Kazakh folk iconoclast Mamer + New Order's favourite Chinese band
Kazakh folk iconoclast Mamer + New Order's favourite Chinese band
+ "the most perverted music in China"
Hello and welcome to the last Concrete Avalanche of 2022. Thanks very much for reading and a special thank you to everyone who’s helped share and support this humble Substack so far.
In this edition: Albums of the year, new material from Carsick Cars’ Zhang Shouwang, some exciting experimental stuff, and a deep dive on dakou, the ‘saw-gashed’ CDs and tapes that helped bring alternative music from the US and Europe to Chinese ears in the 1990s.
As ever, if you like the sound of something in here, please consider helping the artist out by buying their music. After all, Spring Festival is coming up and they all have hongbao to send.
IZ this it? A mammoth new box set celebrates iconoclastic Kazakh folk hero Mamer
Mamer is one of the most fascinating figures on the Chinese music scene, or anywhere really. I can’t do his diverse career or musical prowess justice without going well over the limit of a single email and wouldn’t be able to get close to Josh Feola’s profile of him for The Wire anyway, but the re-release of a live album on Shenzhen’s Old Heaven Books gives me an excuse to devote a few words to him here.
Hailing from the grasslands around Guqung county in Xinjiang, Mamer became a key figure on Urumchi’s music scene after moving there in the ’90s, gaining inspiration from the likes of King Crimson, who he listened to on dakou cassettes (more on those below). By the early ’00s he had decided to split his time between Xinjiang and Beijing, falling in with musicians such as folk band Wild Children and avant folk-rock act Wood Pushing Melon upon his arrival in the Chinese capital. It was with some of these artists that he formed early versions of IZ, a shape-shifting band that is at the centre of the live album mentioned above.
This video from 2010 provides a little glimpse of Mamer during that time:
These days Mamer largely resides in Shenzhen, performing and recording at, and collaborating with, the city’s Old Heaven Books record store and the adjacent live venue B10. His mission to produce ‘new grassland music’, which he mentions in the above video, has seen him move from gentle interpretations of Kazakh folk songs to avant rock and industrial sounds backed by percussion built from barbed wire and iron fans. He’s reinvented traditional Kazakh songs and blended classic folk instrumentation from the region (especially the dombra) with increasingly experimental tendencies, working with a host of musicians and via a bewildering range of different band names. ‘Eclectic’ doesn’t really come close.
In addition to making his own music and being a renowned writer, Mamer has also become something of an archivist. In October, he worked with Old Heaven Books to help what are thought to be late ’80s or early ’90s songs from Altay-born Kazakh folk musician Daulet Halek see the light of day as Dombra Solo. The songs were found on an old reel-to-reel tape discovered by chance at a radio station.
IZ: Drop By Old Heaven Books is, in a way, archival as well. It’s a collection of live reworkings of a host of IZ and Mamer tracks, beginning with his mid-’90s song ‘Bawer’ (‘Brother’) and traversing his diverse discography up until last year. Captured at Old Heaven Books in the first few days of 2021, the album originally came out in May that year, but it’s just recently been given a physical release with special double vinyl and triple CD (plus DVD) sets.
The name makes it seem like the musicians just popped in for a few minutes and played a handful of songs, but as the size of the box sets suggests, there’s a bit more to it than that. Quite a lot more in fact: the full album runs to three hours and spans 30 tracks (on CD; the digital download is 29 tracks, the vinyl 16).
At times Mamer plays solo, at others he’s joined by regular percussionist collaborator Zhang Dong (who also inhabits a host of other bands with Mamer) and by Xalhar on guitar and backing vocals.
The first section features takes on beautiful early Mamer tracks such as ‘Adamzat’ (‘Man’) and ‘Samal Taw’ (‘Mountain Wind’) — the ‘clean’ studio versions of which were released through Peter Gabriel’s Real World label — as well as ‘Aⱪen’ (‘Minstrel’) from Kөlêngkê, which sees its addictive bluesy guitar hook further enlivened by static-filled bursts towards its climax. The second section comprises around an hour of (sometimes wild) improvisation. And the third and final act focuses purely on Mamer’s dexterous dombra work, with the musician employing a range of effects to push the traditional instrument into new territory.
Drop By is a treat for fans and a sprawling introduction to a sprawling body of work for the unfamiliar, though given the raw nature of some of the recordings, newcomers may be better served by the excellent (and not paywalled) career-spanning playlist put together by Mabu Li for The Wire, which also features some brilliant, detailed-filled track-by-track descriptions.
Wherever your starting point, Mamer’s journey continues to be remarkable — and with him recently holding recording sessions at B10, it seems we won’t have to wait too long for his next steps.
New Order-endorsed act Stolen return with first new album in four years
When Mark Reeder, former Factory Records promoter and the man who discovered Paul van Dyk, saw Stolen play for the first time, he says he knew he was “witnessing something very special”. Reeder was watching the electro post-punk band headline a music festival in their home city of Chengdu. “I could feel that these young guys were leading a new generation of creative Chinese artists. It was a similar kind of feeling that I had when I saw Joy Division for the first time, and when I saw New Order for the first time too. It was really exciting for me. From that moment I was hooked.”
Fast forward a few years and Reeder has not only helped manage the band, he’s recorded an album with them in Berlin and secured them European support slots with New Order themselves.
