If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

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In this issue: a special edition, an interview with Ts Bayandalai. Following the release of his debut solo album Wind of Oirat, a record that “inhabits a space between folk memory and contemporary experimental music”, the Mongolian musician talks about the tension between tradition and modernity, how his approach to music has changed since his acclaimed 2020 EP Kimel, and the challenges of performing at 4,700 metres above sea level.

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“Rural life gave me my soul”

Ts Bayandalai was on the cusp of teenagehood when he first encountered the instrument that would become central to his sound. “When I graduated from elementary school, I went to the pastures to herd sheep. There was a professional shepherd there who used to carry a guitar around with him,” he recalls. “I’d never seen an instrument like it before.”

Having grown up in a nomadic family, the Mongolian songwriter and sound artist’s early brushes with music came via weddings and community get-togethers, events where “the elders would sit in a room and drink and sing folk songs all night long.” His main takeaway from such gatherings at the time was that there were sweets for him to munch on — it took meeting the guitar-playing shepherd for him to really pay attention to music. “[His guitar] captivated me and I began learning to play it with him in my spare time each day,” he says. “You could say that was my enlightenment.”

It was also the beginning of a path that would lead him, via an acclaimed EP on Space Fruity Records in 2020, to the release of his debut solo album Wind of Oirat last month on Austria’s Night Defined Recordings. As the label puts it, the LP represents “a further matured, composed and refined version of his signature sound, which combines traditional Mongolian music and instruments with influences from experimental music and post-rock.”

There’s another, more unusual influence at play on the record too: bel canto, the Italian operatic vocal style. Bayandalai spent two years studying the form at university; upon graduation, he joined an a cappella choir in Inner Mongolia. He admits it’s not the most common of paths to becoming a rock musician. “I learnt a lot during that time, even if not all of it was directly applicable to being in a band. I learned how to listen to what others were doing, for example. It gave me a lot of ideas that I would go on to use once I was playing in bands.”

That time came after his move to Beijing. Having left the choir, Bayandalai had been hoping to relocate to the Netherlands to study, but when that plan fell through he found himself in the Chinese capital instead. In hindsight, this may have been fortuitous: he arrived at a time when the city centre was bursting with music. “In 2012, there were numerous gig venues in Beijing’s Drum Tower area, every day there was an interesting performance — it was a scene I had never experienced before in Inner Mongolia. [Seeing] live music gave me a lot of motivation to start a band, and also increased my affection for rock music.”

It was in Beijing in 2012 that Bayandalai started Horse Radio, a band formed of fellow Mongolian transplants and with whom he still plays today. Three years later, he created December3AM as an outlet for some of his more experimental ideas.

His first proper solo release arrived in 2020. Billed as “love song[s] about hometown, grassland[s] and shaman gods”, Kimel is an utterly bewitching record. It comprises two eight-minute-plus tracks of hazy, psych-tinged folk-rock and a B-side of more textural experimental work. The EP is imbued with Bayandalai’s heritage but pushes beyond tradition to create what his official bio accurately terms “a listening experience that is at once primal and modern”.

Six years on, and the shimmering guitar notes and soaring vocals of Wind of Oirat’s opening track ‘Bird of Wind’ seem to pick up almost where Kimel’s first two sections left off. But just like that EP, the album suddenly shifts gears — in different ways to its predecessor.

Bayandalai points to another shift between the two records. “A lot has happened in the last six years, but the most significant change is the increased emphasis on authenticity of emotions, and the power that that authenticity brings,” he says. “I’ve tried to return to the essence of music itself and to use it to really consider our lives.”

Musically, this manifests in a more diverse range of sounds and a surprisingly upbeat canter throughout on Wind of Oirat. Prog-, kraut-, and post-rock elements are all present as traditional Mongolian instrumentation and Bayandalai’s distinctive falsetto are fused with synths, saxophone, and electric guitar. The album — the name of which references the Oirat people, the westernmost group of Mongols, whose ancestral home is in the Altai Mountains region — “inhabits a space between folk memory and contemporary experimental music”, as its accompanying press release puts it. This sense of a liminal space bridging tradition and modernity is captured in the LP’s juxtaposition of track titles such as ‘Apple Orchard’ and ‘404 Not Found 1’.

“We are influenced by modern music creation or education systems, but tradition is fragile; it needs a healthy habitat to continue,” says Bayandalai. “After more than a decade with the influence of Western music trends, many people living on this land have begun to examine their music and lives, which is a good thing. Tradition and modernity are not opposites — on the contrary, tradition has always been a form of nourishment.”

Bayandalai’s personal journey seems to embody this. He may have swapped the steppes of Inner Mongolia for the streets of Beijing, but he always maintained a strong connection with his roots. “Rural life gave me my soul,” he says emphatically. “As a child, everywhere I looked I could see forests and snow-capped mountains, where every creature grew freely and naturally. My homeland gave me a lot of self-understanding. Urban life gave me many conveniences in terms of structure for music. Moving from my home in the countryside to being ‘away’ in the city and transforming traditional music into stage art has been a very interesting process.”

