Duck Fight Goose go nu jazz + Re-TROS in the US with Liars & Battles
+ Chinese psychedelia rides again + a legendary avant-folk band return with their first release since 2008
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.
Recently, the good people at Good On Paper magazine invited me to make a spring Spotify playlist and I managed to refrain from making it all Chinese indie music (though there’s a bit of that too). Give it a listen and a like here. Sorry it’s Spotify, but nearly all of the artists have music on Bandcamp if you want to support them.
I have tip jar running on Ko-fi, which you can contribute to here if you’d like:
Alternatively, please consider simply telling a friend or three about this humble newsletter — I really appreciate any support in helping this thing grow.
In this issue: Duck Fight Goose (founded as a math-rock band and powered by electronic producers 33EMYBW and Gooooose) wander into nu jazz territory, Run Run Run look to the south of China with their new psych-rock LP, legendary avant-folk act Glamourous Pharmacy issue a live album, Rebuilding the Rights of Statues head to the US, a Shanghai group covers George Brecht, and more.
Future shock: Duck Fight Goose journey into nu jazz on new album
Duck Fight Goose founders 33 and HanHan are not ones for standing still. As noted previously in this newsletter, both now have established solo careers as electronic music producers, as 33EMYBW and Gooooose respectively. Yet they continue to return to their Duck Fight Goose project, one which was initially founded as a math-rock band in 2009, but has traversed a number of different genres over the past decade and a half. (They’ve been through a number of line-up changes too, though 33 and HanHan have always remained at the band’s heart.)
Flow, the band’s 2010 EP, and their debut full-length Sports, both fit snuggly under the math-rock genre tag, but by the time of DFG’s second album proper in 2016, there’d been the first of what would become a series of shifts in direction. The press release for the heavily electronic-influenced record, Clvb Zvkvnft, stated that “it’s almost better to think of their music as software, undergoing iteration after iteration, stack upon stack, version updates pushed with the engineer’s perfectionist fervour.”
It was another five years until Duck Fight Goose’s next album, Becoming, released under the artist name Yadae (the pinyin of their original name). It was a record that at one point had felt like it would never arrive; the intervening years had seen 33EMYBW and Gooooose’s profiles rise and Duck Fight Goose appeared to have taken a back seat at the very least. But Becoming suggested that 33 and HanHan, at that point DFG’s only members, still had a purpose for the project, with the record dabbling in retro funk and house beats while drawing inspiration from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
That was 2021. The next milestone in the Duck Fight Goose story came this Monday with the release of night gloss.
For their latest incarnation of the band, HanHan and 33 have re-expanded the line-up, adding jazz drummer Xu Zhitong and jazz pianist Huang Jianyi to their live roster. Xu plays drums on the new record, which also features flautist and saxophonist Wilson Chen on ‘Liquids’. But night gloss is largely driven by HanHan’s vision — he wrote, mixed and plays the rest of the instruments on the record; 33 (as 33EMYBW) is down as a ‘creative director’.
The headline is there’s been another genre-hop, this time into nu jazz territory. There are even moments on the record where you could arguably drop the ‘nu’ prefix. But the more you listen to it, the more you realise there are plenty of strands that connect this album with its predecessors. To begin with, you might even question whether all this stuff about nu jazz is actually true — after the opening track’s sci-fi soundtrack-like intro, you’re catapulted into a guitar-led section that is reminiscent of old-school DFG math-rock.
Even when the nu jazz stylings do become more pronounced, those familiar with the band’s past will still recognise traits from their previous sounds. Tracks such as ‘jogging on Wuding Lu’ (a street in Shanghai) hint at HanHan leaving Club Zvkvnft (the ‘future club’) and focusing on the present, yet his fascination with futurism and technology persists in the background. Lead single ‘the speed of time’ draws inspiration from a trip on one of China’s gaotie bullet trains; ‘feral birds’ is inspired by Craig Reynolds’ bird flock simulator Boids; and ‘automatic builder’, one of the most electronic-sounding tracks on the LP, conjures up images of machines working through the night while a city sleeps.
To me, night gloss is immediately more impactful as a record than Becoming. It’s another interesting stage of Duck Fight Goose’s constant evolution. It may still be unclear what the future holds for the band, and I may well be biased because I’ve been a fan of theirs for so long, but I’m certainly glad they’re still going.
night gloss is out now, but due to label Modern Sky’s steadfast refusal to use Bandcamp you’ll have to look for it on other platforms (Apple Music is the one linked to here, where you’ll also find an interesting write-up of the record with some quotes from HanHan).
Thunder cats: Beijing rockers Run Run Run return with a satisfying slab of psychedelia
Sometimes, you get a Bandcamp blurb that reads like an essay from The New Yorker. The write-up for the third album from Beijing psychedelic rock band Run Run Run is not one of those:
“Run Run Run is a psychedelic rock band from Beijing. This is their third album.”
Succinct. Really though, what more information do we need? You just need to click play and immerse yourself in the music.
I suppose I’ll add a few words here, though they are (as ever) superfluous to just clicking the play button.
