Dirty ambient + Dirty Fingers
+ the welcome return of experimentalists The river, Orchestration, Walkman!
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.
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In this issue: end of summer vibes from a young experimental group, an ambient-leaning compilation, firework-fuelled hyperpop, more videos from China’s best live music venues, a groove-laden live set filmed in a Hong Kong hang out, and a new LP from a notorious garage punk act who’ve survived drug busts, death threats and more.
Not in this issue, but still by me: The great zensounds ran an interview I did with excellent ‘sad Welsh harp pop’ purveyor Cerys Hafana. And I picked out five notable and recently-released albums for China Books Review .
All summer long: experimental band The river, Orchestration, Walkman! return with their most accessible work to date
In my round-up of Chinese music in 2023, I wrote of my excitement about experimental Guangdong band The river, Orchestration, Walkman! and how they were one of the best new acts of the year. They promptly went on to release no new music in 2024. Or in the first eight and a bit months of 2025. Now, finally, we have a new record from them, Eternal Summer.
Despite the lack of activity in terms of releases, TrOW! haven’t been on hiatus. The improvisation-focused quartet have continued with their oddball, sometimes impromptu performances (including one outside a nursery to slightly bemused children) as well as a steady flow of relatively normal gigs throughout the last couple of years. But that activity also left them feeling tired and anchorless, hence the lack of recorded material.
“We were always on the road performing and never really stopped to rest,” explains Jinying, a band member who also doubled as producer for their new release. “You could say we were without a fixed address for several years. Finally, in 2025, three out of four of the band members settled in Guangzhou, and we compiled this new recording.”
Eternal Summer is essentially a collection of pieces that were recorded live (apart from the closing title track, which is a sun-drenched montage of field recordings put together by Jinying). And as is typical of the band’s output, it’s charmingly off-kilter throughout. Yet it’s really only toward the halfway point of the record when TrOW! begin to reach the sort of cacophonous climaxes that characterise so much of their earlier work, and even then these moments are somewhat fleeting. Eternal Summer comes with more focus on relatively conventional melodies and an appropriately hazy, laidback feeling.
Not that they’ve completely cast off their experimental and free jazz tendencies. ‘Little Mushroom’ captures TrOW!’s avant-fun spirit, with the saxophone fully let off the leash but underpinned by a presumably Mario-inspired 8-bit backing track. Flugelhorn, conch shell, and bicycle horn show up in the list of instruments used across the album’s nine tracks; there’s a song that features someone imitating a cat’s meow throughout; and there’s an interpretation of part of kooky composer Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédie’ suite.
But even with all of that in the mix, Eternal Summer is the band’s most accessible release to date. And even if summer has now departed for those of us in the northern hemisphere, there’s a lasting warmth to these recordings.
Eternal Summer is out now.
Downtempo and dirty: electronic label zaaang delivers two fascinating records
Shanghai producer Glass Bystander has a propensity for creating interesting, ambient-leaning alternative electronic music. zaaang (as in 臟, dirty), the label he founded in 2022, is very much being made in that image, as evidenced by its two most recent releases: one is an appealing ambient-adjacent compilation, the other a more intense dungeon synth-influenced LP.
Let’s ease our way in with the ambient-ish compilation, which is entitled Tui Na, after a classic form of Chinese massage. Glass Bystander contributes a track himself, as does similarly established producer Yu Hein (one half of experimental ambient duo Seon Ga), but the record also showcases newer talent, such as Beijing-based artist L1mixe, who was still a high school student when zaaang released his Exiled to Nature EP in 2023.
Tui Na begins in ambient territory, with more percussive elements entering as it progresses. Even as the bpm slowly inches up however, it remains a comfortably chilled out listen. Expect to see several of these pieces on Concrete Avalanche’s ambient playlist soon.
Released at the beginning of August, Zuraigraph’s Heil Ruinenlust was not an attempt to win any ‘song of the summer’ accolades. The album is a whirlwind of dungeon synth textures, haunting samples, darkwave beats and vocals, and bursts of noise.
The record was “driven by love and self-destruction”, according to the introduction on Chinese streaming platforms. On Bandcamp, it’s billed as “a tribute” to a whole host of things, from “a tribute to adolescence” to “a tribute to invisible blood and one-night stands with angels”. As you can probably tell from such descriptions, there’s a pervasive darkness on Heil Ruinenlust, but it’s also a gripping listen at times.
Tui Na and Heil Ruinenlust are both out now.
Related:
Wild horses: notorious garage punks Oh! Dirty Fingers return with an “orchestrated explosion”
They may have been formed just over a decade ago, but it already feels like Oh! Dirty Fingers have been through enough drama to last a whole career. Having quickly established a reputation for combustible live shows, and built a fiercely loyal following on the back of them, the Shanghai-based garage punks have since navigated repeated run-ins with the law, enforced line-up changes, and allegations of sexual harassment. A 2017 piece I wrote about them came with a standfirst that mentioned “Drug busts, jail time, [and] death threats”. Somehow, they’ve survived it all — and now they’ve got a new album out.
