Chinese Football on a football pitch + “unpleasant dance music”
+ legendary folk group Wild Children return with an animated film soundtrack
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 a tip jar running on Ko-fi. Contribute here if you’d like:
In this issue: “lower-tier city” compilations (one from Guizhou, one from a Lanzhou label), folk act Wild Children return with an animated film soundtrack, a rebellious alt-pop and hip hop record, a recording of someone clipping their nails, text-to-speech technology hallucinations, and Chinese Football playing songs on a football pitch.
Real Wild Children: storied folk act returns with first album in seven years
In 2004, just under a decade after they formed, it seemed as if Wild Children had played their last show. That was the year that founding member Suo Wenjun died from cancer. His close friend Zhang Quan, with whom he had formed the band, felt unable to remain in Beijing, where the pair had helped build a growing folk music community centered on the live music bar they ran together. Instead, he left his friends and bandmates behind in the capital and headed out west, traversing Qinghai, western Sichuan, and Tibet. Wild Children had not only lost a core member, the remaining musicians were now on opposite sides of the country.
This wasn’t the first time Zhang had spent an extended period on the road. As young singer-songwriters from Gansu, Zhang and Suo had spent months travelling across China, following the course of the Yellow River and learning from the folk traditions and musicians they encountered along the way. They’d eventually found a community of like-minded folk artists in Beijing and, having opened River Bar as a hang out for the group, it was in the capital where Zhang and Suo played full band shows on a near-weekly basis, building Wild Children’s reputation as one of the country’s finest folk acts.
Suo’s death, however, appeared to have tragically cut Wild Children’s career short. “For a long time, I thought the band was finished,” Zhang, who ended up settling in Yunnan, told me in 2014. “We lived in different places, they were working on different things. There were times when we wouldn’t see each other for a whole year.”
Those comments came ahead of two major shows in Shanghai and Beijing to mark Wild Children’s 20th anniversary. After a decade of only very occasional live appearances, the two gigs saw the band perform in downtown stadia with a slew of special guests — Wild Children were very much back.
Zhang told me he hoped the shows would prove to be a “new start”, and that turned out to be the case. Old friends and former bandmates Zhang Weiwei and Guo Long — both also originally from northwest China — had joined him in Yunnan a couple of years earlier, and together with Ma Xuesong and previous drummer Gao Hui they’d revived Wild Children, recording an album to coincide with the anniversary concerts. They followed that record with another LP in 2018 and it was clear there was still plenty of affection for their stripped down folk sound in alternative music circles in China.
The stadia shows may have been a slight over-reach (I remember the Shanghai one being… less than full), but they weren’t the band’s most surprising flirtation with the mainstream. That came in 2020 with their shock decision to join shiny happy heavily commercial TV show The Big Band. They seemed to regret it almost immediately. Having surprised the judges by performing a cappella in their first performance on the programme, they were clearly uncomfortable with the format and the tasks set by the producers. They walked off the show early.
In some ways, quitting the show probably helped raise their profile more than if they’d been voted off in one of the first episodes. They’ve since continued to have an awkward relationship with commercial fame, never really embracing or being embraced by the mainstream in the same way as The Big Band’s main stars such as Wutiaoren (who coincidentally also have a new album out). Yet after a few incongruous TV appearances, Wild Children may have finally found a mainstream project that actually suits them.
The group were tasked by the legendary Shanghai Film Animation Studio with providing the soundtrack to the new film A Story About Fire. The story is based on an ancient myth from the Qiang people, an ethnic minority group mostly found in western Sichuan, close to the Tibetan Plateau. (For more on the importance and history of the studio — responsible for the magnificent Havoc in Heaven and many other classics — have a read of this fantastic piece from Animation Obsessive Staff.)
It’s an intriguing undertaking for Wild Children. The soundtrack format imposes some constraints on the band, while the nature of the film seemingly pushes them to go beyond their traditional sound. In introductory notes posted to Douban, the band mention their trips to western Sichuan to hear the traditional folks songs of the Qiang, yet also describe the creative process as “tortuous”, pointing to a lot of back and forth between them and the studio.