The album is called Five Thunder Heart Palm. If that makes you think of the Kill Bill finale then you’re not far off. The album doesn’t grab you immediately; there’s a slow, almost hypnotic start before it suddenly reaches out and grabs you.
Opener ‘Once More Into the Darkness’ makes for an atmospheric first track, before the appropriately named second song ‘Swing Swing’ picks up the pace a bit. But the album really kicks into a different gear from track three onwards:
Before the release of this album, Run Run Run had teased an old-timey retro pop-influenced sound with their flexi-inspired EP. That turned out to be a bit of a red herring. Yet while that sound isn’t present in its fully-fledged form here, elements of it have been carried over, from the chorus lines of ‘Yulin Drinking Song’ and the sunshine-evoking birdsong of ‘Kuaile Dawang’ to the jangly guitar rhythms of ‘Thinking of the Border Song’.
There’s also a sense of travel on the record. Songwriter Xiao Dou spent time amid the mountains of Guizhou and Guangxi in China’s southern reaches in the build-up to this LP, and you can feel that influence throughout Five Thunder Heart Palm.
It’s a trip. And an enjoyable one at that.
五雷轰心掌 is out now. There’s lots more Chinese psychedelia here and here.
Medicine for the soul: avant-folk band Glamorous Pharmacy return with first record since 2008
Glamorous Pharmacy’s Rumbling Footsteps is a classic. Released in 2008, it captured nine songs from the experimental folk band, knitting together delicate folk moments, off-the-wall vocal bursts, occasional musical about-turns, and a smattering of Shanghai Animation Studio samples. Here’s a beautiful example of that all coming together, which someone has laid over the top of some of the original animation work from 1981:
(Side note: just came across this great piece on Shanghai Animation Studio, filming ink, and the efforts to document and share the history of Chinese animation from Animation Obsessive Staff.)
Formed in the 1990s, the band was led by Xiao He and featured other Chinese folk luminaries such as Zhang Weiwei. I was fortunate enough to see them perform live in the sweaty and cramped old Yuyintang in Shanghai in 2009. The place was packed; Zhang Weiwei and Guo Long performed a few of their own songs part-way through; Xiao He attempted a handstand at one point and nearly fell into the crowd; he ended the night shirtless; the whole thing teetered on the edge of chaos. It’s one of my favourite gig-going memories.
But then the band largely went their separate ways. It was almost a decade later when Glamorous Pharmacy performed again. Their initial re-appearances were mostly on festival bills and it wasn’t until last year that they went out on tour again (with a handful of line-up alterations).
Which is where this new live album on Old Heaven Books comes from:
The record features live versions of the old Rumbling Footsteps songs, performed in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Foshan and Xi’an.
Xiao He may be a bit older, and he may have mellowed a little, but he still has that glint in his eye and a cheeky smile that suggests chaos is never too far away. Some of his solo material and his more recent soundtrack work demonstrate that he’s adept at creating beautiful, emotionally-rich pieces of music. Glamorous Pharmacy isn’t really that. There’s depth here too, but the overriding sensation is playfulness and it feels very much like an opportunity for He to cut loose a bit — especially live.
Anyway, it’s a fun one if you’re familiar with the band or the players. For those who are new to Glamorous Pharmacy, the original studio album is a better starting point.
Loud As Deadly Silence is out now.
Dirty Fingers’ end of year party looks like it was a blast
Speaking of bands whose live shows come with an edge, here’s a video of Dirty Fingers’ end of year party, held shortly before the Lunar New Year when companies up and down China are holding end of year gatherings and employees are being intimidated into drinking baijiu with their bosses.
Unlike a lot of the recent tour videos from Chinese bands that have favoured showing a couple of minutes of highlights, this one captures Dirty Fingers’ whole show, incidentally their last with this lineup before Brazilian drummer Ale Amazonia was reinstated. The band is set to head into the studio to record a new album any day now, and they’re also off to Japan next month.
Clean bandits: Shanghai Free Music Collective perform George Brecht
Trigger, a small-scale experimental-focused venue in Shanghai set up by Junky of Torturing Nurse infamy, continues to host some fascinating shows. Here’s a clip of Shanghai Free Music Collective performing George Brecht’s ‘Solo for Violin, Viola, Cello, or Contrabass’ (1962):
And here they are with a newer composition by Xu Cheng:
Exit music
Just before we go, a reminder that Re-TROS are touring around the US soon, with their first show in NYC (featuring Battles, Liars and five other acts) taking place on March 30th.
In preparation for their return to the States, the band have spruced up their Bandcamp, adding their debut, Brian Eno-featuring EP Cut Off!, remixes of their music by Xiu Xiu, Fujiya & Miyagi, and Paul Frick, plus more to their page.
They’ve also added to YouTube the “official MV” for their most recent work, a song that made for the (Tencent production of) The Three-Body Problem. Though spoiler alert: the video is actually just a static graphic.
Here’s a more interesting music video from them:
Sorry for the slightly off topic question but can you point me to the record store I should visit in Shanghai to find music in the direction of your newsletter?
Cheers!
now listening to Dirty Fingers