Post-punk act Fazi's "reimagining" + an audio tour of 1988 Beijing
+ a Kode9 collaborator returns with “a new form of psychedelic nomadic music”
Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a newsletter 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. Please support the artists if you can.
I also have tip jar running on Ko-fi, which you can contribute to here if you’d like:
In this issue: Fazi “reimagine” their punchy post-punk sound, trip hop-meets-psychedelia on a new record featuring Kode9 and Adrian Sherwood collaborator Yehaiyahan (fka ChaCha), a fascinating recording of 1980s Beijing, a Shanghai jazz LP that pays tribute to Joyce Moreno, a wild multi-instrumental avant-folk album, and a mini ambient set in a Chengdu park.
Songs of a lost world: Xi’an post-punk act Fazi reimagine 10 old tracks for ‘new’ album
Fazi have always been a slightly inscrutable band. The first time I saw them live, I was excited by their punchy post-punk sound, which was heavily indebted to The Cure and Joy Division. Yet their recorded output never quite delivered on the promise of their gigs. It’s telling that their most famous song today is a reworked version of ‘Control’, a track that originally appeared in fuzzier form on their first studio record back in 2011.
Nevertheless, I still think of them affectionately — that newer version of ‘Control’ is great! (watch below) — and a new Fazi album is still noteworthy in my book. So I was intrigued when they began trailing a forthcoming LP.
Entitled Oriental 101 w Future Prairie, the record arrives after a period of reinvention for the Xi’an-founded fourpiece. While much of their previous work had come with obfuscating production (almost as if they were intent on living up to their former English name, The Fuzz), their last LP was a clear, crisp break from their back catalogue. Coming on the back of Fazi’s short-lived appearance on The Big Band, at a time when many artists who featured on the TV show were rushing out records to cash in on their new-found fame, 2022’s Folding Story was the band’s most ambitious effort to date and represented, as frontman Liu Peng put it, “a different self, a fresh FAZI.”
Having toured the album across China over the last two years, this spring Fazi played a handful of shows in the US, including at SXSW (although their plans for a more extensive North America tour ended up being truncated after poor ticket sales). A documentary of their experiences on tour in the States ended with Liu talking about how refreshing it had been for them to play smaller, in-the-audience’s-faces venues again after years on China’s mid-tier livehouse circuit. Soon after their return, Fazi undertook a tour of smaller venues back in their homeland.
It felt like the band were caught between The Big Band-induced, commercial path and a desire for a grittier, grassroots experience (something perhaps encapsulated by their small venue tour being turned into a slick documentary).
So where have they landed with their new album?
Well, somewhere in the middle still, actually. Turns out their ‘new’ album, is a collection of old songs. Old songs “reimagined,” as they put it, but old songs nonetheless. Perhaps encouraged by the reception to their reworked version of ‘Control’, the band have reached into their back catalogue to present new takes on 10 previous tracks, some of which were first aired over a decade ago.
This could have easily felt like a stale exercise or a stop-gap between new material, but the results are positive, and actually go further than that cleaner version of ‘Control’. The band have embraced the clear, crisp sound of Folding Story but put a cap on the more pop-ish balladry moments (‘Eternal Souls’ being the main dalliance in that regard). There’s a realisation that you can have a clarity of production without discarding the kind of urgent energy that typified the band’s early material.
‘Blue Plasticine’, for example, takes the gentle opener from Folding Story, retains its melody, shifts it slightly in a way that better suits Liu’s vocal range, and underpins it all with some more upbeat percussion and driving guitar parts. It’s a highly successful alternative version.
You can see how the record has been informed by the live experience — Folding Story was a bold offering, but not always one that translated well to gigs. Oriental 101 sounds more like a tighter, punchier live set, but with that studio quality. And while the record is more firmly in the post-punk vein, there are still some interesting stylistic experiments, such as on the skittering electronics of ‘F is Not Free’.
The only surprise / disappointment is that ‘Control’ doesn’t feature as part of the project, and that there isn’t a crisper take on ‘Xiamen’, a song of theirs I’m particularly partial to when done live. Can’t have it all I suppose.
