"Asian Horror + Electronic Music" + lots of bedroom pop
+ "guitar antihero" Li Jianhong + ‘To Discuss Music is to Discuss Bomb’
Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a newsletter about music from China. Thanks very much for reading.
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In this issue: a wild hyperpop release, psychedelia in a Shanghai theatre, noisy guitar work from an experimental icon, tofu- and cat-influenced bedroom pop, conscious rap, a post-rock return and lots more.
China’s number one angel: DJ Gurl blends “Asian Horror” with hyperpop
At the tail end of last year, certain corners of the Chinese internet got very excited by the release of a trio of releases. Entitled Slave to the Rhythm I, II, and III, the records seemingly came out of nowhere, but presented a blistering, bewildering blend of genres, all backed by club-ready, sometimes ridiculously in-your-face beats. The artist responsible was a mysterious persona out of Guizhou named DJ Gurl.
Perhaps it was a misreading of the line promoting volume III as being “2024’s final embrace”, yet no sooner had DJ Gurl made waves, then rumours quickly spread that the project was already finished. Three releases and out.
Or not. Turns out, those rumours were completely false. In fact, even as they spread, DJ Gurl was working on a debut album proper. The result was 头7, a record that, somewhat incredibly, brings together (deep breath) experimental bursts of noise and static, Dong minority-like (funeral?) chants, soaring pop hooks, dirty club beats, warped vocals and rapped verses, and is laced throughout with random horror film screams and heavy breathing. What’s more hyper than hyperpop? Whatever it is, it’s probably this.
Incredibly, the whole thing was apparently conjured up in less than a fortnight. A brief introductory blurb also states how DJ Gurl took the exaggerated reports of the project’s death and ran with them:
“Asian Horror + Electronic Music
Created in 12 days, an album simulates death.
She’s back, but she’s dead.
Her obsessions, like a revolving lantern become the echoes after death.
At this moment, your headphones are the wreath for her. ”
If you want to dig more into the character that is DJ Gurl, you can check out this interview granted to
— it’s a good read (in Chinese), but don’t expect it to give you all the answers. Then again, maybe you don’t really want to know exactly what’s going on with this project. The music is utterly head-spinning, but that’s probably the point. Perhaps you’re not meant to really understand it.头7 is out now.
Ok Sango: two new releases from Chinese Football frontman’s bedroom pop label
Sango Records is a small indie label run by Xu Bo, the frontman for Chinese Football, easily one of China’s most likeable bands. The label’s output tends to be highly likeable too, with the latest double-bill of releases no exception.
The first is from Postmodernhippie, a Japanese-influenced artist who revels in eclecticism — previous releases have been tagged with everything from “metalcore, anime, noise, [and] posthardcore” to “5th wave emo, bedroom emo, dream pop, indie rock, [and] shoegaze”. It’s a whirlwind of genres, yet it once again works on latest effort Farewell Gas.
The second recent Sango release is a less frenetic one. A charming, jangly, shoegazey, bedroom poppy seven track record from Wuhan film-student-turned-music maker AmovingmoviE, LofiaromA features a Velvet Underground cover, a song about cats knowing the answers to some of life’s big questions, and lots of melancholic-yet-sweet moments that feel firmly spring-like. AmovingmoviE only put out his first proper album last year, but this release already has the sense of being a step forward.
Farewell Gas and LofiaromA are out now.
“Unlimited imaginationary trip”: two archive pieces from experimental visionary Li Jianhong
“I started playing guitar when I was in high school,” Li Jianhong is quoted as saying in a Bandcamp Daily profile of him from 2019 that rightly labels him as “one of the most influential experimental musicians in the country”. Li adds: “I wanted to play like a guitar hero, but I hate practicing. My playing was horrible.”
Maybe he’s still not the guitar hero of his childhood dreams, but when Milwaukee-based Utech Records released his Shuttle Raven of the Dream record last month — where Li toyed with drone harmonies and psych-rock soundscapes — they posited that he might be a “guitar antihero” instead. Part of a flurry of recent releases from Beijing-based record label UFO CREAtions, the two pieces that comprise When Mud And Stone Tumbling Down, Echoes Linger Far add more evidence to back up this claim.
Not that much more evidence is needed at this point of course. As the Bandcamp Daily profile noted, Li has long been established as one of China’s leading experimental lights, with the guitar never too far from his output — even if he sometimes ends up ‘playing’ the garden hose. As renowned Japanese guitarist Tabata Mitsuru says of Li on the When Mud cassette sleeve, his guitar sounds “take you to unlimited imaginationary trip”.
When Mud features two improvised 25-ish minute pieces — one from Beijing venue DDC in 2019 (recorded by Seippelabel’s Brad Seippel), one from Place de la Marne in Angoulême a year earlier (recorded by WV Sorcerer’s Ruo Tan). The two tracks are dedicated to the late Japanese experimental producers Hideo Ikeezumi (founder of the infamous P.S.F. label) and Yuji Itsumi (a renowned chronicler of Japan’s free jazz scenes) and the record’s avant garde nature is further signposted right from the start as Li opens with a wail of noise and feedback.
If that sounds a bit intense, the aforementioned Shuttle Raven provides an easier way in to Li’s back catalogue. Or if you’re really looking for a more gentle introduction, you’ll find Li popping up on my recent ambient playlist, with a taste of his some of his mellower ‘environment improvisation’ work. Whatever you’re in the mood for, Li’s vast, varied discography is never dull, and is one that’s well worth exploring.
