"Fierce feminism" post-punk + Wuhan psych-funk
+ David Bowie and Björk as pandas + beautiful seaside electronic music
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 beautiful seaside electronic session, slinky summery funk from Wuhan, principled post-punk from Xi’an, a playlist of experimental cassette label Dusty Ballz’s best bits, and panda-fied takes on David Bowie, Björk, and Kendrick cover art.
Typical girls: feminist post-punk trio Rats&Pear deliver a blistering debut LP
Rats&Pears are angry, that much is clear. And honestly, who can blame them given the present state of things?
The Xi’an post-punk trio set the tone right from the off on their new debut album, The Well of Shame, with opening track ‘The First Shot’ layering samples from the film Suffragette over wild guitars and saxophone. The record — the title of which is a nod to Radclyffe Hall’s once-banned novel The Well of Loneliness — barely lets up from there. It crackles with a confrontational energy throughout the vast majority its 41 minutes.
Formed in 2022 and signed to Maybe Mars just two years later, Rats&Pears say (in English, on international-facing platforms) that they “talk about feminism and queer rights in a fierce voice.” That’s a bold stance in the current climate and it’s no surprise (and is understandable) that their lyrics don’t always deliver on this promise — even as it is, the words to their track ‘So Who has took my keys?’ don’t appear to have made it to Chinese streaming sites.
Musically, the album sits very much in Maybe Mars’ wheelhouse. You can hear producer (and ‘godfather of Chinese post-punk’) Yang Haisong’s influence all over this record, while many of the vocals have strong echoes of (the fantastic) Hiperson — the driving ‘So Who has took my keys?’ and ‘Drowning’ in particular. In places, the band also bring in Li Zenghui, the experimental musician whose saxophone previously gave The Fallacy’s post-punk an excellent new dimension.
While it’s fascinating to see young acts taking elements from China’s post-punk past, it’s not clear Rats&Pears have fully found their own voice as a band just yet. That’s fine, they’re a young group and this is their debut album. They certainly show bags of potential. Hopefully they can craft something truly distinctive as they develop — and feel emboldened with their stances and the messages they want to deliver.
The Well of Shame is out now, with vinyl and CD editions just released yesterday.
Great Wuhan: A Wordless Orange return with a slinky psychy summer EP
In late 2023, Wuhan band A Wordless Orange put out a fun, funky debut album entitled Sleepwalking Nap. The record showcased a sleek synthy sound that felt mainstream-friendly yet was offbeat enough to pique the interest of more avant-garde musicians, such as Li Zenghui (see above), who joined them for a collaboration. At the tail end of May of this year, the band reemerged with a new five-track EP, Guru Orange.
The EP builds on the sonic palate established on Sleepwalking, with the band confidently embellishing their soulful sound with more “Asian elements”, as they put it. Its title supposedly refers to a 1920s figure from Hankow, one of three towns that eventually merged to form Wuhan. The story goes that Guru Orange “often paddled alone at night, traveling back and forth around Asia’s complex waterways, throwing notebooks into the water and drifting to various places with the current. It’s said that people who pick up his words will have fantastical pictures in their minds, see Guru Orange's travel notes, and hear a wordless sound poem: ‘The night is long, planes and boats.’”
Don’t worry. Whether you’re on the receiving end of such messages, and able to interpret them, is largely beside the point — the EP is a super laidback listen and one that’s not worth overthinking. As opener ‘Be Bottle, My Wuhan’ repeatedly asserts: “you can be water, my friend”.
The only disappointment comes with ‘Chilling Drive’, specifically its run-time — just as you think it’s gearing up to be a luxurious, elongated EP closer, it abruptly comes to a halt, prematurely ending the record as a whole. Still, Guru Orange is a great summer listen regardless; here’s hoping the band have another full album in them soon.
Guru Orange is out now.
Goodness gracious: Dusty Ballz in The Wire
Concrete Avalanche favourite Dusty Ballz is featured in the latest issue of The Wire, with writer Daryl Worthington also putting together a special, fully annotated playlist in celebration of the excellent China-focused cassette label. I can’t embed it here, but click that link — it’s free and great to listen to.
