China mourns Ryuichi Sakamoto + tasty beats from Eating Music
+ Torturing Nurse closes in on two decades of mayhem
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thank you for reading.
Here’s what we’ve got this time out: Lockdown techno, a fun new compilation from Eating Music, an intense metal record, China’s most notorious noise act, and more.
Please consider hitting the share button and helping this newsletter to grow. If you like, you can also buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download here.
There’s often too much interesting new music to fit into one email, so if none of the below grabs your fancy or you just want to explore further, check out the free Concrete Avalanche playlists right here.
Uncharted territory: Wu Zhuoling offers “a journey into deep space” on new ambient EP
Wu Zhuoling’s Another Shore album from last year was a blissed out collection of half a dozen lo-fi electronica tracks, which very much felt like something to be listened to beside the beach. So it’s something of a shock to find her new four track EP Uncharted opening with a song that’s powered by screeching guitars. But then Wu has never been one to stand still.
She first came to prominence as a folk singer and as frontwoman for Chengdu trip-hop-tinged indie-rock act Wednesday’s Trip in the late ’90s and early ’00s. The band’s trajectory was disrupted by SARS, spurring Wu to move to Tibet, before teaching herself production and playing with live electronica. She returned to Chengdu where, she became “one of the first non-DJs to appear at [key club space .TAG] in the mid 2010s [and] began casting lines for the live scene to intersect with the wild, qiqiu-fuelled joyride of the Poly Centre [an office and residential tower block where .TAG is hidden],” as Chengdu music scene chronicler Kiwese writes.
After the unexpected opening of ‘The Watch Tower’, Uncharted quickly returns to more ambient territory, ‘Station 2020’ blurring traditional strings and birdsong to beautiful effect. ‘Neptune Rings’ is similarly soothing, before ‘The Voyager’ takes on a more haunting tone as it unfolds to reveal springier rhythms and almost choral vocals.
It is, Wu says, “a journey into deep space with a post-apocalyptic and futuristic atmosphere” and takes its title and cover art from two Tang dynasty works. As Wu puts it, “the Zen philosophy of classical poetry and painting and contemporary ambient music share the same vision with different perspectives.”
Uncharted is out now.
Death to giants: black metal act Bergrisar bestow a new album on “tiny mankind”
Alright, there’s some more chilled out electronic music below with the Eating Music compilation, but first, some metal. Black death metal from Tianjin, to be exact.
In case that YouTube embed isn’t metal enough for you, here’s how Bergrisar’s new album is introduced:
“The survival of tiny mankind is like the withering and glory of leaves, The decline of the olds, The rise of the news, The replacement of kingship. The vast dark fog covered the eyes, The fresh blood dyed the road red. The return of the Chinese black death metal storm! War never changes!”
Still not convinced? What if I told you there are tracks called ‘Long May Darkness Reign’, ‘From Abyss’ and, err, ‘May You Through the Slid’? Or that Bergrisar means ‘mountain giants’?
Anyway, it’s pretty brutal and, further bolstering its credentials, features guest vocals from Chinese metal luminaries Frozen (of Frozen Moon) and SS (of The Illusion of Dawn). Have at it.
Step on the Path of Eternal Salvation is out now.
Mando Gap’s Top 100 Mandopop Albums of the 2010s
Don’t miss this lovingly-crafted mega-project from the always impressive Mando Gap. It’s not all bubblegum pop either, in case that’s what you’re thinking — rappers J-Fever, Kafe.Hu and AR are in there, avant rockers Ja Ja Tao make the cut, and Carsick Cars, Hedgehog and Chinese Football all make an appearance as well.
“A label with taste”: Eating Music drop super chill compilation
Regular readers of Concrete Avalanche will be familiar with the output of Eating Music, even if they’re not aware of it. They’re one of my favourite Chinese labels, with an ethos of releasing music they simply enjoy, regardless of genre. In practice, head honcho Cookie Zhang’s selections tend to hew toward instrumental hip hop and lo-fi electronica, with releases such as Voision Xi’s Loops (spotlighted in this Substack’s very first issue) and vii M’s Sublunary (showcased here more recently).
There’s a lot to love about Eating Music. For one thing, they describe themselves as “a label with taste” and I’m very much here for that kind of humour. For another, they make great merch: chopsticks, aprons, cooking utensils etcetera. And for yet another, every year they put out a compilation providing a little sample of what their artists are up to. The latest of these dropped last week:
“We injected many types of impulses and emotions into the eight tracks, they can become the soundtracks that accompany you to sweat in the sun, or they can be the flowing brain wave signals, breaking through the material world and allowing everyone to go running to meet each other.”
Right on. Voision’s ‘Chasing the Train’ is a stand out for me, but there’s interesting music to be found throughout, with downtempo, left-field electronics, nu-jazz and more.
Eating Music Presents Running with Friends is out now.