Nevertheless, Bayandalai expresses concern that “urbanisation is happening too fast” and observes that “many cities look the same, like some endless copy-and-paste job”. One antidote to this is his Live Anywhere video series that sees him perform in stunning outdoor locations, from Inner Mongolian grasslands amid roaming animals to dramatic backdrops such as the Great Red Mountain near Ulaanqab.

There’s no particular criteria for choosing the locations, he says, though they are “usually in nomadic areas”. Their key characteristic is that they are “places where nature makes me happy”, he explains.

Not that such performances are without their challenges. A recent video filmed on Minya Konka Mountain in Sichuan, some 4,700 metres above sea level, was posted with a wry comment on WeChat noting how difficult it is to sing that high up. He also admits that it’s not exactly convenient to move equipment around in such locations. But these performances aren’t just a gimmick. “High altitudes can calm you down, allowing you to focus more on your breathing rhythm: things that are easy on the plains become slower,” he says. “Performing impromptu at high altitudes makes me more aware of the limitations nature presents to me. Being able to express myself well within these limitations is the best approach.”

So where would he go with the series if budget wasn’t a consideration? “I’ve always thought of performing in Antarctica,” he muses, “because it’s very cold… which is also a limitation.”

For now, he’s set to tour Europe this summer off the back of Wind of Oirat’s release. He’ll play Night Defined’s home city of Salzburg in late August and is currently seeking gigs in Spain and Portugal — the next steps on a journey that has been far from conventional.

Wind of Oirat is out now.

If you’re able to support with shows for Bayandalai in Europe this summer, please get in touch — either via the artist’s social channels or by replying to this email so I can connect you.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: funky “toilet jazz”, illegal cut-out CDs, math-rock, summery shoegaze with a dark underbelly, free jazz, “future archaeology”, almost imperceptible frequencies, and an album that calls for its listeners to “dance without stigma”.

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Modern life is rubbish: DJ Gurl’s creator digs deep for tales from the underbelly on bold new LP

On the opening track of Landfill, the album’s protagonist tells us, “There are no clean sounds here — only what’s been stepped on, used, and thrown away: evidence of a life. Abandoned desires, broken bodies, piled up here, fermenting.” The album is only a few minutes old, but it’s already clear that this is not your average Chinese pop record.

That this is not the world of ‘positive energy’ and saccharine ballads is affirmed over the course of the LP’s 13 tracks: there are samples from gay Taiwanese dramas, tales of illicit hotel room hook-ups and sugar daddies, nods to a pioneering Chinese punk, and an entire track dedicated to those living with HIV. Not exactly common elements in mainstream Chinese music.

The artist responsible is Lie, one of a number of aliases for Guizhou-born producer Chen Haonan. As DJ Gurl, he has been making heads spin with a string of exhilarating hyperpop releases over the last couple of years. As DJ Gonorrhea, he’s lent his quirky production skills to some of the other stars of China’s hyperpop scene. Now, as Lie, he’s seemingly attempting something quite different, something personal. Lie is technically another of Chen’s pseudonyms, but the persona feels like less of a proxy here. The producer raps and sings on Landfill (sometimes imperfectly), appears on its cover (hands bound behind his back, with characters scrawled across his chest), and delivers a full-on dance routine himself in its lead music video.

The opening track quickly sets the tone, not just with its signposting of “no clean sounds”, but with its first-person narrative. It sees Lie talk of growing up beside railway tracks and falling into a group of companions (“my mother didn’t like them; I also didn’t like them,” he says, in a level Guizhou accent that echoes those in Kaili Blues). “Some went to jail, some went to Southeast Asia, some died,” he tells us matter-of-factly. This album, Lie says, is for them.

As the record unfolds, it goes deeper. There are tales of lost nights, of debauchery and sugar daddies, but also of soul-searching and broken hearts (the album was released on May 20th, which said a certain way sounds a little like ‘I love you’ in Mandarin). “Why is life the hardest song to sing?” Lie asks on penultimate song ‘Lost Kids’, reflecting some of the album’s darker overtones. On that same track, he shouts out He Yong, the outspoken Beijing-born musician sometimes referred to as ‘China’s first punk’, who ended up being committed following a suicide attempt, and whose one and only album, released in 1994, Landfill takes its name from (He Yong’s record was more commonly translated as Garbage Dump, but the Chinese is the same). “I pray for more courage,” Lie declares as the record reaches its end.

Landfill nevertheless features plenty of bold moments. Appearing half way through the LP, the song ‘Aids, Aids’ makes it clear that Lie is looking to pack more of an emotional punch than with anything DJ Gurl has offered to date. The lyrics talk of “bravery” in the face of “harsh words”, of “shattered self-esteem” and death-wishes. The video version comes with the pointed message that it is intended to “honor all my friends living with HIV”, and includes a call to “dance against stigma”.

