Best of 2025 so far + nouveau riche rap
+ epic black metal from two-thirds of Zuriaake + dream-like jazz
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 jazz album 17 years in the making, a one-man blackgaze act from Lanzhou who’s broadened his musical touchpoints, a new mixtape from a brilliant downtempo producer currently touring the USA, a classic record from (most of) metal marvels Zuriaake, a box set of experimental livestreams from a time of patchy internet in China (2011), and the tuhao Chinese rapper who’s “one step away from Jay Chou’s throne”. Oh, and some of my favourite music from the first half of 2025.
The best of 2025, so far…
The usual caveats apply, but I recently put together a podcast episode for ChinaTalk featuring some of my favourite music to have come out of China in the first half of this year. It crisscrosses hip hop, post-rock, electronic, punk, and more, and should be available wherever you get your podcasts.
Kind of blue: 不一定 reunite for first time in over 15 years for expressive jazz voyage
It was December 2007 when 不一定 (‘uncertain’ or ‘not necessarily’) last put out an album. To put that in perspective, Oasis were still two years away from breaking up. When a band gets back together after that long apart it’s hard for any excitement to not be tainted with trepidation: have they still got it? Will this tarnish memories of what they once were?
不一定, whose music largely revolved around jazzy improvisation, may have never come close to the levels of fame experienced by the Gallagher brothers, but the band’s members are highly accomplished artists whose names carry plenty of weight in Chinese music circles. (The real rock star from the original group, Dou Wei, is not involved on this new record, focusing instead on his regular series of atmospheric compositions, an example of which closes out this Chinese ambient playlist.)
Keyboard player Zhang Jian has accompanied beloved bands such as Wild Children and Second Hand Rose, and is renowned internationally for his work in the electronic sphere as one half of Buddha Machine creators FM3. Percussionist Liu Xiaosong has toured multiple times with Faye Wong and played with the likes of Pu Shu and Cui Jian (the godfather of Chinese rock ’n’ roll), appearing on the latter’s classic ‘Nothing to My Name’. Wen Zhiyong is a trumpeter who has played with another ‘godfather’ of Chinese music, renowned jazz musician Liu Yuan, as part of a lengthy career. And Chen Xiaohu has played bass for a number of state-level orchestras and created music for a slew of TV shows and movies.
In short, this is an impressive group of musicians. So when they got together for a somewhat impromptu performance at Beijing’s Blue Note in the autumn of 2023, it’s no surprise that someone thought to hit record.
From the four hours of recordings that followed, the eventual result is Tiger, 不一定’s first release in over 17 years. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to realise that this is a worthwhile reunion.
Tiger is filled with the kind of floating, ethereal jazz that takes you places, to the ‘moon’ or ‘To the other shore’, as a couple of the track names put it. Yet there’s an earthiness here too: in between celestial songs themed around lunar phases are tracks rooted in urban scenes, such as ‘Underpass’ or opener ‘Qianmen East Street’ (the road that Blue Note Beijing is located on). By the time closing number ‘Big Deal’ brings you back down to earth with its Chinese market field recordings, it feels a bit like being gently woken from a dream. A dream you’ll happily return to.
It’s been a long wait, but it’s definitely good to have 不一定 back.
Tiger is out now.
Branching out: DeadTrees adds post-rock, jazz, and experimental elements to blackgaze roots
When I think of Lanzhou, I immediately think ‘lamian’. For me, and probably a lot of people, a bowl of steaming hand-pulled noodles is an image that’s inextricably linked with the capital of northwestern Gansu province. (If you’re ever in town, head to Wu Mu Le for breakfast for the best version). That image is usually soundtracked in my head by Low Wormwood’s ode to their home city:
The music of DeadTrees is unlikely to dislodge ‘Lanzhou Lanzhou’ from its perch as one of my go-to karaoke songs, but the one-man-band is showing there’s more to the city’s music scene than inoffensive folk-rock. Self-taught musician Ma Meiming is the mastermind behind the project, which recently delivered a second release in less than a year. This sudden flourish of activity comes after a multi-year hiatus while Ma pursued his interests in noise as MMM and in medieval European folk-influenced metal with Døde-Dands.
If last year’s Negate Me EP felt like a step up for DeadTrees’ blackgaze sound, the new record is a significant advance again, with Ma pulling from a wider sonic palette. While the full-length album is punctuated by bursts of pulsating metal, the record also blends in his interests in atmospheric noise and other sounds to intoxicating effect. There are flaring saxophone parts and places where the LP feels closer to post-rock (it remains instrumental until final track ‘Urban Equality’, and even then, the vocals are kept fairly low in the mix). There are entire tracks devoted to experiments with texture; ‘Iron Rain’, for example, comprises a nearly eight-minute-long percussive loop that sounds a lot like it’s title.
A word on the album name, One Hundred Thousand Meat Horns: it may not mean what you or your email spam filters think it means. ‘Meat horn’ here is a term coined by controversial author Wang Shuo, known for his ‘hooligan style’ of writing, which has been variously described as “vulgar” and “spiritually polluting” by critics; a number of his works have been banned by Chinese authorities. ‘Meat trumpet’ is another common translation, though perhaps not much better in English. Anyway, the term essentially means a mouthpiece for a bad actor, similar to a ‘shill’.
However you want to interpret the title, this is an album worthy of attention.
One Hundred Thousand Meat Horns is out now and is pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp, so what have you got to lose?
Stuttering music: experimental sets from the early days of livestreaming get a box set re-release
In this fascinating new four album cassette box set, gogoj aka Sheng Jie (a classically trained cellist-turned-experimental sound and visual artist) captures a series of performances involving some of China’s most pioneering experimental artists, dating from 2011.
