A beginner's guide to Chinese shoegaze

What if My Bloody Valentine were from Beijing? Or the Jesus & Mary Chain from Zhejiang?

Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a newsletter about music from China. Thanks very much for reading and a happy Lunar New Year!

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. Naturally, there’s a Chinese shoegaze one there now.

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In this issue: a slow dive into the Chinese shoegaze scene.

UPDATE: shortly after publishing this piece, the release of a compilation of young Chinese shoegaze bands showed that the genre was very much alive and well in China; the compilation was followed later in the year by a second volume. For more on these compilations, go here.

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Shoegaze is back. Maybe for some readers it never really went away, but late last year the brilliant Philip Sherburne wrote a piece for Pitchfork detailing “the shoegaze revival”. Just days later, Stereogum coincidentally published an article by Eli Enis declaring that the genre was “bigger than ever”.

In China, this isn’t anything particularly new. Sure, shoegaze is a long way from being recognised in the Chinese mainstream (until recently, so was the vast majority of rock music), but bands from China have been putting their own twist on the sounds pioneered by My Bloody Valentine et al for years now.

Here’s a quick run-down of some of the most significant 盯鞋 acts from recent years, in case you ever wondered ‘What if MBV were from Beijing?’ or ‘What would The Jesus and Mary Chain have sounded like if they were from Zhejiang?’.

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The White Tulips

Xiamen, on the coast of Fujian in southeast China, is an atmospheric, laidback city. On hazy, summer days it feels appropriate that it gave birth to one of the country’s most important shoegaze acts.

One of the main figures on the city’s music scene is Chen Zhenchao (also known as Soda). His more recent projects (Cheesemind, Kirin Trio) have moseyed away from shoegaze into surf-rock and dream- and city-pop territory, but in 2015 he and his band The White Tulips delivered the decidedly shoegazey Fondle. It’s re-release on vinyl in 2021 was a nod to its status as a Chinese shoegaze classic.

Forsaken Autumn

Another key pillar of the Chinese shoegaze community is britlululu. In 2011, he formed the band Forsaken Autumn and still releases material under the name today with Ecke Wu, who has her own shoegaze-ish dream-pop project on the side. He’s also the organiser of the East Asia Shoegaze Festival, which he founded in 2013 and has brought shoegaze and dream-pop bands from across the region to Shanghai.

Released at the tail-end of 2015, Forsaken Autumn’s record Whenere — dubbed “the Chinese Loveless” by one commenter on Bandcamp — is another classic in Chinese shoegaze circles.

Baby Formula

Formed by “three boring people with no expectations for the unknown journey ahead”, Beijing band Baby Formula came seemingly out of nowhere, dropped an impressive eponymous debut album in the autumn of 2013, and then promptly disappeared again.

Yet even more than a decade later, their music resonates — it’s not uncommon to find their name popping up on the Chinese internet whenever domestic shoegaze is being discussed, usually with some befuddlement about why they broke up so suddenly or questions about whether they’ll ever return. Seems unlikely at this stage, let’s be honest, but at least they left us with this (yours for just $5 incidentally):

Rubur

If you’re starting to think that the early- / mid-2010s were the real peak period for Chinese shoegaze, well… you’re not wrong. But there are still bands putting out shoegaze and shoegaze-adjacent recordings today.

Shanghai-based outfit Rubur came into being during that heady mid-2010s period, but their 2022 “double A side” Meanwhile was among their most accomplished material to date. It followed the well-received full-length Persephone’s Seasons in 2020, which benefitted from the involvement of multi-instrumentalist and production wizard Shen Zhi.

Pale Air

An even more recent example of Chinese shoegaze comes from Pale Air, a band formed at Shanghai’s Fudan University back in 2018. After two EPs, including one entitled Neo Shoegazer, the quartet released their debut LP Manifesto On Ice last year.

The record comes with a quote from Jorge Luís Borges’ Circular Ruins by way of introduction, signposting some of the magical realist imagery that it contains. And whether you understand the lyrics or not, like any good shoegaze album Manifesto On Ice features plenty of fuzzy, reverb-drenched guitars and dream-like vocals to give the whole affair an ethereal feel.

Dear Eloise

As frontman for long-running (and recently revived) band PK14, Yang Haisong is one of the godfathers of Chinese post-punk. Yet he’s also played a pivotal role in bringing more experimental, noisy, and yes, shoegazey sounds to the fore. Formed in 2007 with his wife (and one-time PK14 bassist) Sun Xia, Dear Eloise have released a string of atmospheric records over the years.

Debut album The Words That Were Burnt, released in 2010, is probably a good starting point, but if you really want to double down on Chinese indie-rock geekery, check out 2019’s They Slipped Away From My Mind Just Like This, which features a cover of Xi’an band FAZI’s anthemic ‘Control’:

Sound and Fury

Although they’d been around since the early 2010s, Chengdu’s Sound and Fury really found their feet in the middle of the decade, impressing at the first East Asia Shoegaze Festival and releasing their first LP, the upbeat Sprout, via Shenzhen’s Boring Productions. Alas, in a familiar story, it turned out to be their only full album.

City Flanker

Production on Sprout came courtesy of Wang Xiaoyu, a Hangzhou-based artist who has released solo material as The Cheers Cheers and is the driving force behind shoegaze / dream-pop band City Flanker. Their first two EPs in 2015 and 2017 featured plenty of shoegaze hallmarks (right down to abstract, psych-ish cover art and songs with ‘fog’ and ‘dream’ in the title), while their more recent material has added synths and city pop elements. 2020 album The Journey to City Flanker apparently “started with a journey to Tibet and Nepal, a journey about modern life, escape, reality and the view among the journey.”

Jo’s Moving Day

The label responsible for that White Tulips vinyl re-issue mentioned above, FarFarDisc (better known as Shengjian Records) is also home to a whole host of shoegaze-ish, dream-pop artists: Pale Air, The Cheers Cheers, and Soda Chen’s Kirin Trio are all involved. Here’s another one: Jo’s Moving Day.

Default

Also part of the FarFarDisc / Shengjian Records stable, Default have performed with the likes of Slowdive, The Bilinda Butchers, and Tokyo Shoegazer. Their music has migrated away to dream-pop and indie-rock these days, but the record that helped get them support gigs for the aforementioned international acts — 2017’s California Nebula — is very much in the shoegazing camp:

Pocari Sweet

Maybe we’re straying firmly into dream-pop territory at this point (I’m not entirely sure where the boundary lies to be honest), but this act is a personal favourite, so strict genre definitions be damned. Named, almost, after a celebrated Japanese energy drink, Pocari Sweet are another one from the Shengjian Records stable (guitarist Jue’er helped produce that Jo’s Moving Day album).

After a lengthy hiatus caused by one of their members studying abroad, Pocari Sweet returned to the live circuit and released a new record last summer. The gorgeous 2018 EP Gentle Moon remains my favourite by them however.

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Thanks for reading this far. Don’t forget there’s a free playlist of Chinese shoegaze here featuring all the above and more.

This newsletter will be back with the usual round-up of new music in a couple of weeks.