Another shore: Beijing producer thruoutin finds beauty in isolation at coastal resort Aranya
I’ve never been to Aranya, the coastal resort near Qinhuangdao in Hebei, effectively due east of Beijing. It sounds like kind of an odd place though. Located close to Beidaihe, the traditional summer escape for the capital’s ruling elites, Aranya is a failed property development-turned-architects’ playground that went viral on Xiaohongshu thanks to buildings such as the seemingly isolated ‘World’s Loneliest Library’ sitting on its beaches. The Guardian called it a “seaside haven for the ‘lying flat’ generation” and noted how social media had essentially revived the area, bringing in 1.5 million visitors a year. siyuan pointed out that not everyone is so enamoured: “Most voices believed Aranya had failed to build a paradise for middle-class escapees that it had been striving for.”
Besides a number of leading art galleries, Aranya is also host to music venues and occasional festivals. Wang Wen filmed their special sunrise set there back in 2023. Long-running Beijing venue DDC has an outpost there. Indeed, DDC used to run artist residency programmes out beside the sea, which is where a new release from American-born producer and long-time Beijing resident thruoutin began. Not that this was some summer jolly for him though — he visited in December 2019.
In his introduction to the four track EP, released last week on Hush Hush Records, thruoutin explains how he was shown around DDC’s recording space upon arrival. He assumed the venue’s owner and the technician who had greeted him there would be on-hand throughout his residency, but “After a brief overview of the mixing console, and getting clearance to use some of the more expensive gear, I was given the keys to the entire place and left to my own devices.”
The wintry conditions and the isolation are reflected in the album’s name A Desolate Hue and its track titles: ‘Emptiness’, ‘Loneliness’, and ‘Nothingness’ among them. Don’t be put off though — this is not a stark, chilly-sounding EP. In fact, there’s immense beauty contained within its four tracks, as thruoutin layers drones and field recordings with double bass, electric lute, and more. There’s also a sense of propulsion, especially on the first two tracks and in the record’s closing moments; there are ambient foundations, but thruoutin builds strongly rhythmic instrumentation on top. It’s the last song name that really conveys the energy of the record for me: ‘Limitlessness’.
“After five days, I returned to Beijing with a hard drive full of files,” says thruoutin. “I put the project aside and would only work on it in the ensuing years when that feeling of nothingness surfaced again. The result is these four pieces of music.”
They were worth the wait.
A Desolate Hue is out now and available on cassette here.
Sinister grift*: UPEE reference Björk, Kendrick, Omnipotent Youth Society and lots more with new panda-themed compilation
In addition to being a (Chinese language) reviews and interviews platform, UPEE does “something more than journalism”: they have a spin-off record label. In early June, said label released an album of 10 electronic tracks all themed around YaYa, a giant panda.
YaYa was born in Beijing but spent two decades living in Memphis Zoo in the US. When images purportedly showing YaYa in ill health emerged online, there were widespread calls in China for the panda to be repatriated, including via a number of cheesy pop songs. YaYa eventually returned home in 2023, with images of a seemingly happier and healthier bear back in China subsequently also going viral.
UPEE’s compilation is a wild ride through memefied remix territory —reminiscent in places of the work of DJ Gurl. You can read more about the music in UPEE’s own post here (even if you don’t read Chinese, you can probably get a good idea from an auto-translation), but I mostly want to draw attention to the artwork they came up with for the record. The cover used on Bandcamp is a reference to The Boss, but that only tells part of the story.
UPEE produced dozens of covers for the release of the compilation, putting panda spins on a whole host of classic albums from artists such as David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Jay Chou and lots, lots more. Here’s a small taste:
YaYa Remixes Repacked is out now. *It’s not really a sinister grift, at least, not as far as I’m aware; that’s just a Panda Bear reference.
Exit music
Pest Productions are one of China’s finest metal labels. Yet here they are, waking up their YouTube channel after almost a year, with a ~40 minute short film for an album released last year by M.A.N.Y., a band who aren’t even signed to Pest (they’re on Weary Bird Records) and who aren’t metal — they ply an indie- / post-rock sound influenced by the likes of MONO. Anyway, don’t question it, just watch and listen. A bit more background:
“The band invited renowned Japanese director Yuta Sekiyama to helm this project, a cross-border collaboration months in the making. With over a hundred emails exchanged and numerous online meetings, the vision finally came to life.”
Loving Rats&Pears! Any idea what Hiperson are up to? I always wanted to see them when I was in Chengdu but never had the chance.
oh my god that Wuhan band is so gooood, thank you so much!