The album marks a musical change too. While DJ Gurl’s sound is built on “a blistering, bewildering blend of genres, all backed by club-ready, sometimes ridiculously in-your-face beats”, Landfill takes a different tack. The quality of production is still there, the playful touches and clever samples, and overall there’s still an eclecticism to the sound — 1990s-style pop motifs, myriad TV and film clips (including from an adaptation of Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys), traditional Chinese instrumentation and folk, and some bone-juddering beats all feature — but Lie is more focused on songs here. The approach is less hyper, more pop.

Aiding this undertaking are a number of notable guests. It’s testament to the reputation Chen has built through his various pseudonyms that he’s able to call in features from buzzy names such as Billionhappy (the hyperpop rapper whose most recent album Chen helped produce) and jackzebra (the viral cloud rap star who recently teamed up with Bloodz Boi). He also brings rising alternative acts along for the ride, such as Henan-born singer eden2001 and Guangzhou-based artist Yoyi.

The album is not without its blemishes: while some will hear a raw honesty in Lie’s vocals, others may just find him out of tune; Lie’s admiration for Michael Jackson is presumably only music- and dance-related (he also credits Terry Riley as an influence), but sharing that appreciation unqualified on a track called ‘Lost Kids’ is a jolting juxtaposition; likewise, taking a stand against prejudice one moment and sampling and shouting out Ye the next seems ill-judged.

Yet ultimately, if DJ Gurl demonstrated that Chen could do irreverent and in your face, Lie shows he can do powerful songwriting. Landfill is no throw-away record.

Landfill is out now.

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Close to the edge: art rockers handycam deliver a wild ride on album made in half a day

“Art Rock / Theatrical Music / Toilet Jazz”. These are the genres that Shanghai-based band handycam profess to traffic in. Their debut album proper sees them blend the kind of groove-inflected global sounds-influenced jazz of Beijing’s Sleeping Dogs and Brooklyn-founded act Pu Poo Platter with more out-there psych-ish guitar licks. Toilet jazz? Perhaps, but this is no piss-take: handycam’s line-up is flush with talent and their fun sound is rooted in some serious musicianship.

Initiated as a solo project in spring 2025, handycam has grown both sonically and numerically since then, with founder Hong Xinyang building a five-member group counting renowned Shanghai experimental guitarist Aming and Cola Ren collaborator and Pu Poo Platter saxophonist tga among its ranks. Kaidan Kaidan is their first studio album as a full band.

Released less than a month after it was recorded, the LP was put together in just half a day on a bunch of old analogue equipment and without any proper rehearsals. “The musicians were all a little tense,” says Hong. “One was still half asleep.” Presumably that state didn’t last too long, given the bursts of psych-ish guitars that punctuate so many of the tracks here.

The constraints may have caused a few hiccups, as Hong readily admits, but the ‘as-live’ approach and the less-polished moments it leads to give the album a suitably febrile energy. As Hong puts it, “Don’t compromise for realness, don’t make excuses, seize the moment, and grasp what truly matters.”

Kaidan Kaidan is out now.

Staying out for the summer: nu gaze with an edge from Sichuan’s Sleep Leaps

Is it a coincidence that Summer Outside, the second studio album from Chengdu band Sleep Leaps, features a cover that looks a little like that for Psychopomp? Probably. There’s obviously a very different significance behind the Japanese Breakfast album cover, but those two figures looking down into the camera, that shade of blue, the haziness of the image (in this case a watery reflection)… Maybe I’m only making the connection because Sleep Leaps’ music isn’t a million miles away from that of Michelle Zauner’s 2016 album at times — it has a strong taste of indie-pop, but is backed up by some more interesting, often noisy instrumentation as well.

Opener ‘Summer.Noise.Pool’ lays out the band’s priorities with its title and sonically sets the scene by blending catchy hooks with revved up shoegaze — it’s not dreampop, it’s too lively for that, but there’s a sweetness to Sleep Leaps’ sound that offsets some of its more boisterous moments. That they’ll be supported by Beijing kawaiicore act Xiao Wang when they visit the capital as part of their album tour is another nod to Sleep Leaps’ ability to oscillate between edginess and cute.

The band’s lyrics also undercut some of their more saccharine moments: the album takes its title from a collection of short stories by renowned Korean author Kim Ae-ran, all of which deal with loss. Sleep Leaps may be bringing some summery vibes, but there’s a darkness beneath the surface, too.

Summer Outside is out now.