When Mud And Stone Tumbling Down, Echoes Linger Far is out now.
Suicide squad: revamped Railway Suicide Train serve up supernal psych in a Shanghai theatre
Shen Zhi is a figure whose name is attached to a broad sweep of interesting Chinese music projects from the last few years, especially those with a psych-ish bent. He plays in “jangle pop” band Gatsby in a Daze, experimental outfit Dolphy Kick Bebop, and Yepeng, whose psychedelic 太陽寨巷戰 album was one of my favourite Chinese records of 2022. His production slate includes Beijing riot grrrl punk band Xiao Wang and Changsha post-punks Berlin Psycho Nurses as well as Oh! Dirty Fingers’ most recent album, on which the notorious rockers added Latin-inspired rhythms and Balkan-style percussion to their sound.
His main band though, the one he really drives, is Railway Suicide Train. The group made their name with their second LP Continent in 2020, an appropriately expansive record made in gig venue-cum-studio Gebi, which sits on the site of an old temple on the outskirts of cheap goods capital Yiwu.
Since then, the band have gone through some line-up shuffles and released the slow-burn album 一些次要的時刻. Around about this time last year, Shen and a revamped Railway Suicide Train took to the Young Theatre in Shanghai for a special gig featuring newly reinterpreted versions of songs from the band’s back catalogue. It’s taken a little while, but the recordings from that show have finally made it onto a platform I can easily share in this newsletter.
The straightforwardly-named at the Theater features live renditions of 16 songs taken from the aforementioned Continent and 2022’s hypnotic 一些次要的時刻, as well as their 2016 debut album 余波. The band are joined by a number of guest musicians and backing singers, with Sleeping Dogs’ Li Zichao a welcome part of the fray.
A lot of the tracks are in keeping with the mood of 一些次要的時刻 — meandering, trance-inducing psych. My favourite moments are when they cut loose a little more, such as on the sax-laced ‘Circle Route II’:
The album hasn’t been made available on Bandcamp (yet), but you can find it on YouTube (obviously, hence the embeds above), where you’ll also find footage from the show, if you want something a bit more visual:
If you’ve never heard of this band before, I still think Continent is the record to go for, but at the Theater is a decent live album, and an interesting indication of the track this talented group of musicians may be headed down next.
at the Theater is out now.
Just briefly: wild hip hop, retro rock, another dose of bedroom pop, and more
Inspired by Damián Szifron’s collection of short films Wild Tales, the fourth studio album from Hangzhou rapper Xie Tianyou can feel a little scattergun at times (the club-facing ‘我在某天决定，要把这个城市燃尽’ feels especially abrupt and out of place among more mellow tracks). Yet there are enough sharp lines and pleasing beats to make 蛮荒生活 worth a spin.
It’s been around two years since Run Run Run released their first flexi-disc-inspired single. Earlier this month they put out their third record in the series, a similarly nostalgia-heavy retro release that feels separate from their usual psychedelic fare, but is nonetheless an enjoyable old-timey listen, like it’s predecessors.
“I want to create a new type of youth music, something like sliced up time sprinkled with glittering fragments from all of the moments,” says Yanyu, a bedroom pop producer from Hangzhou. It’s an ambitious manifesto that isn’t always realised, but slow-burning debut EP 企鹅的忧郁 and standalone track ‘Waltz for Nobody’ show plenty of promise.
After a 13-year hiatus, Changsha post-rock band Summer Fades Away have returned with a new record, the seven track Endless. It’s billed as “melodic, intense, raw, and defiant” by the Bandcamp blurb, and climaxes in a sort of post-rock ‘Auld Lang Syne’ — worth a listen.
Segueing into another noisy release below, here’s a new piece from the always-interesting gogoj, who teamed up with Jena Jang for a 35-minute improvisation at Beijing’s Raw Material Space at the start of the year:
Dog’s diary: an experimental US-China collision in Yunnan
“Picture a small village in Southwest China: a snow peak reflected in a calm lake, the land flat and wide with well-arranged houses embraced by mountains. One of those wooden houses is gently shaking with music. Noise bounces between the roof beams and the floor, the people inside and the dogs outside are all affected by flows of sounds.”
This is the introduction to Crossing a River By Rope, an experimental album originally recorded back in 2017, but which was recently posted to Bandcamp by Li Xing. Li is the guitarist and composer behind Red Scarf, “one of China’s most rambunctious and radical prog rock/noise bands”, and has also collaborated with the likes of Hai Qing in the past (the results of which were referred to by this newsletter as a Mongolian take on King Crimson).
Joining Li and his Red Scarf bandmates — Deng Boyu and Lao Dan, both renowned experimental musicians in their own right — on Crossing are cellist / vocalist Theresa Wong and clarinetist John McCowen. The group came together as part of an artist residency at Lijiang Studio in the beautiful province of Yunnan, in southwestern China. The result is… well, unusual. As a neighbour of the studio, Er Ge, put it according to the official blurb: “When you guys start playing, the dogs come over to cry!”
Crossing a River By Rope is out now.
Exit music
Playing us out is Shanghai-based producer Cocoonics. A long-time collaborator with the likes of Eating Music and alternative nightlife venues in the city, such as Elevator (RIP), she’s teasing her forthcoming debut album with this explosive new music video for single ‘To Discuss Music is to Discuss Bomb’:
DJ Gurl album is doing things to me.
thanks!