“The "gigonline" format involved late-night, livestream performances. With no live audience in the studio, performers wore headphones, quietly creating sounds that were transmitted in real-time via direct input to the internet, allowing viewers worldwide to watch freely and discuss online.
“In 2011, during an era dominated by 2-4Mbps (ADSL) broadband—where upload speeds were only 0.5-1Mbps, barely sufficient for web browsing and standard-definition video—achieving such livestreams felt like harnessing "wind-fire wheels" of progress. As AI reminds us: 2011 marked the launch of China’s "Broadband China" strategy, focused on establishing connectivity "from scratch."
“The audio in this series is extracted from the original livestream videos, preserving the stuttering caused by network limitations.”
This “stuttering” can in places meld almost seamlessly with what the artists are doing. In the case of Li Jianhong and VAVABOND’s collaboration for example, it’s sometimes unclear whether the stuttering is down to buffering or an intentional twitchiness on the part of the musicians.
Likewise, “network latency played a compelling artistic role” in Beijing-based musician Feng Hao’s meeting with Peruvian instrumentalist Paed Conca. Nevertheless, there are moments of beauty in their collaboration, and although it’s billed as featuring a clarinet and electric guitar, their session seems to incorporate wind chime-like sounds that in places bring to mind gamelan music.
The other half of the four cassette box set features explorations of feedback and noise from renowned sound artist Yan Jun, and gogoj herself in collaboration with Taurin Barrera, an electronic musician and researcher based in Hong Kong who focuses on multimedia interaction and technological innovation. It’s not clear if that extended to helping improve the internet speeds for their session.
The four releases may be bound together by gogoj’s curation and China’s (at the time) unstable internet, but the sessions are sonically diverse. And as the introductory text states, “While the passage of fourteen years means some memories cannot be presented in high quality, this does not diminish their value as archival material.”
The gigonline and freetalk releases are available individually and as a four cassette box set via shanavlab.
Just briefly
Wonderful Chengdu-based downtempo electronic producer Wu Zhuoling has been playing some dates in the US recently, with shows in and around San Francisco coming up in the next few days, including one with Mike Gao (keep an eye on her Instagram for updates). Wu has made a special ‘mixtape’ of some of her best music to sell on the tour, but if you can’t make it to a show, don’t despair — the mixtape is also available on Bandcamp. It’s a nice introduction for those discovering her music for the first time, and features the beautiful ‘Another Shore’ (from the album of the same name) and the outstanding ‘We’ll Follow the Wind’, a suitably epic closing number.
Su Zixu and An Zhihua’s album Eong scooped a gong for Best Instrumental Album Producer at Taiwan’s 2025 Golden Melody Awards, often referred to as ‘the Grammys of the Chinese-speaking world’. It passed me by a bit when it was initially released last year, but it’s an intriguing blend of Chinese folk, Su’s signature bluesy guitar, and what label Men Records term ‘world fusion’, even bringing to mind Irish folk music on the record’s penultimate track.
Here’s another notable collaboration: Montreal’s thisquietarmy (Eric Quach) and Zhejiang / New York’s otay:onii (Lane Shi) have a new record out on Katuktu. The release, entitled Howl and Tell and apparently part one of two, “traces its origins to a European tour in spring 2023, where the artists crossed paths as part of Hypnodrone Ensemble—a Berlin-based project led by Quach and Aidan Baker.”
New-not-new Zuriaake: an epic black metal archive release makes it to Bandcamp
“New release from Zuriaake” read the subject line of a recent email from Bandcamp, and I think my heart nearly skipped a beat. Turns out it wasn’t a long-awaited new album from one of China’s finest metal acts, but the uploading of an old 2007 LP by Varuna.
So what’s going on? Well, not really sure why this record only just got added to the band’s Bandcamp page, but Varuna was comprised of two-thirds of Zuriaake’s core line-up. With Bloodfire on bass, Deadsphere on guitars, and the pair sharing vocal duties, it’s no great surprise that Varuna’s music isn’t a million miles away stylistically from that of Zuriaake. The album comes with the ‘ambient black metal’ and ‘atmospheric black metal’ tags that are often associated with Zuriaake’s excellent output and there’s an undeniable class to what they’re doing, even on such an early release.
So not a new Zuriaake LP (can we have one soon though please?), but quality black metal is quality black metal. And if you’re not familiar with Zuriaake and why a new record from them would be a big deal, then congratulations, you get to explore their discography with fresh ears. Start here.
The Epical Trilogy of Vorlaufen I: Night Master is out now.
Exit music
At this point, there are lots of reasons to boycott Spotify, and Daniel Ek seems intent on bolstering that case, but given its user numbers remain depressingly high, it does work as a measure of the listening public’s interests in many countries.
Hence some fuss recently when Chinese rapper Skai isyourgod seemingly hit the top of the Mandarin-language pop singer charts on the platform, surpassing the King of Mandopop, Jay Chou, in monthly listens. The numbers have since been disputed, with some hip hop outlets on WeChat saying he’s only made it to number two — not quite Jay-level but still ten times the plays of Masiwei, the most successful of the Higher Brothers.
Whatever the official data, it gives me an excuse to share this music video, splicing together two tracks from last year’s Stacks from All Sides album. That record was a clever mash up of trap beats, traditional instrumentation and old Chinese opera samples (plus a clip from Scarface at one point), and over-the-top tuhao imagery. If you enjoy it, you can catch Skai in Australia, Europe and Southeast Asia this autumn.
SO much great music in this update… I'm on a quest to buy myself a copy of 'Tiger' somehow, now. Thanks again for what you do.
Feels like SKAIISYOURGOD has had a 'Gangnam Style' moment on YouTube and TikTok. It sure caught my attention when I discovered his tracks earlier this year. My kids laughed at me when I played him for them; they knew all about him already. Rap/Hip Hop is truly international.