David Lynch-inspired rap + Sichuan eggpunk
+ Free Sex Shop + an album themed around Guizhou moss
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In this issue: an ADHD rap record where DeepSeek gets a writing credit, a wild cold wave music video, a long lost noise recording from an underground Shanghai bunker, “blackened crustcore”, post-metal, eggpunk, and an experimental ambient-adjacent album inspired by gathering moss in Guizhou.
Fire walk with me: J-Fever returns with Lynchian hip hop album ADHD Snake
J-Fever suggests you listen to his new album inspired by ADHD in one go. He’s well aware that that makes for quite a contradiction, but anyone with a short attention span may find that the rapper’s new record isn’t as hard to digest in one session as it may initially seem — it rarely lingers in one place for long, hopping around between a mishmash of different sound textures independent of the track times.
The record came about through a conversation J-Fever (also known as 小老虎, or Little Tiger) had with two friends who both have ADHD, and through an impromptu show he put on after learning that one of those friends planned to leave Beijing. The album’s production was also bookended by two significant celebrity deaths: David Lynch on January 17th and Da S (Barbie Hsu) around two weeks later.
J-Fever has always been an artist who has favoured a free-flowing, improvisational-heavy approach, but with the attention deficit theme and the quick life cycle of the album’s production, ADHD Snake feels especially helter-skelter. As his rap stream of consciousness unfolds J-Fever discusses far more than just neurodevelopmental conditions or the passing of entertainment icons. He feeds in references to vacuum cleaners and ancient Egyptians, tequila and bald eagles, trips in Vietnam and “digital refugees”. The ‘snake’ in the album title is a nod to the old-school computer game, while penultimate track ‘直到迷宫变成一条直线’ features lyrics apparently co-written with DeepSeek.
The occasionally erratic nature of the record can sometimes make ADHD Snake a challenging listen, but — as is so often the case with this artist — no one in China is making music quite like this right now, and it’s worth spending some time with.
ADHD Snake is out now.
Is it getting heavy? Metal and punk round-up
Old-school Shanghai act The Loudspeaker have released a new album via Dying Art Productions. Despite the label name and the fact the band have been around in various guises since 1998, they’re still showing plenty of life with their “blackened crustcore” sound.
Practically embryonic by comparison, Katharnum were formed in 2024 and were “born in the shadow of the abyss”, which is an interesting way to describe Shanghai. It’s a sign of their quality that their first demo — the six-track Year of the Snake Black Metal — has been picked up for a release by Pest Productions, one of China’s leading metal labels.
Tassi, the solo project from the frontman for long-running post-metal act Bliss Illusion, is back with a new LP, which has been released on Italian “radical music label” Dusktone. Billed as a “sister series” to Tassi’s Northland trilogy, the album opens with a series of deep sighs, which are soon replaced by Tassi’s wild wails as the record progresses. There are plenty of melodic touches throughout as well though — Tassi has previously cited Sigur Ros as an influence and you can still hear that here. As a message to fans put it, “The music dwells in a realm between Depressive, Blackgaze, and Post-Black Metal — steeped in a lucid sorrow, in echoes of stillness and storm.”
Hailing from Chengdu, MENGZHUMENG has recently released a trilogy of rough-around-the-edges eggpunk demos entitled Social Reintegration. Each collection comes with brilliant hand-drawn covers and plenty of attitude — the artist gets full points for the track ‘CN NSBM [Chinese National Socialist Black Metal] FUCKOFF’, in particular.
All-female Beijing punk band Free Sex Shop have released a ‘new’ record despite breaking up back in 2018. Bit of an odd one, but their Old Treasure EP still gives a good taste of some of the sounds that were coming out of the capital’s School Bar in the mid- to late-2010s.
Gathering moss: experimental ambient inspired by the cliffs of Guizhou
The ‘Godfather of Chinese rock’ Cui Jian — he of the blindfold, Tiananmen, and ‘Nothing to My Name’ — may have found a key influence in the music of the Rolling Stones, but he has a younger, Guizhou-born namesake who’s more interested in gathering moss. In fact, the experimental musician has recorded a whole album inspired by it.
In addition to its spectacular karst landscape and deliciously spicy food, Guizhou is known for the distinctive cultures of minority groups such as the Dong and Miao. Cui the younger has found his musical practice touched by this environment. He’s one third of experimental group BNS, formed with Miao musicians Dieel Guik and Dlas Diel Nix, and his latest release is partly inspired by an expedition with a group of aunties in the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture, undertaken when he was “documenting the traditional tunes of baishi of the Lisu people”. An expedition to harvest moss.
