"We felt an urge to speak out" + underpass recordings
+ Skai isyourgod heads to North America + "Beijing’s Cafe Oto"
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In this issue: two albums spotlighting the experiences of young women in China today, moon lute tunes, “Beijing’s Cafe Oto”, Torturing Nurse goes to India, Skai isyourgod goes to America, underpass recordings, broken turntables, “a brutal alliance”, and a weird Bi Gan short film with a soundtrack from one of China’s biggest post-rock bands and made for a brand of cat products.
“We felt an urge to speak out”: electro-punks Hex in Sparkle and rockers Fiery Medusa put female stories front and centre
Three decades after the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, the Chinese capital hosted a new set of UN-backed meetings on women’s rights this week. While Chinese state media trumpeted the country’s role in “women’s empowerment”, Western media outlets mostly took aim at what the New York Times called the Party’s “stifling” of activism in the area of women’s rights.
Perhaps timely then, for the release of two new records amplifying the stories of young women in China.
The Ballad Of Girlhoods is the new album from the band formerly known as Fake Orgasm, whose electro-punk EP Semi Semi was released last year. Now located in Chengdu, the trio have changed their name to Hex In Sparkle, but they’ve not lost the raw musical energy and forthright lyricism that characterised their previous incarnation.
The new album “began with a dissatisfaction with the current narratives and symbolic slogans surrounding youth, and a strong desire to voice the hidden emotions of young women,” the band say. It’s particularly influenced by Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, with opening track ‘Dissolving Boundaries’ a direct nod to the discombobulating sensation sporadically experienced by Lila in the novels. From here, The Ballad Of Girlhoods examines subjects such as body image issues and society’s expectations for women, but also contains messages of sisterhood and solidarity. “We felt an urge to speak out about these things,” Hex in Sparkle say in the album’s introductory text.
Musically, the record largely picks up where Semi Semi left off, with a mix of sultry synths and more in-your-face electro-punk. ‘My Game, I Play’, the lyrics of which are delivered in the style of Avenue D’s classic ‘2D2F’, introduces an 8-bit backing track in line with its theme of role-reversal gamification; ‘Lost Summer’ has a playful carnival feel to it; and in between, ‘Jealous’ and ‘Roaming Forever’ provide some of the more measured, better composed moments on the album. Similarly assured are the LP’s final two tracks; in particular, ‘∞’, which closes with a Buddhist mantra and is perhaps the strongest song on the record.
The Ballad Of Girlhoods doesn’t always sparkle musically, but it’s a bold statement of intent, giving voice to those “hidden emotions” that are all too often absent from the mainstream narrative.
The Ballad Of Girlhoods also features distinct echoes of Yunnanese act South Acid Mimi’s work, and it’s encouraging to see Hex in Sparkle taking inspiration from a strong female-led group who’ve gone before them. The same is true of the new album from Shanghai-based band Fiery Medusa, which contains several tracks with aspects that seem to draw on the work of excellent Chengdu post-punks Hiperson and singer Chen Sijiang. Second track ‘Wind Wind Wind’, in particular, feels indebted to Hiperson’s epic ‘Spring Breeze’.
But Eyes Looking Down does its own thing as well. Just as you’re settling into what you think is an artsy post-punk record, the band unleash metal-ish vocals and flick to oi-punk rhythms. And there’s a palpable anger at times; ‘I Swallow My Humor Down’ is described as “a clenched-teeth retort” in the Bandcamp blurb.
Eyes Looking Down is a debut album from a young band, and — though the sounds are “sincere and intense” as they put it — there are some parts that don’t come together quite as well as they could. But, as with Hex in Sparkle on The Ballad Of Girlhoods, Fiery Medusa are keen to share a message, and it’s one worth hearing.
The Ballad of Girlhoods and Eyes Looking Down are out now.
Moon safari: gogoj plucks light from experiments with a moon lute
La Luth de la Lune, the new album from experimental musician gogoj (aka Sheng Jie), began with her distractedly picking at a yueqin on the sofa. The instrument was “a very ordinary one”, she says, “bought during a trip to Quanzhou, just because I wanted to hold it.” The Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg graduate had no real intention of formally learning the traditional Chinese lute, she says, “But what does it matter? An instrument makes its own sound because of a person, and that sound is heard by someone. Maybe that’s all that needs to happen.”
Sheng has fulfilled her half of the bargain and is now giving us the opportunity to complete it with a record that is presented as “an exploratory collection of miniatures”. There’s certainly a sense of her prodding and probing with the instrument at times, yet these are generally mellow, enveloping experiments. Using droning cello notes as a backdrop, Sheng embroiders sometimes fractured but often delicate melodies over the top on the yueqin.
