, and Chongqing rap crew GO$H Music’s Toryondacloud and L4WUDU to mention just a few. All the collaborations mean Charity has his work cut out giving SsB pt​.​1 THE ANCIENT WAR a cohesive feel, but he’s no stranger to flirting with a mix of genres and in some ways the fidgety eclecticism is precisely the point.

Like 33 up top, Charity SsB is another artist who has built up his address book and honed his talents in Shanghai clubs such as The Shelter and its successor ALL over the years, graduating from simply hanging out and bumming cigarettes to working with the experimental Genome 6.66Mbp crew and becoming a lineup regular in his own right. He’s digested the various sounds he’s come across in that time, chewed them up, and now — with the help of some high-profile friends — is spitting them back at us.

His genre agnosticism has been on full display since 2020’s NIC3 2 MEET YOU mixtape and while Ancient War marks a more mature work, there’s still a lot going on — trance, drill, emo rap, melodic alt-pop… the album careens through them all and more, with a lot of autotune sometimes the only thing holding it all together. Across the dozen tracks, Charity and his cohort deliver reflections on rejection, fame, death, immortality, the entertainment industry’s devouring of the culture, and baijiu.

It won’t be for everyone, but Charity SsB’s debut is certainly a wild ride.

SsB pt​.​1 THE ANCIENT WAR is out now.

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A Little Happiness is probably what we all need right now

Rounding off this edition with a couple of warm, soothing works to hopefully help provide a little respite as the world falls apart.

First up, this isn’t a ‘new’ record — it was first released in 2018 — but Little Happiness Group’s Debut has been given a 2023 vinyl reissue by excellent label Eating Music and I’ll take that as an excuse to give it some new exposure.

Formed by Shanghai jazz scene stalwart Voision Xi (who has since gone on to make an impressive LP of original works and a series of excellent electronic pieces), the band began as Little Happiness Trio before being renamed Little Happiness Quartet, then Little Happiness Quintet, then… they sensibly went with the more flexible ‘Group’. Xi’s talent as a vocalist, and her years of work at lynchpin Shanghai jazz venue JZ Club, enabled her to tap some of the scene’s finest talents for the group: guitarist Zhang Xiongguan, saxophonist Li Shihai, Blue Note-endorsed guitarist Jun Xiao, pioneering pianist Huang Jianyi and more.

Debut is a collection of easygoing covers featuring songs by Nick Drake, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and more, and is now available as a fetching yellow 10”.

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Exit music

Space Fruity are a label who tend to move at their own pace. No complaints here, given the output this approach helps generate. And Harry Styles seems happy with it too, so there’s that.

Anyway, announced as a “a late arriving music video”, the label put out a karaoke-fied version of Run Run Run’s nostalgia trip single ‘Lost in Nanning’ earlier this week, only the seven months after it came out on flexi disc-inspired green vinyl. Whatever, it’s a perfect pastiche of old-school KTV videos.

Look out for a new Run Run Run album at the end of this year / early next (again, Space Fruity move at their own pace so it’s hard to know for sure).