Ultimately, this is a “reimagining” that was actually worthwhile, whether you’re familiar with the originals or not. It feels like Fazi may have finally cracked that code for transmitting the spirit of their live shows onto record in a more accessible way.
Oriental 101 w Future Prairie is out now.
Beijing ’88: “a record of a city that has subsequently changed dramatically”
Sid Frank, father to Gong Gong Gong bassist Joshua and electronic artist Simon (who together were also Hot & Cold), has released a remarkable record of his own: a soundtrack of daily life in Beijing from 1988.
I’m going to keep my write-up on the release short — partly because there are a couple more longer pieces already in this newsletter, and partly because it’s hard to top the words that feature on the record’s Bandcamp page. I highly, highly recommend you go there and read the backstory to the release, and to the friendship between Sid and Zhu Wenbo, which led to the latter putting this out on his renowned Zoomin’ Nights label.
And, of course, I highly recommend you give this a listen — both the initial half-hour drone-backed composition, and the field recording clips that follow. It’s a beautiful picture of the Chinese capital as it once was.
Beijing 1988 is out now.
Wild things: Kode9 collaborator Yehaiyahan teams up with Taiga for a psych-tinged trip
When Time Out launched an English edition in Shanghai in 2010 and made me their music and nightlife editor, I immediately knew who I wanted to interview for my first profile in the magazine. With her base at the former bomb shelter-turned-cutting edge club The Shelter, Guizhou-born singer and producer ChaCha had by then already collaborated with Kode9 and The Spaceape on her way to becoming one of the leading lights of Shanghai’s non-mainstream music scene.
My interview with her focused on her solo work, at that time often as a reggae- and dub-influenced MC (later that year, she’d release a single with Jamaican deejay Ranking Joe). Yet just over a year later her music was demanding a prominent feature in the magazine’s pages once again, thanks to the debut album from AM444, her collaboration with Dutch beatmaker Jay.Soul.
Almost 15 years have elapsed since, but Eye Wonder is still a collection of songs that I return to time and again — partly out of nostalgia, admittedly, but also because its blending of infectious hip hop beats and catchy hooks remains so utterly enjoyable to listen to. The title track in particular often comes on shuffle in my head, even to this day.
The duo followed up Eye Wonder’s release (held at The Shelter, of course) with the darker Rooms a year later, before 2015’s Dark Show EP effectively marked the end of the project. But ChaCha was far from done.
She continued to work on her experimental Faded Ghost solo project, a name under which she’d released a debut EP in 2013. And in addition to some more high profile collaborations, she moved away from the ChaCha moniker and back to her given name of Yehaiyahan, which she used to unveil a new, trip hop- and soul-influenced LP in 2019.
It’s been a fascinating journey by a hugely talented artist. But her latest collaboration — with Chengdu-based electronic duo Taiga — might be the closest she’s come to a return to AM444’s mix of accessibility and intrigue, of “underground sensibilities with sheer pop appeal”, as an excited young Time Out Shanghai music writer once put it.
Originally a folk band, Taiga is comprised of Husile from Xilinhot in Inner Mongolia and Xi Leilei from Altay in Xinjiang. The pair have proclaimed that they want to create “a new form of psychedelic nomadic music”. Their releases in pursuit of this mission haven’t always hit the mark, sometimes straying into cheesy electronics. But with Yehaiyahan on board, they’ve upped their game.
Or perhaps her vocals lift what would otherwise be less powerful productions. Some of the beats could certainly be stronger, and the track run times tighter.
Regardless, the resulting album — which the trio have released under the band name Wildride (or 梦马, literally ‘Dream Horse’) — is one of the best records out of Taiga’s Chengdu stable to date, and one of the more dancefloor-friendly things that Yehaiyahan has been involved with in a while. It may not linger in your mind quite as long as those AM444 tracks of yore have done for me, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself with some of these songs stuck in your head after just a couple of listens.
