Wutiaoren & Omnipotent Youth Society in the US + Chinese jazz rap
+ video of a notorious Chinese band on tour in Japan
Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thanks very much for reading.
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In this issue: Faye Wong covering The Cranberries, major Chinese acts touring the US, two new and notable hip hop records, a surprising shift in direction from a Chinese folk legend, and “a synthesizer-ruled sci-fi soundscape”.
Star child: Louzhang embarks on an epic ambient sci-fi adventure
The last issue of Concrete Avalanche turned the spotlight on the new album from pioneering electronic artist 33EMYBW. But as big a deal as her new record was, there was another electronic release from China that was catching my ear about the same time: a more low-profile offering from producer Louzhang.
Slipped out on excellent Guangdong label Jyugam, the album “represents an expansion of experimental ambient music, an auditory film that invites the audience to navigate a journey of self-reconciliation,” according to the introduction on its Bandcamp page, and is pitched as “a pointillistic palette of sound forming a synthesizer-ruled sci-fi soundscape.” It’s fantastic.
As the professed ‘pointillistic’ approach suggests, the sounds here are more aciculate than the average ambient piece, with twinkling, sometimes almost piercing synths seemingly representing a vast sea of stars instead of what are termed the “cumbersome walls of sound” of Louzhang’s previous ambient works. Yet there’s still plenty of texture-building and gentle passages throughout this expansive soundtrack for a film yet-to-be-made.
Back to that Bandcamp blurb:
“Come and see, we are nothing more than tiny specks of dust, forever searching for the traces of distant stars in the midst of chaos and emptiness, until the end of time.”
Thousand-Years Planet Movie is out now.
Changsha fire: 17-year-old rapper Boom Ham impresses on debut LP
Hip hop’s 50th birthday was rightly celebrated across the world earlier this year. It’s become an immense cultural force, yet inevitably, the output hasn’t all been solid gold. The history of Chinese hip hop is shorter, but it has also produced its fair share of bad tracks over the years. (I mean, check out this new ‘Mbappé’ drill track from WD Wang with Korean rapper Hangzoo. Maybe I’m just too old to get it…) So when a 17-year-old kid comes through with something highly listenable, with an impressive flow and lyrics that hint at wanting to do more than just ape the genre, it seems worth paying attention to.
Is Boom Ham / Bao Han’s new album earth-shatteringly original? Not really. But then, the Changsha rapper admits as much, recognising he’s learning the ropes and that he may still be in the ‘imitation’ phase of creativity, as laid out by Dilated Peoples’ Evidence in a clip deployed toward the end of this debut LP. It’s refreshing to hear a young Chinese rapper acknowledge and embrace the idea that first you imitate, then you innovate, rather than just throwing out unoriginal bars filled with tired boasts, even if 出土 is not without ego.
“Lessons from the past,” Bao Han says, are at the core of 出土. The album’s front cover references both the KMT’s torching of Hunan’s capital in 1938 — an image Bao Han plays on when he says “a fire burned away my previous impression of Changsha” — as well as the ‘unearthing’ of the album title, with an image of archaeological site Mawangdui. Bao Han is up front in being influenced by what’s come before, and it helps that he and Plz!, who produces the bulk of the tracks, have strong taste when it comes to musical forebears: in addition to shouting out Changsha hip hop crew SUP Music, the rapper cites Outkast as a key influence on this record.
Digging for ‘cultural relics’ is another theme at play here, with Plz! dusting off samples from James Brown to MF DOOM, from Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver to the work of serial soundtrack composer Piero Piccioni and more obscure cuts from Bun Hunga and Donna Kime.
出土 is not perfect — it is still a debut record, after all — but even with the above caveats, it’s an album that’s making a lot of people sit up and take notice.
出土 is out now.
Chengdu Guru: rapper PO8 looks to Shanghai jazz on new album
Compared to Boom Han, PO8 is a more established figure — he was on mainstream TV show Rap of China last year, for example — yet he only just put out his second album. Born in Chengdu, the rapper spent a significant chunk of time in Shanghai in the two year period between his debut LP and its follow-up, and the eastern city’s influence on the record is telling (the former French Concession’s Normandie Apartments / Wukang Mansion even feature on the cover).
The opening tracks are the most remarkable — and perhaps the most Shanghai-influenced. Not only do they feature Shanghai-based artists and Concrete Avalanche favourites J-Fever (小老虎) and Voision Xi, but they also riff off of the city’s storied jazz past, with PO8 rapping over gentle old-timey jazz rhythms. In particular, ‘Jing’an Thoughts’ is laced with Shanghai imagery, referencing both a district of the city and one of its most famous former residents, writer Eileen Chang.