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Scoring the end of the world: Mongolian, Daoist and cosmic metal

It’s been three and a half years since Muqali burst onto the Chinese metal scene with their eponymous debut EP. Their return is not a quiet one. Marching Under the Moon’s Wisdom, Triumphant in the Golden Sunset, the band’s first full-length, continues frontman Tergel’s “obsession with ancestral worship and Mongolian war culture” and is as grand as its title suggests.

Yet for all its apparent pomp and ceremony, there’s a “grittiness” to this work, as identified by leading Chinese metal label Pest Productions, who are responsible for the release. Even more intriguing is that, while the album seems overtly history-focused, it also “traces a path from tales of Mongol conquests to the contemporary crises collectively borne by their kinsmen”.

Divina Vindicta set their stall out early on debut album Interring Fate to Behold the Way. No gently building intros for them, they get straight to it with some ferocious drumming to open the record. Yet while this intensity rarely lets up (and at points, only increases), there’s more to the band’s work than just out-and-out noise.

The official introduction to the album talks of it being “grounded in strictly doctrinal engagement with Daoist practices and cosmology”; one track’s title translates loosely as ‘36 Days of Secluded Meditation, Transcending Worldly Concerns and Forgetting All Earthly Desires and Worries’. Musically, too, there’s an interesting use of traditional Chinese instrumentation and rhythms at times, along with elements of dungeon synth, even if it’s the raw black metal sound that dominates throughout.

There’s a more melodic slant to the black metal found on the first album from Beijing’s The Eternal Dusk, whose Letter Beyond Lightyears unfolds through four movements. It’s a record with an interstellar focus, but in a very metal way: its tracks purvey a “cosmic vacancy stretched across time—where light and darkness meet in a perpetual dusk, a threshold that is at once terminus and passage”. Atmospheric and with some interesting ideas, this is a solid debut.

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Just briefly: cut-out CDs, math-rock and more

It’s hard to talk about the birth of modern alternative music in China without mentioning dakou. This is the name given to CDs and cassette tapes that were sent to China for recycling in the 1980s and ’90s. To stop them being resold, they had holes punched through them, but they still found their way onto the black market, exposing a whole generation of music fans and practitioners to sounds that were otherwise hard to come by in China at the time.

Back in 2003, an anonymous artist gathered a bunch of dakou CDs and made their own sounds with them on a broken CD player, “with two MD players and a four-track recorder as production tools, occasionally also employing a turntable and FM radio tuning.” The resulting album was recently given a new lease of life with a version being uploaded to Bandcamp:

One for Chinese Football fans here (which is all of us, right?): Hangzhou quartet No Decision at Night released their debut album at the start of April, a record with an emo and math-rock heart, and which should appeal to fans of the more famous Wuhan band.

ayrtbh (aka Wang Changcun) is a quality alternative computer music producer who’s always worth paying attention to, as proven once again by his recent release stupidity good as new, an album of experimental pieces. Reuniting him with Japanese label Tokinogake after he last worked with them in 2023, the record begins atmospherically before deploying increasingly deconstructed rhythms.

i wish i was wrong comprises two tracks from two key figures on Beijing’s experimental scene: Sub Jam label runner Yan Jun (who’s also a major reference point for the article on dakou linked above) and former Chui Wan member Yan Yulong. On this collaboration, the former employs a random low-frequency generator while the latter embellishes the outputs with his trusty electric violin. “conceptually we call this music,” the introductory text notes.

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Now jazz now: three new Chinese free jazz recordings

Lao Dan has been a leading figure on China’s free jazz scene for over a decade now. Classically trained in the Chinese bamboo flute, his work often blends traditional Chinese instrumentation with avant-garde saxophone and multinational jazz elements. That’s the case for his new album Klotski, released on Austrian label Trost Records. The five-track LP captures his work with percussionist Michael Zerang, double bassist Joshua Abrams, and pianist Mabel Kwan after he performed live with the trio of Chicago-based musicians back in 2024.

Billed as the Lao Dan Chicago Quartet, the group weave some heady rhythms as Lao Dan brings his bamboo flute, tenor sax, and suona to the party.

Guangdong-born saxophonist Nezok is an avant-garde saxophonist who also runs Foshan experimental venue MiceSpot. Earlier this year, he visited Shanghai and performed at Trigger, a similarly experimental gig venue and the home base for harsh noise act Torturing Nurse. Nezok was joined for an improvised free-for-all by Zheng Haozhong (known for his work with psych band Dolphy Kick Bebop), Leon Wang Olsson (the percussionist for soulful jazz act Pu Poo Platter), and Mai Mai (who’s long been a leading figure on the Shanghai noise and experimental scenes).

The sessions, featuring two duo sets and two where all four played together, were recorded and the result, in Nezok’s words, was “a rare pure improvisation live recording in China, and a snapshot of exchanges within the country’s independent avant-garde music scene.”