The resulting record, which they’ve called Flaming Rock, is actually a variation on the studio-approved soundtrack, one that the band re-recorded six months after completing their work on the film. They’ve nevertheless kept the tracks largely instrumental, with occasional vocals but no lyrics. It can feel a little odd for a band whose music has so often had a strong narrative thread in the past.
Their typically acoustic instrumentation meanwhile, is augmented on some tracks by synths and electric guitar, with penultimate track ‘阿勿巴吉归来’ (‘Awubaji’s Return’) being perhaps the biggest surprise on the record: its MOR drumbeat is a far cry from the usual pah-pah-pah percussion of the band. This points to another shift on Flaming Rock: an expanded sound is matched by an expanded group of players, but there are also some notable absentees. Guo’s only involvement on the album is to contribute some vocal harmonies; Zhang Weiwei meanwhile, isn’t present at all, having quit the group before they went on The Big Band to focus on his solo project.
While my initial sense was that this meant the songs weren’t quite as soulful as, say, ‘眼望着北方’ (‘Gazing Northward’, an early classic), the soundtrack has grown on me after repeated listens. And of course, no one should begrudge a band trying something a little different. This may not be as affecting as Wild Children’s older material, but I’d rather the band were still going than not.
Flaming Rock is out now.
Related:
Kaili blues: dive into an eclectic “lower-tier city” compilation from Guizhou
A recent feature in The Face looking at the Nu China scene led by cloud rapper Billionhappy, talked of “a new generation of rappers, ravers and weirdos emerging from China's smaller cities”, away from the country’s traditional music power centres of Shanghai and Beijing. The article, which I came across via Collin Smith , was illustrated with a photoshoot in… Shanghai, with the artists featured having relocated there from their lower-tier home cities. (No shade for The Face here, it’s good to see an outlet like that covering this scene.) But what about the scenes back in those smaller locations themselves? A new compilation from Kaili, a city of just over 700,000 in Guizhou, offers one glimpse into such a scene.
Kaili is the capital of the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, an area of southwest China known for the stunning architecture, colourful traditional dress, and distinctive music forms of the Miao and Dong peoples. Entitled Dreaming in Kaili, the compilation includes modern spins on traditional folk songs (retaining the minority language) and original tracks that skip across reggae-tinged rock, hip hop, pop, indie rock and more. Put together by local bar and music venue The Awning (who also released a special edition beer for the occasion), it’s a fascinating compilation.
Take Xangs’ Miao language ballad about an ancient band of long-haired warriors from his village:
Or Jiuli’s metal-ish interpretation of an old Dong folk song about childhood sweethearts, arranged marriage, and lost love:
Or, for something a little different, this number from Kaili-born rapper PD and friends:
It’s a great example of how China’s music scenes have really grown across the country in the last few decades, as The Face piece pointed out. The whole thing is worth a listen.
Dreaming in Kaili is out now. If you’re on WeChat, you can find it on vinyl, cassette, and CD (along with some of that beer if you’re lucky) through The Awning.
Just briefly: a grungey DIY compilation, “normal everyday things”, and experiments in text-to-speech technology
While we’re on the subject of DIY compilations, here’s another one from Lanzhou-founded label CaptainDeep. It’s fairly rough around the edges, and not just because it focuses on hardcore, grunge, and midwest emo — the production values are pretty raw in places. But in some ways, therein lies its charm. Dig in:
You might be in the office, or in a public park, or sometimes on the metro, but every now and again in China, you’ll come across an unmistakable sound, a sound similar to that presented in ‘clipping nails’, the first track on The cheapest Japanese cuisine in the world. Recently released on Beijing experimental label Zoomin’ Night, the album sees everyday people Zhao Ziyi and Yang Kuku, who together perform as Nichijo, capturing the sounds of daily life in China with track names that are similarly self explanatory: ‘taking the elevator in a tall building’, ‘dragging something to a destination’, and ‘gardening’ join the aforementioned opener.
Wuhan-born London-based artist Zheng Hao’s new record why mean it documents her experiments with text-to-speech (TTS) technology. Using Amazon’s Polly and OpenAI’s neural TTS voice, she feeds in pre-written texts, “with an interest in exploring phonemes in different languages and accents, prosody both within and out of context, the hallucination and glitch of the machine itself, and how these elements can affect listeners’ cognition.” The voice outputs also trigger drum samples in places, as part of an attempt to “create unpleasant dance music”.