Earlier this year, Dirty Fingers played the Great Escape festival in Brighton and then took over a London studio for a week. The result is Peasant Delights, or 整一座城市的胡椒粉也辣不死人 in Chinese (which very loosely translates as Even an Entire City of Pepper Won’t Kill You and is based on a misheard comment in Hangzhou dialect at a family dinner table).
Here’s one of the founding members of the band, Brazilian drummer Ale Amazonia, reflecting on their back catalogue as a teaser for the new record, in a video entitled ‘Growing Up Has Been the Best Thing That’s Ever Happened to Me’:
That Amazonia fronts this short film feels significant: Peasant Delights marks the culmination of the last four and a bit years since he fully reunited with the band following an enforced absence from China. And whereas previous album Planet Dominic Vivavilli saw Dirty Fingers experimenting with a broader set of sounds under the influence of drummer and Sleeping Dogs member Li Zichao and producer Shen Zhi, their new record is largely a return to the garage punk with which they first made their name.
Certainly, Peasant Delights feels less refined than Vivavilli, with the band’s crunching guitars brought back to the fore. In the video above, Amazonia describes it as “a carefully orchestrated explosion”, but at times, especially on first listen, it can feel more like just an explosion, frequently teetering towards chaos. Of course, chaos is nothing new for Dirty Fingers, and even if they’ve grown up and calmed down a bit, their live shows — where these songs were forged — can still have an edge to them.
Capturing the energy of those live shows on record however, can be a challenge. Singer Guan Xiaotian might sound great when he’s snarling about fancying your girlfriend in a rowdy gig venue in front of a baying crowd of young Chinese people, but when his voice is high in the mix on your home speakers it’s a slightly different story. In typical zero-fucks-given style, Dirty Fingers set their stool out on this right from the start — Peasant Delights opens with Guan’s isolated vocals:
How you feel about those opening few seconds, may dictate how far you make it through the album’s 14 tracks. Oh! Dirty Fingers are something of a Marmite band, especially on record: you either love them or you hate them.
Yet whether you embrace the chaos of Peasant Delights or are repulsed by it, the band likely won’t care too much. They might proclaim that this record is the best thing they’ve done, but in some ways, to have made it at all and to still be playing together after everything they’ve been through probably feels like achievement enough.
Peasant Delights is out now.
Voice of youth: watch these mini docs on China’s pioneering gig venues
Last issue I highlighted a little documentary about one of China’s longest-running gig venue brands, Shanghai’s Yuyintang. It’s actually part of a series featuring other beloved Chinese livehouses such as Wuhan’s VOX and Chengdu’s Little Bar.
Beijing’s bié Music, who produced the series, have handily now uploaded the videos to YouTube:
And speaking of alternative cultural venues in China, it turns out that following its widely mourned demise, DADA Beijing was resurrected this past weekend, less than a month after its closure. Nice to have some good news in that realm for once.
Life is pain: Hangzhou hyperpop olympian GG Lobster unleashes new record
Interesting timing to have a music video featuring a ton of fireworks being set off in the countryside, but that’s where we are with Hangzhou hyperpop provocateur GG Lobster. To be fair, he actually slightly pre-empted the Cai Guoqiang mess with his video for ‘Stronger’, which at least doesn’t seem to be taking place in as ‘protected’ an area as the Tibetan plateau:
Reworking Daft Punk’s anthemic ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’, GG Lobster’s new track is, on the face of it, a typically brazen moment from his new album Pain Olympix, where it’s joined by ‘Gimme back Loopy’, a song that also came with a controversy-baiting music video. Dig beneath its brash exterior however, and you find that ‘Stronger’ is representative of a humourous, at times melancholy album. That might seem an odd thing to say about a record that seems so concerned with maximalism, but Pain Olympix’s allusions to Beijing’s 2008 games, and unfulfilled dreams from that time, add ballast to the in-your-face production.
GG Lobster’s wry lyrical witticism as he takes aim at mass consumerism, internet fame culture, and “the absurdity of urban life”, as he puts it, also helps him stand out in a Chinese hyperpop scene that continues to grow (another key figure in the genre, Billionhappy, also put out a new album this summer). Meanwhile, his smattering of features means Pain Olympix feels less one note than the output of some of his peers.
Ultimately, if you’re looking for a taste of the Chinese hyperpop scene beyond those DJ Gurl records, Pain Olympix tops the podium.
Pain Olympix is out now.
Exit music
Grateful for a reader tip that pointed me toward this set from Brooklyn-formed Shanghai-based group Pu Poo Platter, who serve up a quartet of soulful, jazzy tracks as part of a set recorded in Hong Kong’s Salon 10 bar on Boxing Day last year. If you like what you hear, you can read more about the band and their debut album right here.