It’s not often that Li Zenghui provides the most chilled out moment in a round-up of new releases, but the latest track from the Qingdao-born experimental saxophonist is a remarkably soothing number. Over the years he’s toyed with noise and avant-garde sounds and given a wilder edge to bands such as Omnipotent Youth Society, The Fallacy and A Wordless Orange (not to mention let loose with Black Midi), but here he delivers a slice of contemplative jazz befitting of the track’s title, ‘Gentle Graceful Snow’.

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Exit music

Changsha weird-pop artist Chainhaha put out a new four-track EP entitled Three Seeds earlier this month. Here’s a new video for the lead (and arguably best) track from the record, ‘Archaeologist from the Future’:

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: dinosaur-themed emo, Tibetan construction songs, outspoken Qingdao punk, Kazakh folk that “summons spirits from ages past”, new Yu Su, and a clutch of alternative hip hop records featuring a murder mystery, a Memphis rap obsessive, and a former food delivery driver.

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Life’s a struggle: ex-delivery driver rapper xiajie drops a startling hip hop album

“I was born to shine on a stage,” declares xiajie at one point on his second album, Rent a room for love. Until now, life appears to have had other plans for him. The Wuhan-born rapper has written of spending time in prison, of being abandoned by his parents, and of working in demeaning conditions and suffering a leg injury as a delivery driver. But what’s that old saying about life giving you lemons? xiajie has taken what’s been thrown at him and decided to rap about it.

Hence we get ‘fuck you food’ (titled ‘I Deliver Food’ in Chinese), with lines about dropping off cakes, suffering a flat tire, smelling bad and feeling ashamed of his profession. We get a track — one of the record’s best — entitled ‘Done with Life’s Bullshit’ when the album is only a few minutes old. And we get heartfelt lyrics about feelings of insignificance, resentment, guilt.

The title track brings it all together by describing the process by which he recorded the album: alone in a room with a mic and a computer, not always knowing where his next meal was going to come from but pinning his hopes on becoming a popular rapper, both envying and idolising major stars.

Yet there are moments of light and of hope, too. In the midst of venting his frustrations with the hand he’s been dealt, xiajie also finds occasional points of pride, pays tribute to his friends, and displays a gutsy determination.

The rapper’s style won’t be for everyone; his nasal sound and at times abrasive delivery can be challenging. But then, an album based on his experiences to date was never going to be an easy listen. “Real life, real talk,” he frequently writes when on his social profiles and when posting his work — this record is about sincerity, about what ‘keeping it real’ means to a twentysomething former delivery worker in China, not about making the listener comfortable.

The album’s manifestation, together with an accompanying nationwide tour, are also testament to the protagonist’s perseverance. “Grit your teeth, grit your teeth,” xiajie raps as the album reaches its climax, before ending the record by repeating, “I will never hate myself.”

Rent a room for love is out now.

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Shadows of tomorrow: three more alternative hip hop records from China

A couple of issues ago, this newsletter spotlighted Guo Yinan and Yuan’s exciting album The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment, holding it up as an example of the more interesting sounds to be found away from the mainstream in Chinese hip hop. The above record is another example; here are three more:

Beam of Light — Psynius

This is a tear-jerker. Hebei rapper Psynius dedicates this album to his mother, explaining on the last track proper that, “My mother was like a beam of light, leaving before she could see me grow up, so suddenly.”

Over drumless tracks — instrumental versions of which are also available as part of the Bandcamp release — Psynius delves into his family’s stories and struggles, “preserving memories with melody”, as label Explore Music puts it. While his late mother is at the heart of the album, he also raps affectionately about his grandparents and “brothers and sisters”. Audio clips of his relatives are also woven into the LP’s sonic tapestry alongside samples from the likes of Japanese jazz musician Yuji Ohno and British composer John Cameron, giving Beam of Light a feeling akin to watching sepia-tinged home movies or poring over an old photo album.

It’s emotional, but beautifully judged.

Silver Engraved Cigarette Roller — Memphis Tangren and Wong Parry

Perhaps the raw honesty of Psynius’ record influenced my feelings about this next album, maybe it’s simply because I’m completely out of touch with the subcultures that have birthed it, but I don’t really understand Silver Engraced Cigarette Roller. Doesn’t mean it’s not an intriguing release, though.

Memphis Tangren is a young teenager from Guangdong who, as his name suggests, has a penchant for hip hop from the dirty south. His experience as an MC himself, is… limited — from what I can ascertain, his online renown largely stems from something to do with raising electronic pets, and him subsequently being drawn into the world of Memphis rap via the comments section (he’s also been involved in apparent ‘beefs’ on music streaming platform NetEase). Wong Parry is a vaporwave-influenced producer whose stated mission is to build ‘China’s Griselda’, seemingly a reference to the New York boom bap label founded by Westside Gunn. Together, they’ve produced what Wong believes is an album “that, at least in terms of production quality, can rival underground albums from Europe and the US.”