What a Wildride is out now. Not on Bandcamp yet, despite Taiga and the label they run being present there, but you can find it on YouTube via the above videos and on Yehaiyahan’s Soundcloud.
Also, here’s a quick playlist I put together of some of my favourite Yehaiyahan jams from over the years (that I could find on Bandcamp).
Killer queen: Shanghai jazz lynchpin Voision Xi releases accomplished second LP
Here’s something of a Concrete Avalanche full circle moment: a new album from Voision Xi, who was behind the first ever recommendation made in this newsletter. That was for 5 Loops in Her Way, “a glittering, light-filled record of playful electronica”. This new LP is something quite different however.
While Xi is a skilled electronic music producer, her longest-running musical relationship has been with jazz. She’s been a key figure on the Shanghai jazz scene for years, first by working behind the scenes at city institution JZ Club, then later by taking to the stage herself.
As with her debut solo album, Lost for Words, Xi has assembled an extensive, talented group of musical collaborators for this new record, Queen and Elf, including Eating Music friends TingTing and Sdewdent, Taiwanese singer Wen-Hui Tsai, and the holy jazz guitar trinity of Zhang Xiongguan, Lawrence Ku, and Blue Note-backed Jun Xiao.
And as with her debut, the follow-up is rooted in jazz but doesn’t limit itself purely to one genre, weaving in elements of instrumental hip hop, ambient, spoken word and more, along with nods to Brazilian legend Joyce Moreno and Spanish poet Leticia Sala along the way. I initially took ‘Southern Shanghai’, for example, to be part of her more electronic-leaning work when it was released as a stand-alone track in the spring, but turns out it’s part of this album, and it slots in comfortably alongside the more outright jazz material.
Queen and Elf is out now.
Dark show: an experimental recording from Dali inspired by “dark forest spirits”
Earlier this year I wrote about how Wuhan-born musician Liang Yiyuan had done something out of character: he’d released a relatively conventional folk album. It was, I said at the time, “a highly accessible work from a musician for whom ‘accessible’ hasn’t exactly been a watchword in his career to date.” Here’s an example of what I was talking about.
Originally recorded in 2021 and now given a proper international release through Texas’ Full Spectrum Records, Sonic Talismans sees Liang join forces with another artist renowned for pushing boundaries: Li Daiguo. Liang takes to the yangqin (a kind of hammered dulcimer), while Li provides guzheng, double bass, pipa, piano and bawu — as well as his trademark lengthy song titles.
Together, the Yunnan-based duo present a series of noisy, twisting, “untethered” pieces that capture their “shared preoccupation with manifesting the sounds of the dark forest spirits who creep around the periphery of Chinese folklore.”
Sonic Talismans really is a wild ride. A conventional folk album, it ain’t.
Sonic Talismans is out now. Li Daiguo put out a (mellower) solo album recently as well by the way, but I don’t have space to get into this issue — maybe next.
Some other scenery: a load of Wutiaoren albums are now on Bandcamp
Just before we get to the exit music, a quick note that beloved Guangdong folk-rock act Wutiaoren have finally made it to Bandcamp. Several of their albums are now available on the platform courtesy of Modern Sky sub-label Badhead. That label is home to a lot of great archive releases from a range of other artists, so fingers crossed they expand their page (and that Modern Sky generally starts to put its music up on Bandcamp… we’ll see).
Exit music
Leaving you with a video of the wonderful Wu Zhuoling performing three of her more ambient-leaning tracks in a park in Chengdu at sunrise: ‘A Glimpse of the Future’ from her 2019 LP Halo, and ‘Marvelous Clouds’ and ‘Que Sera Sera’ from 2022’s Another Shore. The video only gives you snippets of those songs, so click the links for the full versions.
Meanwhile, a very fetching orange vinyl version of Wu’s album Reverie, which was released earlier this year, has also recently been made available on Bandcamp, should you fancy that.
Seems like Badhead were updating their Bandcamp literally as this newsletter went out. They’ve added records from Mamer, IZ, Li Jianhong and more just in the last few minutes. Worth keeping an eye on