Minority music from the villages of Guizhou + Noooodle King
+ Chicken Feathers Big Band's new LP comes with food pairings + “dance with fake orgasm”
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In this issue: Dong songs from Guizhou, Fakeorgasm’s soundtrack to this “turbulent period”, a post-punk / psych-folk Hangzhou double bill, a capoeira-influenced coming-of-age story, a “rare free voice from the east” tours the USA, an immersive new track from Harry Styles’ favourite Beijing record store, and more.
Kind of blue: Dong ethnic minority field recordings from China’s deep south
A classically-trained cellist who studied at Ecole Supérieure Des Arts Décoratifs De Strasbourg, Sheng Jie is an audio and visual artist based in Beijing. Also releasing under the name gogoj, she is renowned as one of China’s foremost experimental musicians, or as the introduction to her 2023 release on Dusty Ballz put it, “known for making beautiful noises”. Her latest release however, sees her primarily working with the beautiful noises of others.
Strolling in the Moon is based on a series of field recordings made in two villages in Qiaodongnan, a region in China’s southern Guizhou province. It’s a mountainous area punctuated by some spectacular architecture and is home to large numbers of people belonging to the Dong ethnic minority.
In addition to their architecture and their traditional dress, the Dong are known for their rich musical tradition — which can be traced back 2,500 years — and Strolling makes extensive use of villagers’ chorus singing and musicianship.
Sheng Jie isn’t the first artist to be attracted to the region and its traditional singing. In 2016, Shanghai-based musicians HanHan (aka Gooooose) and 33EMYBW of Duck Fight Goose travelled to Guizhou, resulting in a pair of albums: Dong1 and Dong2.
Sheng Jie’s approach here is quite different. Where 33 and Gooooose worked chopped up recordings of traditional folk singing into their electronic productions, Sheng Jie not only leaves the original songs complete, she captures some of the moments in between as well. As she puts it, “All sounds in this recording — night, bugs, ducks, pigs, river water, firewood, and people — are treated equally with care.”
The two tracks of around 25 minutes each therefore “capture and convey the beauty” of the Dong people’s “profound reverence for harmony with nature”. They’re deeply atmospheric.
Further tying the record to its environment, the vinyl version of the album comes as a beautifully produced package featuring a photo booklet and wrapped in indigo-dyed cloth, another Dong tradition. It all makes for another great release from WV Sorcerer.
Strolling in the Moon is out on Friday, which is also Bandcamp Friday incidentally.
“This is just the beginning”: Fakeorgasm embrace Mimism on electro-punk EP Semi Semi
And now for something completely different.
It seems telling that Xi’an trio Fakeorgasm have tagged their debut EP with ‘desktopunk’. It’s a smile-raising portmanteau, but one that you won’t find referenced much beyond coverage of South Acid Mimi, the Yunnanese electro-punk group who recently returned to the fray with a new album1.
If ‘desktopunk’ doesn’t mean a lot to you (fair enough), a reminder that South Acid Mimi once name-checked Björk, Bikini Kill, Suicide and Rammstein as influences. Listening to Fakeorgasm’s convulsing debut, you can probably pick out similar reference points — or just that it sounds pretty similar to South Acid Mimi’s output.
Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that. Few acts release truly original sounds on their debut record and South Acid Mimi aren’t a bad act to follow in the musical footsteps of. Plus, Fakeorgasm’s attitude suggests that they’re keen on doing their own thing, and won’t want to be in anyone else’s shadow for long. As the band say themselves, “In this turbulent period, we're trying a new way of expression, creating the music with fantasies and intuitions, and this is just the beginning.”
Uncompromising lyrics (yes about sex, but also about freedom of expression and societal disillusionment) collide with skittering electronic beats, spiralling synths, riot grrrl guitars, and more over the course of the seven songs. Original soul or not, it’s a crackling statement of intent — it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.
Semi Semi is out now.
Let’s dance: Beijing producer Noooodle King serves up a capoeira-inspired feast
Back in July, I picked out Beijing producer Noooodle King’s ‘Inside the Oil Tank’ as one of my favourite tracks on the high quality Genius Loci compilation from Guangzhou electronic imprint Jyugam. So it’s great to see the miantiao monarch back with a dedicated solo release — and on the ever excellent Eating Music label no less. Yum.
The 11-track album is billed as “a fictional coming-of-age story and, at the same time, a record of real-life experiences”, with the record comprising “two independent yet intertwining storylines: one explores the internal exploration of the self, attempting to describe the author through fragmented depictions using various words for ‘I’ in different languages. […] The other storyline delves into the external influences on the self, documenting four tearful moments Noooodle King experienced as a capoeirista during his first event.”
Yes, presumably to help shed the carbs that come with sitting on a noodle throne, Noooodle King is also a keen capoeira enthusiast; the album’s title, Meia Lua à Beira Mar, combines two “significant symbols in capoeira”: the half moon and the sea.
The duelling storylines and capoeira influences seem fitting for an album that combines moments of gentle beauty with bursts of industrial noise, and which dances around stylistically. Noooodle King seems unwilling to dwell on one sound for too long, meaning at times Meia Lua à Beira Mar resembles a compilation (somewhat ironically, given the opening paragraph above). This feels like a conscious choice however, not an accidental lack of cohesion, from an artist who says he “attempts to delineate the world as he perceives it at the intersection of different musical genres”. It’s also notable that the record has been released as a cassette by Eating Music, with the album’s different energies broadly split between its first and second halves, or sides A and B.