That caveat is crucial: the production is good, a mêlée of hazy beats, TV and film clips (The Twilight Zone, Breaking Bad, and Takashi Miike’s Ambition Without Honour among them), and samples from everyone from Denzel Curry to Brazilian producer Roberto Menescal.

The rapping, meanwhile, is something else. Both Tangren and Wong deliver bars across the record, but neither is an accomplished MC and it shows, even when Quasimodo-style effects are used on some verses. The content also unnecessarily skews horrorcore at times.

It’s led to a bit of head-scratching among some Chinese hip hop observers (is this a joke? Some sort of bizarre clout grab?), but what is certain is that the album is unusual and notable. It’s also made its way to Bandcamp. See what you make of it:

Derailed — Xie Tianyou

Thankfully, this next album is a bit easier to comprehend, although there is an air of (intentional) mystery involved. Last time we heard from Xie he was using rap to explore the themes found in Damián Szifron’s collection of short films Wild Tales. This time, Derailed uses the idea of space-time loops (think Looper or Tenet) and a “cyclical murder case” on a train to examine questions of self-worth and alienation.

Musically, there’s a more cohesive feel to this record compared with Xie’s previous effort, with prominent piano parts plus original cello, flute, and electric guitar contributions that provide an apt, mature backing for his thoughtful verses. It’s a suitably introspective blend that pulls you in as a listener.

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Something different: Uyghur Grooves, a Lisu “mixtape”, Tibetan worker songs, and more

In April, Yazi Ilminur Hemit delivered a fantastic hour of ‘Uyghur Grooves’ on Palestinian platform Radio Alhara. You can now listen back to the mix here; it features Puppet, Askar Grey Wolf, and a piece from Li Xingyu’s Xinjiang folk collection The Farthest Place From the Sea, and spans traditional folk, hip hop, pop and more.

Also out last month was this re-release of Kink Gong’s The Lisu, Laurent Jeanneau’s “sort-of-mixtape” that’s “based on recordings of music from the Lisu communities in China and Thailand”:

More field recordings are available on Silence in the Valley of Songs, a record featuring “folk songs collected by the author between 2009 and 2012 in the Sman shod region of Sde dge County, Dkar mdzes Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. The tracks consist mainly of work songs, including songs for ramming walls, milking yaks, plowing, harvesting barley, and divination.” Younger generations are less familiar with such traditions, meaning that today, “the scene of a thousand voices raised in unison has all but vanished”.

Traditional folk songs also form the spine of a new album from Mamer. The ever-evolving Kazakh musician first rose to prominence with an LP of relatively straight-laced folk tracks on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label before reinterpreting the traditional Kazakh songbook in increasingly experimental ways. On Bar xatteƣem, Bar ⱪayƣem (All the Joys, All the Pains), he comes the closest he’s been in a long time to that Real World album, quietly plucking away at a secondhand guitar and layering his own vocals to create a choral effect — or even that of a ghostly choir. “Mamer summons a host of brothers to sing in chorus, but these brothers are spirits from ages past,” an introduction from Zhang Xiaozhou explains. “They ride in formation on horseback, coursing through his vocal cords, a golden thoroughfare.”

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Q&A-list: interviews with Yu Su, 33EMYBW, and Otay:Onii

Kaifeng-born, London-based producer and chef Yu Su has an excellent new album out called Foundry. To mark its release, she was interviewed by . has also teased an interview with her, so definitely keep an eye out for that (and read his review of Foundry here).

Speaking of brilliant female producers, 33EMYBW is the subject of a recent deep dive profile from PAM Magazine, following her appearance at Le Guess Who? Festival last year.

And rounding off a trio of conversations with interesting figures is ’s in-depth chat with Otay:Onii, who also just dropped a new record, the delightfully-titled Love Is In The Shit.

Just briefly: new Chinese emo, all-female punk, and traditional instruments-meet-noise

China’s emo revival shows no signs of abating. One of the latest missives from the movement comes in the form of a five-track EP from Changsha’s WaytheDinoScream. It’s entitled The School Day We Spent With a Brachiosaurus and is hopefully a sign that the band will only be releasing records themed around dinosaurs; dino-emo, perhaps. It’s also a fun listen, full of youthful energy and threaded through with sounds of urban Chinese life.

Three years on from their second album War is Nightmare, all-female Qingdao punk group Dummy Toys are back with a new album, The Point of No Return. “We are still who we are, more powerful than ever before, more uncompromising, and more relentless,” they say by way of introduction. Songs such as ‘Artificial Inefficiency’, ‘No More Discrimination’ and ‘No Means No’ show they’ve not lost their urge to speak out.

Yang Haisong and Wang Xiaofang have released the latest in their series of fascinating explorations of traditional Chinese instrumentation and noisier textures. Entitled Ballad of May and released on May 1st, it comprises recordings made last year in, err, the summer. Joining the guitar-and-yangqin duo this time is talented percussionist Liu Pi, with the trio serving up an atmospheric pair of pieces from Hangzhou and Chengdu broken into two tracks each. Yang and Wang are essentially forging their own genre at this point — long may it continue.

