Wang Wen x Omnipotent Youth Society + China's answer to Tiny Desk Concerts
+ scintillating Sichuanese sci-fi-tronica
Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thank you for reading.
Back to the normal format for this edition and lots to get through. There’s a big post-rock album to digest, two intriguing electronic releases, an epic ambient piece and… Señor Coconut.
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Post-rock heavyweights Wang Wen unveil new Omnipotent Youth Society-influenced album
China’s pre-eminent instrumental rock band Wang Wen returned with a new album in early October entitled Painful Clown & Ninja Tiger. Pretty good as album names go. The record was available as a paid-for stream on NetEase for the first month before becoming more widely available, with the international release on Pelagic Records finally arriving late last week.
Founded in 1999 in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, Wang Wen have established themselves as China’s biggest post-rock act. Their vision has gotten grander with each album, progressing from the fuzzy, grungey guitar music of their early work to deliver lushly produced, sweeping instrumental pieces on their most recent releases. They also have a well justified reputation for powerful live shows and are one of the country’s better known bands internationally, having toured Europe several times and released a split with Sweden’s Pg.Lost.
In short: a new Wang Wen album is a pretty big deal.
The big news on Painful Clown & Ninja Tiger is that, after 20-odd years of making instrumental music, Wang Wen have added extensive vocals for the first time. Frontman Xie Yugang pours out sombre lyrics on four of the LP’s seven tracks, with a gravelly, sometimes strained delivery.
Xie has spoken of the record as a kind of catharsis and a crutch for helping him through the pandemic. “In the past two years, I have treated this album as my only project. It was as if only by keeping myself at work could I feel free,” he said in an interview (中) with the band’s Space Circle label. “The past two years have basically been about existing and music. Essentially, I was either at home or in the studio. Music felt like the only thing I wanted to do, and I had no motivation or interest in anything else.”
The album’s name in Chinese relates to years in the lunar calendar cycle — in this case 2021 and 2022 — and, unsurprisingly given how those years have panned out, the lyrics often deal with loss and uncertainty. It’s debatable whether the vocals convey any greater feeling than Wang Wen have achieved without them in the past, but they certainly give the tracks where they appear a stark form of emotion. This sensation is emphasised by the juxtaposition with songs where Huang Kai’s trumpet melodies come to the fore, offering more warmth. In many ways, this is a reflection of the last few years of grappling with Covid and the ensuing lockdowns in China: moments of cold isolation punctuated with occasional bursts of hope.
The album ends with Wen Zhiyong guesting with a more melancholic trumpet sound and Xie singing of tragedy and doubt, encapsulating the weariness, the uncertainty, and the weariness with uncertainty that so many feel at the tail end of this year.
Huang’s trumpet parts, though not a new addition to Wang Wen’s sound, also highlight another significant shift for this album: the influence of Omnipotent Youth Society, the Hebei band whose two brass-laden prog-rock albums have made them one of the most celebrated independent artists to come out of China.
While some of Painful Clown & Ninja Tiger was recorded at Wang Wen’s own studio in Dalian, the band spent significant time in OYS’s Cable Temple Studio in Shijiazhuang. For a sense of the space, here are some photos from brilliant flautist and saxophonist Lao Dan, who has also been working on a new record at the studio:
The industrial-like surroundings are immediately apparent on Painful Clown, which opens with reverb-laden drums recorded via a microphone suspended from the ceiling of the yawning main hall. As the album progresses, Omnipotent Youth Society’s influence can be found in more than just the recording environment. The band’s Dong Yaqian adds slide guitar on ‘There’s a Walmart Underneath the Olympic Square’, and while he’s only officially credited on that one track, at times it sounds as if Omnipotent Youth Society have remixed a Wang Wen album (or vice versa).
‘There’s a Walmart…’ and ‘Black Pill and White Pill’ particularly stand out as moments where the alchemy of having Wang Wen inside the Cable Temple Studio works beautifully. And while the vocals take some getting used to for anyone familiar with Wang Wen’s instrumental discography, Painful Clown & Ninja Tiger is a compelling listen from a compelling band. Find the full record here.
Sweet Home, Go! This YouTube channel takes you into artists’ personal spaces
A parade of artists playing songs from a broad sweep of genres, filmed in intimate settings for well-produced videos that are then posted to YouTube. This is, of course, Homegrown, a platform dedicated to showcasing “the freshest & finest tunes played at home” by Chinese artists, and which recently turned two years old.
Over the course of 40-odd episodes, they’ve dropped in on soulful Yunnanese beatmaker Dizkar, dodged a Beijing sandstorm by sheltering with psychedelic funk act and Sleeping Dogs collaborator BowAsWell, stopped by for tea, coffee and piano-propelled jazz with Fishdoll, and looked on as garlica princess Cacien frolicked on her sofa. Pretty sure more than one of the sets they’ve filmed has involved a tiny desk as well.