Here’s ‘Umbrella’, which features J-Fever and comes with a cute animated video:
The album eventually shies away from going full Jazzmatazz, with the second half of the record seeing PO8 turn his attentions to his hometown. A nod to Yulin, Chengdu’s hipster hang out district, is disappointingly the start of a slide into more conventional sounds as the self-styled ‘poet rapper’ leans on more standard hip hop tropes. But the record is worth a spin for the first three tracks at least.
热岛 is out now.
A little pop interlude: Faye Wong covering The Cranberries
Michael Hong, of
fame, recently reviewed not one but four Faye Wong albums for Pitchfork, beginning with a reference to her classic Cranberries cover:Let a hundred plastic flowers bloom: Wutiaoren and friends are touring the US of A
Not sure if this was what the recent meeting between a certain pair of world leaders was paving the way for, but Guangdong ‘anti-pop’ outfit Wutiaoren are heading back to the US, with a series of dates starting this Friday.
Notably, they’ll be in New York for the Friends from the East festival, which also features the mighty Omnipotent Youth Society. Two other acts playing that festival — old-school rockers Miserable Faith and indie-pop outfit Landlord’s Cat — are also taking the opportunity to tour the States.
Can’t find any information on whether Omnipotent Youth Society will do the same, but they certainly seem to be booked in for NYC, with two dates in the city no less.
Wutiaoren are also giving a talk at Yale (following on from Ren Ke’s chat at Harvard earlier this year):
Wild child: Chinese folk grandee Zhang Weiwei’s first solo LP in a decade lands with a twist
As about-turns go, it’s not quite a renowned rapper releasing an album of flute recordings, but folk artist Zhang Weiwei’s new LP has certainly caused a bit of a stir in certain circles in China. Gansu-born Zhang has been a key figure on the country’s folk music scene since moving to Beijing in the late 1990s. He’s found acclaim both as a solo artist and as a member of Xiao He-fronted avant-folk act Glamorous Pharmacy and mellow folk band Wild Children. Yet new record SAMLI sees him delve into electronic music.
Here’s an example of his older work taken from his accordion-propelled album Baiyin Hotel, released in 2012 with trusty sidekick Guo Long on percussion, around five years after the initial songs were written. ‘The Rice Shop’ is an absolute classic, in part thanks to a version by Li Zhi, a folk-rock artist with a cult following but who has largely been scrubbed from the Chinese internet in recent years.
Understandably, after around a decade and a half of being known for and playing the same songs, Zhang has opted for a change in direction. Working with Shanghai electronic producer Yan Jun (not to be confused with the Beijing experimental sound artist of the same name), Zhang has thrown himself into the world of synths, crediting the instrument with helping build “the imagery and spatial sense of this album”.
There were hints of this at a fantastic show he put on with members of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra a few years back (where I spotted Li in the audience incidentally), but he was clearly still honing the new sound:
After what Zhang terms “many twists and turns” in the production process, the result is now available on international platforms, with the release of SAMLI marking his first new solo album in over a decade.
It’s certainly different, but it’s not as radical as all this may sound: the songs are still largely constructed as folk numbers — ‘Yongfeng Street’, in particular, hews pretty closely to Zhang’s previous work — and his skill for poetic, evocative lyrics remains undimmed. It’s electronic music, technically, but in a very broad sense. He probably won’t be playing Berghain any time soon with these songs.
Instead, it’s a progression, an experiment with a new tool. It’s interesting to see him explore new sonic territory and not rest on his laurels, but there’s plenty here for fans of Zhang’s older material, too.
“Amid the ups and downs of life, music put me at ease again, leaving behind these 50 minutes of sound,” Zhang says of SAMLI. “I’m very fortunate. Perhaps you too, have experienced such ups and downs and felt what I have felt. Perhaps what put me at ease, can put you at ease as well.”
SAMLI is out now. Full disclosure: I helped out with some of the translation for the album.
Exit music
Earlier this year, I wondered what was going to happen regarding Chinese bands touring internationally after the overnight reversal of the country’s zero-Covid policy. The answer has been a number of major acts heading overseas, from Chinese Football’s first adventures in Europe and FAZI taking on Singapore and South Korea, to Wang Wen heading to Taiwan and the aforementioned US tours for Wutiaoren, Miserable Faith et al.
Chinese Football had some lovely written diary entries from their travels, which were serialised on their WeChat account, and there’s been the odd video clip here and there from some of the others, but it feels like Chinese bands in general are still not great at putting together a tour video of any real substance.
Oh!Dirty Fingers’ capturing of their tour of Japan starts out in a positive fashion but some nicely-shot footage ends up undone by poor sound and the absence of any real storytelling or commentary, although given the band’s previous brushes with the law, you can probably forgive them for not wanting to say too much about a country with whom China’s relations remain… let’s say… complex. Anyway, check it out here:
ooh i might swing thru the wutiaoren show in LA, thank you!
I loved Omnipotent Youth Society live! But I haven't listened to them in about 5 years. Time to dig them back out again.