Techno for an answer: Shanghai lockdown-inspired beats
Yes, more electronic stuff, but this is very distinct from the above, I promise.
Shanghainese techno stalwart and strident Shanghai Shenhua fan (for his sins) Ma Haiping has released an EP inspired by the city’s Covid lockdown in the spring of 2022, entitled Shanghai 1984.
Much of the world had moved on from Covid lockdowns at that point, and even though strict ‘zero Covid’ measures were still being deployed regularly across China, there seemed to be a sense in Shanghai that the city wasn’t going to be seriously affected by them. But anyone who thought that Shanghai was too international or too well-managed to be hit by scenes of apartment blocks being sealed up and makeshift fences being rolled out across the streets was given a brutal wake-up call in April last year. In some ways, the city still seems to be recovering even now from the bungled lockdown it endured.
MHP’s four tracks, ‘Sight’, ‘Speech’, ‘Movement’ and ‘Thought’ (which are joined by two remixes) explore “what is lost when all is taken”. Written during the lockdown period, the music “rages against the machine that closed the doors”.
MHP has produced poppier work and participated in mainstream TV talent shows, but he’s also long been affiliated with Shanghai’s premier techno crew VOID. They’ve been running authentic, non-commercial club nights in the city since 2008, bringing in the likes of Juan Atkins, Robert Hood and Orlando Voorn, who provides one of the remixes here. Musically, this EP is more in that vein, the kind of thing you’d expect from a dedicated student of Detroit techno. It’s intense, dark, and powerful.
MHP’s Shanghai 1984 is out now.
P.S. Also on the newly-released techno front: ECHO is the latest album from producer Shao Yanpeng. Previously known as Dead J, Shao is another figure who’s been around on the Chinese techno scene for years. He was one of the producers associated with the Shanshui label back in the early/mid-’00s, an imprint that I wrote about here.
His new release is inspired by Bengali poet (and so much more) Rabindranath Tagore:
“Harsh as fuck” noise act Torturing Nurse still going (very) strong after 19 years
[Content warning: all sorts of weird, potentially upsetting stuff below.]
At the start of this month, there was an incredible gathering of experimental and noise musicians in Shanghai at System:
If, like me, you couldn’t make it, here’s a bit of harsh noise provocateur Torturing Nurse’s set for you:
This, and the fact of Torturing Nurse’s 19th (!) anniversary in a couple of weeks, feels like as a good an excuse as any to bring up some of the act’s legendary live shows.
I first saw Torturing Nurse opening for Carsick Cars around a year or so after they’d formed. Back then, it was a three piece: Junky opened and closed an umbrella into the mic (eventually mangling it), Jia Die was on yelping, screeching vocals, and Xu Cheng provided some ear-splitting electronic static. The last time I saw Torturing Nurse was in 2021, when Junky — in his now customary facekini / balaclava — used an old turntable and contact mics in a small upstairs bookshop down a quiet Shanghai lane to unleash a wall of noise before binding the audience up in security tape.
In between, the act has performed scores of shows. Over the course of their existence, Torturing Nurse has produced 468 releases (at time of writing), including cassettes, lathe-cut vinyl records, and reel-to-reel tapes.
Probably the shows that most people think of when they think of Torturing Nurse however, took place in an old industrial building in Shanghai’s Yangpu district around 2008. These included Yan Jun ‘torturing’ Torturing Nurse as part of a night that featured broken glass, nudity, and Junky trying to fight his way out of a sack. Another show around the same time saw a young woman dressed as a nurse have hot candle wax poured onto various parts of her body and face to a soundtrack of what the act have regularly described as “harsh as fuck” noise.
In 2009, in a more centrally-located art gallery, Torturing Nurse also performed a special ‘unplugged’ set. An interesting one if you were in the audience…
These days, Torturing Nurse is just Junky. But as the video up top demonstrates, he doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.
Read an old interview with Torturing Nurse in The Wire here. Follow him on Twitter for more video and other updates.
Exit music: The End
The first I heard of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s death at 71 was a screenshot of the news followed by a wave of 😭 in a music-related group chat on Chinese super-app WeChat. The Yellow Magic Orchestra member was a beloved figure in China, where he was “an unusual object of pop-idol-esque obsession,” as Chaoyang Trap put it.
If you’re unsure how much of a big deal his passing was in China, the mentioning of his death during a Foreign Ministry press conference — events not usually known for their referencing of electronic pop music (or kind words towards Japanese citizens for that matter) — gives you a bit of a clue:
A few days after Sakamoto’s death was announced, China marked Qingming Festival, a traditional day for honouring the dead. Hualun, whose new album Tempus kicked off the previous issue of Concrete Avalanche, released a special track on the day, dedicated to the Japanese musician.
For more on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Chinese fandom, here’s the aforementioned Chaoyang Trappiece for you to dive into:
Do you know if Wu Zhuoling will be performing live anywhere this year? Another Shore was great! Will check out the new Uncharted EP. Thank you for the article.