Berlin Psycho Nurses + the Chinese hip hop album of the year?
+ sumptuous seaside electronica
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thank you for reading.
This time around there’s Hunan post-punk, a musical road trip across the Tibetan plateau, a fantastic hip hop release, a calming NTS mix, and clunky references to both Grandaddy and REM (for the kids).
Please consider hitting the share button and helping this newsletter to grow if you think it’s worthy. Also, as there’s often more good new music from China than I can fit in this email, feel free to follow me on Twitter (while that platform is still alive) for a regular stream of Bandcamp links etcetera.
Dive into a Software Hellhole with post-punk act Berlin Psycho Nurses
Berlin Psycho Nurses have a flair for good names (although they tend to drop the Psycho bit in Chinese). After their first EP Hardcore Horse, and an eponymous LP, the Changsha post-punk band’s latest effort is entitled Software Hellhole. But there’s more to them than just some attention-grabbing titles and eye-catching artwork.
Their debut album was a flurry of fun, fast-paced post-punk with lyrics about bank robberies, sex, and being trapped in Paris on Bastille Day. It was a riot — as was the tour behind it, appropriately called KISS KISS BANG BANG.
This new EP is more measured, less frenetic. It’s inevitably something of a come down, but it’s no Software slump.
It’s produced by Shen Zhi, a multi-talented musician with an extensive list of credits. He plays in art-rock act Railway Suicide Train, “jangle pop” band Gatsby in a Daze, experimental outfit Dolphy Kick Bebop, and Yepeng, whose psychedelic 太陽寨巷戰 album hasn’t gotten much attention but is one of my favourite records of the year. His production slate includes Xiao Wang (who I wrote about last time out) and Oh! Dirty Fingers’ most recent album, on which the notorious punks added Latin-inspired rhythms and Balkan-style percussion to their sound. That context feels particularly relevant on the second half of Software Hellhole.
After ‘Oceanscapes’ and ‘Elizabeth Town’ set the record’s more mature tone — with singer Lamora channeling Nick Cave as he delivers wry English-language lyrics on boredom and spiritual disenchantment — ‘Psychotic Whispery’ and ‘Cloudy Bay’ see the band get a bit more playful with the standard post-punk structure. The former’s quirky rhythms are embellished by spiky saxophone parts from experimental artist and Omnipotent Youth Society collaborator Li Zenghui as it builds to a cacophonous climax, while the latter sees the Nurses shoot off into psychedelic territory.
While it doesn’t have the relentless velocity of Berlin Psycho Nurses, there’s still plenty of energy and personality to Software Hellhole. The four tracks show that the band can offer substance to back up their style, and that they very much remain one to watch.
Some of China’s most compelling artists featured at a festival in the Netherlands last week
Digitally, of course. Travel restrictions mean that the prospects of artists from China touring overseas remain dim for the moment.
Still, last week Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? festival teamed up with BIE Music (the people behind bié Records) to host a special showcase of acts from China. It was part of the impressively-programmed LGW Embassy series, which also highlighted music from Brazil, Sudan, India, Palestine and beyond in tandem with a physical festival headlined by Animal Collective.
The China section featured interviews and music from some of the very best artists in the country right now: Howie Lee, Gong Gong Gong, Hualun, Naja Naja and Otay:onii, who captured her recent road trip with another Concrete Avalanche favourite “mystic folk wizard Wang Xiao (王啸)”, as they traversed “the high-altitude mountain ranges in Manigango on the Tibetan plateau.”
It’s a must-watch:
Hip hop collective J-Fever, Zhou Shijue and Eddie Beatz get by with a little help from their friends
I originally had a big chunk here on the new album from J-Fever, also known as 小老虎 (‘Little Tiger’), which he made together with jazz rapper Zhou Shijue (周士爵) and producer Eddie Beatz (也是福). But last week in his ever-excellent
Substack, Michael Hong shone a spotlight on the record and provided some great background on J-Fever, one of China’s most interesting, most intelligent and sometimes most inscrutable rappers, so I'd like to point you toward that instead:
The album is entitled 去爱去哭去疑惑 (Go Love, Go Cry, Go Doubt) and was conceived during a ten day spell the trio spent together amid a brief respite from Covid zero lockdowns this spring. Usually residing in separate cities (Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing), the group wrote songs, played frisbee and climbed mountains in Dali, a long-time musician magnet and a place that
describes as a “utopian city for exhausted city-dwellers”. The result, as Michael writes, has the feel of “a friendly conversation”, a sensation bolstered by contributions from the group’s friends, including accomplished vocalist and producer ChaCha (aka YEHAIYAHAN and Faded Ghost), jazz singer Voision Xi, electro-soul artist Fishdoll, and Boston/Chengdu-based bilingual rapper Xinwenyue Shi.It’s one of my favourite recent releases. You should read Michael’s eloquent write-up of it and listen to it here:
Go Nightswimming with this mellow NTS mix
Yu Su recently handed over the reins of her NTS show to Wuhan-based producer Night Swimmer, whose tropical-tinged, retro dance-dipped album Xia Ye was released back at the end of August. Night Swimmer’s mix opens soothingly with Eiger Drums Propaganda and Alice Coltrane With Strings before plotting a course via Ralph Lundsten and International Noise Orchestra towards a series of his own productions. It’s a great Sunday morning or late night listen.
Or, as the blurb puts it, it’s
“an hour of sonic currents carrying confluence from sounds of fourth world ambient, minimalism, dub and psychedelia. All tracks, including several ones from his new album, Xia Ye, were mixed and edited by himself. This mix is also a dedication to the muses that have inspired and influenced his musical senses. From Ariel Kalma, Alice Coltrane and Pauline Anna Strom to Yu Su, Susumu Yokota and Anadol, electronic music from all over the world were collected and coalesced to seek for a gateway to a world of spirituality, fluidity and generosity.”
Listen to the full mix here, click above to get into the album, and find some punchy remixes, including a 2000 rave remix of the track ‘Depressionfruit’ by RUI HO, here:
Exit music
Wrapping up with a new-ish music video from Wu Zhuoling, the Chengdu indie rocker-turned-electronica producer who recently relocated to Berlin. It’s for a gorgeous slow-burning track, ‘We’ll Follow the Wind’, that she put out last year and which has now been given a full animation treatment:
If you enjoy that, check out the blissful Another Shore album from the same artist, which you can get a sense of with this recording made on the coast in tropical Hainan: