Must-listen new music from Cola Ren + Xi'an dream-pop
+ live psych-rock 3,000 metres above sea level + not one but three new releases from China’s premier metal label
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In this issue: Guangzhou ambient-ish producer Cola Ren’s excellent new record, lo-fi hip hop instrumentals, Xi’an dream-pop, a dark-yet-gripping soundtrack work, an award-winning jazz music video, a triple-bill from China’s premier metal label, and slinky psych-rock performed live among the Tibetan mountains.
Flow state: producer Cola Ren returns with an outstanding water-themed ambient-adjacent EP
Having navigated her way through forests and fireflies (and gotten lost in bamboo) last year, globetrotting Guangzhou producer Cola Ren returns to nature once more on her new EP Mekong Ballad. Released on Tristan Arp and Simisea’s ambient-leaning New York-based label Human Pitch, the record is five tracks of blissfully soothing music all themed around two of the wu xing (five elements). As the official introduction puts it, “Influenced by the breath of rivers and the weight of tropical air, each piece drifts like reflections on moving water—dissolving, refracting, and returning.”
Ren’s previous two releases, 2023’s Hailu and last year’s Forest Drone, were also in the downtempo and ambient realm, yet Mekong Ballad feels like new ground. The producer pulls in guest features from Thai trumpeter rrrrrm and Pu Poo Platter saxophonist tga, who performed live during her set at Chengdu’s Chunyou Festival earlier this year. She also adds her own vocals for the first time, singing lyrics penned by rapper J-Fever (小老虎) on the record’s title track. Such elements add what the label terms an “organic, human pulse” to Ren’s beautifully dream-like soundscapes.
An artist who makes music inspired by her extensive travels, Ren’s talent has caught the ear of DJs and producers across the globe. Her Hailu EP was given the remix treatment by K-LONE, Salamander, Al Wooton, and her production mentor-of-sorts Knopha, among others. For reinterpretations of her tracks for the expanded (currently CD-only) version of Mekong Ballad, Ren has called upon another intriguing cast: Chengdu music scene lynchpin Wu Zhuoling, Taiwanese psych band Mong Tong, and rising Ningbo-born producer Guohan.
Whether you snap up one of those CDs or just let Ren’s sounds wash over you from a streaming platform, Mekong Ballad is a release to fully immerse yourself in. “Both a meditation on water and a journey into states of weightlessness and belonging,” as Human Pitch’s introductory text frames it, it’s a beautifully judged record from an exciting talent.
Mekong Ballad is out now.
Related:
Lo-fi Chinese beats to study to: Sancebai drops a nostalgia-imbued album of instrumental hip hop
If Cola Ren’s Mekong Ballad suggests there’s something in the water in Guangzhou when it comes to well-crafted laidback beats, Sancebai offers further evidence to bolster the case.
At the tail-end of 2023, the fellow Guangzhou-based producer — who this time last year contributed to the Three-Body Problem-inspired hip hop album Wuhuiyou — dropped the second of his Upside Down mixtapes, a collection of 31 small slices of lo-fi hip hop piled high with old film and TV dialogue clips and spliced together with crowdsourced voice-notes. Now, nearly two years later, he’s stripped back some of the layers to present an instrumental version of the release.
Without the chitter chatter of the original, the instrumental version of the mixtape sees Sancebai’s skill for selecting (musical) samples come to the fore. Never wavering from a bpm range of between 65 and 75, the tracks are all comprised of fragments found on pre-1990s vinyl records, with the producer “aiming to create a slow-paced, nostalgic, or even dreamlike atmosphere.”
The instrumental versions don’t insist upon your attention in quite the same way as the originals, resulting in a calmer feel. As Sancebai notes, this makes the tracks “suitable for listening while walking, before bed, while writing, or when quietly alone”. Lo-fi beats to study to, essentially, but certainly a cut far above any AI-generated BGM.
Upside Down (2): Instrumental is out now.
Just briefly: Xi’an dream-pop, a dystopian soundtrack, and experimental lo-fi rock
In their early years, EndlessWhite toyed with synthy post-punk and indie-rock sounds while (live at least) occasionally leaning into noisy shoegaze. Now a decade into their career, the Xi’an four-piece have settled into a cohesive dream-pop aesthetic punctured by periodic power-pop moments. Entitled When Time Grows Loud in English, their new record plays with nature and seasonal metaphors as it unspools a tale of love and expectation, hurt and disappointment, and ultimately perseverance, while highlighting the futility of resisting time’s incessant march. It might just be the band’s best work yet.
Beijing-based American producer thruoutin has teamed up with LITA, a cassette label from Dali in Yunnan, for the release of his latest work, a score he produced for Detour, a “dystopian science fiction film […] that explores surveillance, control, and the fragility of human agency”. Largely concerned with texture, with “deep bass synth drones, fluttering pads, and melodic strings capturing the film’s tension and quiet melancholy”, it’s a gripping soundtrack and a release that more than holds its own as a stand-alone listen.
Newly out on Beijing label SpaceFruity, Lose Again is the third album from lo-fi rock duo Luxinpei. Members Ma Meng and Ma Yuan have been making music together under the name since 2007, while also looking to challenge convention: the pair declare that they have “zero tolerance for structuralized form”. They might not be quite as wild as they think however — while there’s certainly an experimental edge to Lose Again and some moments feel slightly disorientating, tracks such as ‘Sleeping Puppy’ show that the duo are not entirely against composing pretty little ditties either.
Watch it: a quick music video round-up
Slinky Wuhan psych outfit A Wordless Orange have been on a YouTube uploading spree of late. Since the video of them performing on a traditional-style wooden boat that I highlighted in the last issue, they’ve added a host of ‘shorts’, live clips and music videos. Here they are performing in the spectacular surroundings of Lunang, a Tibetan town more than 3,000 metres above sea level:
Here’s a lovely chilled Homegrown session entitled “Improvising with the Wind: A Twilight Jam Between Trees” and featuring producer Ye Shifu (a regular collaborator with rapper J-Fever), guitarist Nianci, and saxophonist Liu Yue. Stay tuned to their YouTube channel for a forthcoming video with the supremely talented Zhang Xingchan, aka Nono.
And here’s an older video, but one that I recently found out has picked up awards from a host of international independent film festivals. Ro and PandaLee’s video for ‘Kagi’, the stand-out track from jazz singer Voision Xi’s second album Queen and Elf, has scooped ‘best music video’ gongs at Berlin Kiez Film Festival, Rome Perspective Fest, NYC International Movie Awards, and the Tokyo Film & Screenplay Awards.
“Like a dream in slow descent”: a triple-bill of releases from metal label Pest Productions
Pest Productions has long been a vital part of China’s metal scene. Since it was founded almost two decades ago, the label has provided a home to releases from some of the country’s very best metal bands, such as Zuriaake, Black Kirin, and Ὁπλίτης (Hoplites), while also helping spotlight newer acts including Mongolian thrash outfit Muqali and one-man blackgaze project DeadTrees. Any new release from the label is therefore worth paying attention to — and in recent weeks we’ve had three.
Magatama EP brings together two post-black metal solo artists, both now based in the northeastern province of Shandong and both of whom have been on something of a hiatus in the past couple of years. The two tracks find the two acts riffing off of each other’s work as “their solitary emotions intertwine”, according to the introductory text accompanying the release, “where loneliness, memory, and redemption echo once more amid the ruins and the dim light.”
Opening with a track called ‘Joker’, which uses dialogue between Robert De Niro and Joaquin Phoenix taken from the film of the same name, and ending with a track called ‘Gone with the Wind’, which features neither Vivien Leigh nor Clark Gable, To Burn in Blizzard is the debut EP from Silent Sorrow. Originally founded as a solo act by a musician calling themself Gastric Puncture, the Xiamen-based project has evolved into a full five-piece band, and makes for an interesting spin-off from the coastal Fujian city’s traditionally strong shoegaze scene, blending fuzzy guitar work into a black metal sound. “Like a dream in slow descent,” as Pest poetically puts it.
Completing a strong trio of recent releases from the Pest Productions stable is their reissue of an album from Shiren. When I wrote about them at the start of this year it was in the wake of a couple of more power electronics-focused records, but Pest have chosen to re-release 苦棘, their album from May of last year, which hews a little closer to ambient black metal, and therefore feels more at home on the label. As ever, Shiren builds an intensely dark atmosphere through their sounds, with Pest describing it as a “suffocating storm”.
Magatama EP, To Burn in Blizzard and 苦棘 are all out now.
Exit music
Leaving you with this retro video game-inspired accompaniment to Hex in Sparkle’s ‘My Game, I Play’, from their recent Elena Ferrante-influenced album The Ballad of Girlhoods.
That Luxinpei sounds fun!
A truly fluid, atmospheric curation. Listening feels like wandering through an altar built of resonance.