Together with Micha Adam, Reeder is also on board for production duties on the band’s new LP, Eroded Creation, which they released on December 19th. Stolen’s third full-length studio album, the record is the Chengdu act’s attempt to wrestle with how “everything has changed in the past three years,” they say in its Chinese language description.
“These three years have had a huge impact on our writing and even on vocabulary itself in real and terrifying ways. […] The past few years have told us that no matter whether your country is great or small, your life is at the foot of the mountain or at the top, your art is smart or dull, every creation is being eroded by the environment, time and even human beings themselves.
“That’s why we chose not to show a clean and new logo on the cover of this new record, but to show an eroded symbol, because this is the reality that we as owners have to admit. Like some must admit reality, this is one of the countless eroded creations produced by the human world during the pandemic.”
Musically, there are flashes of New Order and Depeche Mode, ‘Never Believe’ dips into metal and ‘Why We Follow’ brings in Higher Brothers’ Psy.P for a burst of rap, before the record rounds off with gently undulating piano ballad ‘Waiting’. There’s a lot going on here. Yet the album feels oddly hollow.
On 2015’s Loop, the band’s combination of techno and rock felt exciting, even if the two genres had been smashed together in multiple forms by then. Fragment, released in 2018, saw them hew closer to the electro part of their electro post-punk sound and felt a bit more predictable. Four years on, and it feels to me as though Eroded Creation continues that trajectory, with a less interesting interpretation of slightly pretentious electro-rock than, say, Re-TROS’s take back in 2017.
BUT! Plenty of people are into it, giving the new record a bunch of four and five star reviews on Chinese reviews site Douban, and the band clearly has talent, so definitely don’t let my comments stop you from giving it a listen.
Albums of the year 2022
It’s that time of year. Most publications and music people have published their music of the year lists by now, but if you’ve not been completely overwhelmed by listmas, make sure to spend some time with
’s outstanding Mando and Canto pop run-downs, including this one:
I also put together a few of my favourites for a piece on the best music to come out of China in 2022 for The China Project.
Three experimental things: Deng Boyu releases with Cafe Oto; Sun Yizhou starts a label; “perverted” Chinese noise triple threat
Deng Boyu, another Mamer collaborator, has a new release on the legendary Cafe OTO’s OTOroku imprint. Deng has also worked with the likes of Lao Dan (as TuTu Duo), Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth fame), Marc Ribot, Akira Sakata, Theresa Wong and Federico Casagrande. Earlier this year, his Tractor Academy was released on cassette by Dusty Ballz, a UK-based label who like Old Heaven have a penchant for beautiful wood cut cover art. On this new record, entitled Inertion, he covers “more ground in 20 minutes than most would manage in a triple LP.”
Also significant in the experimental world: Beijing-based artist Sun Yizhou has started his own label. The launch of Aloe Records comes with an explanatory blog post, which I encourage you to read in full. Here’s a snippet:
Shit happened in 2022—quite a lot, in Beijing in particular. Each morning you and I woke up petrified, drawn into some fucked-up incident through social media, insulted by someone for some matter that was by then sealed, closed and inaccessible. Incomprehensible at first, we erupted into a fury; in the end, all we could do was sit and complain. Despite all matters, what’s closely related to this article is the current situation of Chinese musicians, with fewer gigs than in previous years and sporadic patches of cancelled tours around the country. Music venues are facing closure, or switching their operations to find alternative ways to stay afloat.
I asked myself, where will my friends and I be able to perform next? If nowhere, then what can I do instead? So I started making recordings, solo projects and collaborations. During this period, probably one April morning, somewhere between those walls where I was locked in at home, I thought, well, then why not start a new label from scratch!
Another new and notable release, The Most Perverted, Harshest and Dirtiest Music from the People’s Republic of China, does pretty much what you’d expect with a name like that. Featuring harsh noise pioneer Torturing Nurse, Hefei-based ‘cybergrind’ artist Empty Calvins and Zibo grindcore act Impure Injection, this is not one to file under easy listening.
Cut Off! How thrown away CDs and cassettes influenced a generation of Chinese artists
“The Chinese cultural life in the 1990s was for many observers marked by a mundane yet peculiar set of objects: dakou (打口) CDs and tapes,” Nathanel Amar writes at the start of his 2018 article ‘The Lives of Dakou in China: From Waste to Nostalgia.’ “Literally meaning ‘cut’ but often translated as ‘saw-gashed,’ the term dakou designates the foreign CDs and tapes which were sold on the Chinese black market in the 1990s. These CDs and cassette tapes arrived in China as waste to be recycled […] however it was still possible to repair the tapes or listen to most of the CDs.”
Thus, alternative music from overseas managed to make it to Chinese stereos in a way that may not have otherwise been possible before the advent of widespread internet access. It wasn’t the only outside musical influence circulating at the time, but for some young people in China, dakou had a huge impact, as Amar explores in this open access piece:
For more on the dakou generation and the “genesis of underground Chinese music”, read the inimitable Josh Feola on Tiny Mix Tapes here.
Exit music
Closing out this edition with two tracks from White+, the “hardware electronic” act from Carsick Cars’ Zhang Shouwang and The Gar’s Wang Xu.
Released last month, the pair of songs deal in retro-soused electronica, with Zhang’s distinctive vocal sound washing over both. Annoyingly, Maybe Mars has released them separately on Bandcamp, but fortunately they’re far from exorbitantly priced.
China gets the Blues? Loved it.
https://open.spotify.com/track/3UCnS94uOqgvTmHohbgH9W?si=f916b3735aef4300