Regardless, there are some great moments, with ‘ฉัน (Phuket Night Swing)’ a particular stand out, alongside the simultaneously playful and mournful piano-driven ‘Ming (One You Have Loved Long Ago)’.
Meia Lua à Beira Mar is out now.
Chicken Feathers Big Band release food pairing suggestions with their new LP
The second LP from Hangzhou’s 鸡毛大乐队 Jimao Big Band (they don’t really call themselves Chicken Feathers, that’s just my translation and partly to get your attention — sorry), Beyond 8000 finds the group adding a trumpeter and keys player to their ranks, adding a new dimension to their sound.
The horn in particular is a welcome accoutrement to their mix of art punk dipped in Balkans-ish rhythms, sprinkled with spaghetti Western guitar licks and given dashes of the kind of lip-quivering, evocative psych-folk that calls to mind Bayandalai or even Moxi Zishi.
Here’s a taster of the record, comprising short cuts of the tracks:
There’s a reason I’m over-egging the food references: ever keen to stand out from the crowd, Jimao announced the new album with a track-by-track run-down on their official WeChat account that featured serving suggestions for each song.
And so listeners are invited to digest the album opener while enjoying “cold jellyfish head (jellyfish head soaked in salt water overnight, washed and served with fresh garlic leaves, light soy sauce, sesame oil, and Pinghu rose rice vinegar)”; ‘Shitouji’, the rockiest number on the record and for which YouTube provides the somewhat unexpected lyric video below, is intended to be accompanied by “pig fat egg noodles (when I’m at my hungriest in the morning, I will choose to scramble a few eggs and put them aside. Put the pig fat, salt, MSG, and light soy sauce in the bowl in advance. Put the cooked noodles in it and mix well, then add the eggs and garlic leaves).”
The album finale — a song with a really familiar melody that I can’t quite place and which is really what gave me the Bayandalai vibes — is apparently best imbibed with “hot rice wine with sugar and shredded ginger”. If they insist.
Anyway, give the album a listen — with or without these dishes and drinks.
Beyond 8000 is out now.
Pillowtalk: Heitian Yizhen dish out punchy post-punk on cyberpunk-influenced debut
Here’s another one from Hangzhou. Trio 黑甜一枕 Heitian Yizhen have delivered a debut EP on Ruby Eyes that crackles with energy. Although the band were formed “amid a wave of technological anxiety and technical ability awkwardness”, they’ve served up six tracks here that make good use of that tech and showcase ample aptitude using it, even while their music is underpinned with a classic post-punk swagger.
Inspired by the “inevitability of cyberpunk culture, which is struggle and despair”, the EP’s blending of synths and electronic elements with crunching guitars brings to mind some of Re-TROS’s work, even if it doesn’t quite hit those heights (no real criticism when that band have been going over two decades).
There are some moments that don’t work as well stylistically, but it is a first EP after all, and Heitian Yizhen show plenty of potential. Give it a spin, and don’t skip the closing track.
按兵不动 is out now.
“Rare Free Voices from East”: Lao Dan in America
Experimental flautist and saxophonist Lao Dan is currently touring in the US:
He’s one of those artists who is very difficult to sum up using just one release, but here’s one I’m particularly partial to:
Lost frequencies: left field electronic imprint Seippelabel returns
This one landed in my inbox described as “a very stripped-down, avant-garde type of listen”. Naturally, I was intrigued. Even better, it combines Beijing-based producer and Aloe Records founder Sun Yizhou, whose work has appeared a number of times in this newsletter before, with the rebirth of Seippelabel.
Seippelabel, which had been on hiatus since 2018, is run by multi-instrumentalist and producer thruoutin. They have a whole series of compilations on Bandcamp for you to work your way through, happily bouncing from footwork to drone to juke to left field experimental electronics and more, and featuring artists such as Li Jianhong, Alpine Decline, and Gooooose. They’ll be adding to that as the rest of 2024 unfolds with at least one more compilation on the way plus some non-compilation releases, so be sure to hit that follow button on their page.
In the meantime, duì xiàng x3 sees Sun playing with “irrational texts, performative readings, rotating motor devices, self-made speakers, and analog/digital amplifiers.” I could describe it further, but honestly, I’m unlikely to better the aforementioned line from the email that brought it to my attention.
duì xiàng x3 is out now.
Exit music
From the label that brought us Sleeping Dogs’ debut album and Run Run Run’s recent LP, here’s the first single from Beijing instrumental trio eitisga’s forthcoming EP, Dune Pulse. Entitled ‘Water and Dreams’, it certainly has an ethereal quality to it and anyone who’s enjoyed the label’s output to date — looking at you, Harry Styles — should lap this up.
Turns out, we may have all been listening to the wrong version of that South Acid Mimi album. The other week, record label Ruby Eyes issued a notice to say that the wrong files had been released by accident and that anyone who’d downloaded the album should go back and re-download the updated version. I’ve not had time to compare the two releases so no idea how different they really are, but just thought I’d mention it.
图中有歌歌中有图, you’re doing an amazing job of finding people with cross domain creativity