“Following one auntie as we climbed from the cliff’s lower reaches to a small plateau for rest, I saw a patch of open ground already piled high with this soft fluff,” Cui writes in the introduction to back to the pond, a series of ambient-ish, sometimes noisy tracks. “Dense foliage swallowed the sunlight; time became indistinct. A sudden gust lifted the fluff into the air, swirling it around the aunties, filling the atmosphere with a haze of granular down that seemed to tint the very light. Calmly, she puffed on her pipe.”
(You should really read the whole intro, available on the Bandcamp page, to get the full, poetic picture.)
Once Cui returned to the big city, he says he felt a “profound sense of disconnection from nature”. So he did what any of us would do in the circumstances: he went out looking for more moss. He also weaved together his memories of the trip with field recordings and experimental electronic sounds to build back to the pond, capping it off with a Lisu folk song (complete with dog barks in the background). It’s probably not the sort of record that will see him make as big a splash as his older, internationally-renowned namesake of course, but it’s an interesting collection of pieces nonetheless.
back to the pond is out now. It’s pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp.
Related:
Different trains: 33EMYBW and Gooooose’s Weirdcore collaboration gets a vinyl release
33EMYBW and Gooooose are two of China’s most interesting — and internationally known — electronic music producers. In late 2020, the pair — who are also the main creative force behind the band Duck Fight Goose — were commissioned to produce the soundtrack to London-based artist Weirdcore’s first solo exhibition in Beijing. The show “spanned 7 interconnecting audio-visual installations forming a ‘train station from the future’”.
In the spring of 2022, 33 and Gooooose released Trans-Aeon Express on Shanghai-born label Svbkvlt, building on their sound design for the exhibition with seven deft tracks of atmospheric, always-interesting electronic music. And now, that album is available on vinyl with the recent release of a limited edition 12” — get one while you can.
Trans-Aeon Express is available here.
Better city, better life: a long lost noise recording featuring Zbigniew Karkowski resurfaces
In the ’00s, the best places to rehearse if you were a band in Shanghai were often underground. A number of former bomb shelters, bunkers, and basements had been transformed into rehearsal spaces across the city, with 0093 among the most famous of them. Named after its location (it was number 93 on Lingling Road, 0 being ‘ling’ in Mandarin) and managed by Lao Jiang and Wang Tiantian, 0093 offered a dirt cheap and often simply dirty place for bands to bang out their music without fear of neighbours filing noise complaints.
If memory serves me correctly, 0093 getting closed down when Shanghai was being extensively remodelled for the 2010 World Expo was one of the sparks for local band Top Floor Circus’ angrier take on their anti-Expo anthem (originally a more gentle piss-take of the Beijing Olympic theme) that saw them effectively banned from performing in the city for several months.
Around about the same time, in 2009, Chinese noise provocateurs Torturing Nurse and Li Jianhong came together for a private show in 0093 with Polish composer and experimental music pioneer Zbigniew Karkowski. No audio recording was thought to have survived from the performance — until recently.
“Long thought lost, the recording was rediscovered from an old reel-to-reel audio tape with the help of Dennis Wong (黃仲輝) and carefully restored by Thomas Stadnicki,” label WV Sorcerer explain in the introduction to the release of a recording of the trio, entitled Noise in Shadow City.
“The sound itself is raw, singular, and monolithic,” the intro continues. “Rather than building toward a climax, the trio sustains an unbroken wall of distortion — grinding, humming, erupting — suggesting a controlled immersion in physical, almost architectural noise. There are no dramatic gestures, only the steady erosion of sonic space.”
Sadly, this performance was part of Karkowski’s final visit to China: he passed away in December 2013. Thankfully, the audio has finally been rescued.
Noise in Shadow City is out now.
Exit music
Heimu and ShiShi’s Demon have teamed up for a new track entitled ‘Comfortably Evil’.
A reminder of who we’re talking about here: Heimu is a psych-rocker-turned-DJ-turned cold wave producer who released his album De Luna Amour at the beginning of this year. ShiShi’s Demon is the solo project from one third of Yunnan’s consistently compelling electro-punk outfit South Acid Mimi. When their powers combine… well, we get this pleasing, dark-yet-danceable track for starters.
“This is just the beginning,” Heimu said when the track emerged. Fingers crossed that means it’s part of a wider collaboration between the pair.
Regardless, it comes with a wild AI music video directed by Heimu himself and featuring references to Kubrick and Lynch, which brings this issue neatly full circle:
There's no way I'm not going to check out that Jian Cui album. Those live noise recordings also sound absolutely fascinating.
I've been really into 33EMYBW's work for years and would love to find out more about her – maybe a subject for an interview or a longer artist story at one point?