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Guangzhou-based producer Luo Qinlin recently released a new experimental electronic album as RESBina, a project that marks “a new phase in her musical work”.

And that gives me an excuse to post this video of her performing in “an abandoned cave shelter” three years ago:

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: made in Manchester drum n bass-tinged pop, a musical mahjong set, a Mongolian Metallica cover, computer game baroque, an 18-hour logistics recording, powerful post-punk, an anti-AI anthem, the new album from New Order-endorsed Sichuanese band Stolen, and Cui Jian celebrates four decades since the “birth of Chinese rock ’n’ roll”.

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Velvet goldmine: Hangzhou trio Heitian Yizhen deliver a post-punk headrush

China has a long and glorious history of post-punk. The godfathers of the genre, PK14, may have moved away from the sound on their most recent album (more on that if it ever makes it to international platforms in full), but there are still plenty of young acts looking to put their own mark on it.

Back in April 2024, Hangzhou trio 黑甜一枕 Heitian Yizhen — whose band name is taken from a centuries-old idiom about drinking well and sleeping soundly, and is sometimes translated into English as Velvet Pillows in Black — showed bags of potential with their debut EP on Ruby Eyes Records. 按兵不动 had some missteps, but mostly it crackled with energy as it blended brooding synths and electronic elements with crunching guitars and a classic post-punk swagger. Almost exactly two years later, they’ve delivered a full-length follow up — a record that confirms them as one of Chinese post-punk’s most promising purveyors.

Not that the band are keen to be labelled as such. Zhao Yiyang, Heitian’s chief creative force, has even dismissed the post-punk tag in interviews. On Red Mountain, you can kind of see why. The core of the band’s sound that they introduced two years ago remains intact, but they’ve both honed and bolstered it. When they’re in their post-punk groove, the trio are lean and focused, yet they also demonstrate an ability to switch things up, with psych-ish and goth-y break-outs in the mix. Whereas their EP felt a little messy in places, Red Mountain’s use of these different sounds feels much more cohesive.

Perhaps this is thanks to its production process. While Zhao has said the songs were written over the course of several months, the album was recorded in just a few weeks at the beginning of this year. She and her bandmates were effectively sequestered away in her small studio until the songs were done, lending the record a sonic intensity that chimes well with its lyrics about self-examination, “obsession and vulnerability”.

Zhao’s experience likely also plays a part. She began playing piano at the age of just five, studied music in the UK (there’s a recurring UK theme in this issue, oddly), and played a key part in Helen Feng’s Nova Heart project. That last bit of her CV came toward the end of Chinese rock’s D-22 heyday, but at times it feels as Heitian have hoovered up influences from that period and spun them into something fresh.

They may not think of themselves as being part of the genre, but Heitian Yizhen have shown there’s still life in Chinese post-punk, still interesting things that can be done with the form. And whatever genre tag we’re putting on it, Red Mountain is certainly a big step forward for the band and a rewarding experience for the listener.

Red Mountain is out now.

True faith: Sichuanese singer jody opens up on dnb-laced electro-pop LP

Although she hails from Chengdu, RnB-influenced singer jody积融’s new album Is it gonna happen again? was finished in Manchester. The record comes with a slinky pop sheen, but is also indebted to drum and bass, so it’s perhaps fitting that it was completed in the UK, the home of dnb and of artists such as PinkPantheress, who’ve put a new pop spin on the genre.

That’s not to say that jody isn’t doing her own thing here — in fact, that’s kind of the point of the whole album. The record, we’re told, “traces from the ripples of personal psychology to the rhythms of cosmic time and space, capturing that single, certain glimmer of light within the infinite vertigo.” Apparently documenting her “long journey of self-exploration” and “the labyrinth of her cyclical life struggles”, Is it gonna happen again? is personal but in an instantly accessible way. jody’s sultry vocals and sense of melody are a big part of this, but so too is the album’s underpinning by DIY sensibilities and emotional honesty.

It’s an approach that extends to jody’s entire aesthetic. Take her album cover art, where she’s photographed slightly out of focus beside a cat whose eyes have caught the flash. She’s stood atop a table, seemingly in an apartment, while wearing a wedding dress, bright red gloves and boots, and with a cigar hanging from her mouth; a clearly posed yet playful composition.

There’s a similar feel to her music videos as well, whether it’s the purposefully lo-fi accompaniment to ‘Forever’, which mashes together travel footage with clips of her dancing in front of a nighttime cityscape, or the more produced ‘Cocoon’, which looks higher budget but still preserves a certain offbeat quirkiness.