Having abandoned the project and then come back to it, Sheng reflects that the resulting recordings make for an unusual collection for her, but that ultimately she felt these moments were worth capturing. “Maybe it’s different from my previous works, and it won’t continue in the future because it only belongs to a certain stage,” she says. “It’s light and slow, but it can still be preserved.”
La Luth de la Lune is out now.
Related:
Just briefly: Steve Albini-sampling noise-rock, Beijing free jazz, and Skai isyourgod’s North America tour
Here’s a wild new record from Lanzhou’s TV Party that strings together punk, noise, metal vocals and a clip of Nardwuar interviewing Steve Albini among other things.
For something completely different, but no less experimental, check out 原料奏鸣曲 (Raw Material Sonata), which brings together Malaysian saxophonist Yong Yandsen, Chinese pianist (and thruoutin collaborator) Huang Aiqi, and Iranian clarinet musician (and member of FluFlaFen) Hadi Marvian. The two free jazz pieces were recorded at Raw Material Space, a venue that the introductory blurb refers to as “Beijing’s Cafe Oto”.
And something completely different again: Skai isyourgod, the Chinese rapper who’s “bigger than Jay Chou” (by some metrics anyway), is headed to North America on tour, with dates in Chicago, LA, San Francisco, NYC, Toronto and more.
Torturing Nurse news: new compilation, India tour
Shanghai-based ‘harsh as fuck’ noise act Torturing Nurse remains as productive as ever. He’s set to tour India in December, a series of gigs that comes with this fantastic poster:
He’s also curated a 15-track harsh noise compilation for Germany’s L.White Records, featuring new recordings of artists from Japan, Indonesia and China. Entitled TRIAD, it’s only available as a CD from the label’s website.
In other noise news: new Vavabond, a Beijing underpass, a broken turntable, sheep, and more
A different kind of noise to the harsh variety that Torturing Nurse deals in, but those interested in less conventional sounds would do well to check out the latest release from Vavabond. Self-described as a “laptop noise / improvisation musician,” Vavabond is also one half of the improvisation-focused act Mind Fiber with Li Jianhong and looks to “Process meaningless and fragmented sounds in a nonlinear-time approach” on new release functional structures.
Two half-hour-ish pieces (the first recorded in a Beijing underpass) from Zhao Cong and San Francisco sound artist Kevin Corcoran make up one of a string of new releases on Sun Yizhou’s Aloe Records. Zhao, whose practice involves ‘playing’ everyday objects affixed with contact mics, used “rotating mobile phone stand, karaoke light, [and] tape recorder” in her work on the release.
On GRADO, released by Washington label Marginal Frequency, Beijing-based experimental pioneer Zhu Wenbo elicits sounds from a 1970s Japanese portable record player. “Grinding mechanics, electrical stutters, and a varied palette of sounds produced by a machine operating outside its intended parameters” all feature on his “study of the internal dialogue of a broken turntable”.
A couple of recent Yan Jun releases for you: a sheep may die in the real sees the leading Chinese experimentalist pair up with Charles LaReau for “a collaboration and exchange between friends”; Old Tales Retold comprises a live recording of him and Taku Unami at an art gallery in Beijing.
And forthcoming on WV Sorcerer is the belated release of a collaboration between Mei Zhiyong and Switzerland’s Maxime Hänsenberger, “a brutal alliance”, as the label puts it. Recorded in 2019, “Mercury Hill erupts as a raw document of harsh noise grindcore. Chaotic, pulverizing, unrelenting.” As 2M2, the duo are currently on tour in Europe, with a gig in Zurich this Sunday and upcoming dates in Brussels, Lille, Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo and more from now until early November.
Exit music
It’s a few years old now, but this video recently resurfaced on WeChat while people were bored during the national holiday. It’s a short film by director Bi Gan (who brought us the excellent Kaili Blues) for Pidan, “a brand dedicated to creating products for cats”. If that feels like a bizarre link up, wait until you see the result.
Bi Gan isn’t the only big name attached to the project: the soundtrack comes courtesy of Chinese post-rock giants Wang Wen.
How else would I find out about Beijing's Café Oto if it wasn't for Concrete Avalanche? Listening to Yong Yandsen/Hadi Marvian/Aiqi Huang right now, decent free improv stuff not without a certain 'you had to be there' vibe, but just reassuring to know these spaces exist out there.