“Just another cog in the system”: Gen Z rapper and alt-pop singer Shin Li battles conformity on debut LP
Rapper and alt-pop artist Shin Li is “a standout representative of China’s Gen Z music scene” according to her Bandcamp bio. She’s certainly been able to pull in some heavyweight features for her debut album, Fitting In. Higher Brothers’ KnowKnow and Shanghainese Rap of China star Gali are among those contributing verses, while LusciousBB (who made waves with his VansDaddy collaboration last summer) splits production duties with rapper / electronic artist Sun Cilang.
As the album title suggests, the record sees Li tackle notions of obedience and orthodoxy.
“We are molded into compatible pieces under societal order, gradually becoming the perfect fit,” runs an introductory piece of text accompanying the LP. “Like how the young struggle to understand the silent endurance of their parents — who once tried to run along the radius of life, only to circle back into calm submission. But the youth dream heavier dreams.”
There are lyrics declaring “I have no voice, I have no choice”, about being “just another cog in the system”, and how “it’s your duty to obey”.
It’s a shame then, that musically it all feels a bit safe. True, Li toys with a range of genres — hip hop, dream pop, R&B, even drum ’n’ bass — but despite some promising flashes, it’s not quite as daring as it wants to be. It’s more adventurous than many of her peers, especially those in the mainstream hip hop field in China, but there’s more risk-taking and creativity to be found on fellow Gen Z singer Zhang Xingchan’s most recent release, for example, which isn’t weighed down by repeated declarations of anti-conformism.
Nevertheless, Fitting In a notable debut and one that’s been well received in China. Hopefully we’ll see Li really push things going forward and not simply… fit in.
Fitting In is out now.
Everyday struggle: experimentalist Liang Yiyuan returns with an album of “guitar solos”
In May 2024, Liang Yiyuan released an album that was at once a fairly conventional folk record and something of a surprise. For an artist who had spent much of his 20-odd year career exploring everything from dark ambient and abstract electronics to avant takes on traditional Chinese instrumentation, the straightforward accessibility of White Blotted Mountain was unexpected.
So was this a rejection of his former experimental ways and a push toward ‘safer’ territory, or was the LP merely a self-contained one-off? Liang’s new album, Struggleology, may hint at an answer.
Struggleology is presented as an album of “guitar solos”. A closer look at the record’s cover art suggests that this isn’t exactly the full story. As the photo shows, Liang’s guitar underwent some modifications for the LP: a series of “sound-generating boxes” were fixed to the front of the instrument, with each one fitted with springs of varying tightness.
“When playing, these springs can produce various sound effects to expand the range of guitar timbre and pitch,” Liang explains. “For example, the sounds produced by plucking and scratching these springs; or from the sound of plucking the strings, the resonance of the panel can cause a spring installed in a specific position to vibrate and shake, thereby creating artificial vibrato and sustain of the acoustic guitar; and then I used some small tools to create some non-musical sounds or some percussion-like sounds in the box.”
Liang also employed a violin bow at times as well as an array of bamboo sticks and other implements, plus a plastic tube with a whistle inside it that he fed into the guitar’s soundhole.
The result, as you’ve probably guessed, is a fair bit more experimental than White Blotted Mountain. But Liang has always been an experimentalist at heart, and not one to linger too long on a singular sound. And while it may not be for everyone, at its best Struggleology is a fascinating study of the limits and possibilities of the guitar, of extracting new sounds from one of the most familiar instruments around.
Struggleology is out now.
Exit music
We’re all familiar with artists performing on camera while crammed behind a small piece of office furniture, but how about this for a concept: put Chinese Football on an actual Chinese football pitch and have them play some songs in the centre circle.
HowHowMusic are the people we have to thank for making this happen. They filmed the utterly charming Wuhan band on a sweltering May afternoon as they performed a set featuring a number of classic tracks from their eponymous debut album, which turns ten in a couple of months.
Awesome to be shouted out in one of our favorite newsletters! Thanks very much, and great work as always, Jake!
Fantastic issue. Off to explore Wild Children in more depth.
Spent a few crazy days in Kaili back in 2008. Met lots of very friendly locals and drank way too much homemade rice wine.