In strictly musical terms, the output can sometimes be a bit hit and miss, the inevitable result of their attempts to capture a variety of artists. Some of the sets are a little twee for my tastes, but so what if you’re not a fan of everyone they feature? The quality of the video production doesn’t waver and it can be a great way to discover new artists or to witness those you already know in a different setting, much like a certain NPR series.
Follow them on YouTube here and find them on Instagram for clips, mini-interviews and lots of images of houseplants.
Zaliva-D’s Misbegotten Ballads batters the senses
High time SVBKVLT got a mention in this newsletter. Founded by Gaz Williams, manager of legendary Shanghai clubs The Shelter and ALL, the label is one of the most interesting electronic music imprints going. SVBKVLT’s back catalogue is basically a who’s who of cutting edge Chinese electronic music — with notable releases from 33EMYBW, Hyph11e and Scintii — combined with a smattering of fascinating artists from further afield, including Bali-based group Gabber Modus Operandi (who collaborated with Björk on Fossora) and Cairo-born producer ABADIR.
The label’s latest release is Misbegotten Ballads, the fourth album from Beijing-based audio-visual duo Zaliva-D.
It’s a typically atypical record from producer Li Chao and visual artist Aisin-Gioro Yuanjin. Misbegotten Ballads plays with many of the elements that Zaliva-D have deployed since reinventing themselves on their 2013 Shanshui-released EP Origin, blending synth lines and traditional Chinese strings and brass with metallic, industrial percussion, and topping it off with vocals that sound like they’ve been sampled from a dastardly villain on the Cartoon Network.
It makes for a bold, bizarre and willingly weird sound, but one that nevertheless doesn’t stray too far from the dancefloor — or at least, the kind of thing that gets played to those inside the black box of ALL’s dancefloor area.
Sichuanese sci-fi-tronica: vii M attempts “to build a nirvana between earth and moon”
Released the day before Zaliva-D’s album, Sublunary is an equally intriguing LP from Chengdu-born Shanghai-based producer vii M. Before we go anywhere with this, you need to read the background story:
Blended with both underwater and anaerobic texture, a Prussian blue living space filled with an air called “New Oxygen”. People’s consciousness is scatterdly floating in this medium. A glass helmet is crucial for survival, while all the background sounds and communications are automatically transmitted outside the helmet. In order to survive and maintain the remaining bit of purity and privacy in the midst of it all, a music-only vacuum space is secured for our own independency inside the helmet.
“One for all, to comprehend, to experience, to create. I just want to magnify all my sensations to the max.”
<Sublunary> is conceptualized for this fictional space, but is also composed for the purest sound left inside the helmet. Penetrating the boundless ocean, earth, and dry moon, “New Oxygen” merges the characters of two spaces: one is flooded with humid dream and primitive perception, while the other stretches across the horizon with tensions and suppressed emotions. Those two intertwined planes become ten emotionally-complicated pieces, exhibiting the illusionary image of “a world beneath the moon”. vii M is both a narrator and a wanderer.
Entanglement, evolution, transformation. The future or the present. An endless chasing game.
So what does that sound like? Perhaps more accessible than you might think. It’s ethereal, exploratory electronic music but with a sense of fun. There’s a kookiness to vii M’s sound, lacing the album’s glistening trip hop melodies, breathy vocals and retro-futuristic sci-fi electronica with skittering beats and bleeps that enhance rather than distract.
And despite the out-there concept, there’s still that strong sense of listenability that unites so much of the output on the Eating Music label.
It’s also just over half an hour, so hardly a major commitment if the words above haven’t sold you on it or made it any clearer what it really sounds like. Check it out:
(And while we’re here talking of interesting electronic music, go have a listen to Chinabot’s fifth anniversary compilation, released around the same time as the two records above. They’re not a Chinese label, but they are one of my favourite imprints, and back in September they released what might be my album of the year, Bo Sedkid’s Goring.)
Exit music
Leaving you with two exit music choices.
First up, a slice of techno-leaning electronic music from Wuhan-formed, Shanghai-based duo Frankfurt Helmet. Earlier this year, they put out their debut album Individuals on Modern Sky, produced by Byetone and inspired by their sci-fi readings. Its release even came with a quote from Chen Qiufan.
The track ‘Patch’ from that album was recently remixed by Atom™, the (appropriately Frankfurt-based) producer Uwe H. Schmidt, also known as Señor Coconut:
Second is something completely different: a 48-minute ambient piece from Kaiping-based producer Yu Yiyi, who quickly followed this track with an album of distinctly less soothing (but still interesting) experimental works. It can be a stressful time of year right now, so take a moment to yourself, hit play below and let it wash over you…
These live versions sound even more intimate and exclusive than Tiny Desk performances. Thank you for sharing!
That Zaliva-D sounds interesting from a quick listen. Will check more. Not big on electronic music unless it's weird and out there and this may fit the bill!