It’s this slightly oddball energy that helps distinguish jody’s work from that of the standard Mandopop artist. It’s hard to imagine many mainstream singers turning food storage advice into a hook, for example, yet in jody’s hands ‘keep it in the fridge’ becomes an infectious banger. Such talents make her an artist to watch.

Is it gonna happen again? is out now.

More electro-pop: meet the creators of a mahjong-inspired musical instrument

Speaking of electro-pop artists and interesting music videos, Beijing-born Tokyo-based singer, producer and cartoonist Diàn — whose YouTube videos have racked up tens of thousands of views in recent years — has just put out a new album on Chinese label Modern Sky.

The record is largely saccharine synth-pop, which is not standard Concrete Avalanche fare, but looking up the new LP on YouTube did lead me to something a bit more interesting: the creation of Jongbeat. ‘What is Jongbeat?’ you ask; well, there’s a video for that:

Said video is in Japanese and Chinese with pretty shabby audio quality, but essentially it sees Diàn and mad professor / producer Nobumichi Tosa (founder of ‘artistic unit’ Maywa Denki) explaining that Jongbeat is an instrument that at long last merges electronic music with mahjong. Pushing different tiles gives you different sounds, from bass to drums to vocals. Skip to about two minutes in on the above video for a demonstration that (naturally) also features dancing cats.

And if you want to buy a set, it’s yours for just ¥5,000.

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Just briefly: anti-AI songs, video game baroque and, err, Piers Morgan

Beijing rockers Birdstriking are back with a couple of tracks as part of a new EP. The pair of songs includes a new studio version of ‘KO! AI!’, which featured on their 2024 live album and which has of course found greater meaning as AI’s rise has accelerated. Set in 2052, the song is about the handing over of all city management to an AI platform and is billed as the start of a series entitled When Songs Become the Most Dangerous Code.

Cyan Pac and Zimabu, two excellent projects from the talented musician and producer Liu Qing, have brought their discographies to Bandcamp. Start with last year’s wonderful Witch Hand, which blends off-kilter electronics with soaring jazz — and even clips of Bassem Youssef and Piers Morgan infamous argument from 2023. It’s also worth noting that her similarly quirky collaborator, and fellow Changsha native, Chainhaha has new music on the way in the coming weeks.

Speaking of quirky and off-kilter sounds, if you’ve ever wondered what a combination of baroque, prog-rock, and computer game music would sound like you’re in luck. Tianjin-born producer Shen Ao has combined these elements on Cyberspace, their debut EP. London label Kit Records, who are behind the release, describe it as “five movements of knee-wiggling, tear duct-tingling, and downright bizarre audio”.

‘Nothing to My Name’: Cui Jian marks 40 years of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll

Simply a love song. That’s how Cui Jian likes to portray ‘Nothing to My Name’. It’s what he told the BBC in 2010, for example. On the face of it, the song is exactly that. The lyrics are all about unrequited love, about someone giving everything and getting nothing in return. Yet whether you accept Cui’s assertion on this point or not, for many the song will forever be associated with Tiananmen Square, after he performed it for the student protestors gathered there in 1989.

That link has sometimes meant an uneasy status around the song and Cui more generally in China. His ‘New Long March’ tour in early 1990 was aborted part-way through, establishing something of a pattern for his on-off performances in the country over the following decade. And while he has continued to play ‘Nothing to My Name’ at festivals and gigs over the years, it was widely reported in 2014 that he refused to take part in Chinese national TV’s Spring Festival Gala after organisers said he wasn’t allowed to sing his most famous song.

Earlier this month however, Cui announced that he would be holding a special concert in Beijing’s Capital Indoor Stadium on May 9th to mark “40 years of Chinese rock ’n’ roll”, explicitly linking the start of that era to the release of ‘Nothing to My Name’ in 1986.

“Forty years after ‘Nothing to My Name’, will you choose to continue?” asked a post announcing the concert on Cui’s official WeChat account asked, a post that echoed some of the song’s lyrics. “Forty years, seven studio albums, countless performances — Chinese rock has always moved forward, questioning, exploring, creating, persevering. As the years turn, have you changed? In 1986, a question was posed, endlessly asked. In 2026, an answer is given: continue!”

Whether ‘Nothing to My Name’ is a love song or a political anthem, its status as the starting point of Chinese rock is widely accepted. And whether Cui’s Beijing performance has a certain historical resonance or is simply an elder statesman — the ‘Godfather of Chinese rock’ in fact, as ‘Lao Cui’ is often referred to — getting a good pay day as a legacy act, audiences are clearly excited — tickets sold so well for the first show that a second date has now been added.

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World in motion: Chengdu electro-rockers Stolen try to make sense of a restless society on new LP

In case the title of their new album, Cacophonic Symphony, doesn’t give it away, Chengdu electro-rock band Stolen have always had a penchant for the dramatic. It’s not just that they like a big concept — their last album was about how “every creation is being eroded”, while 2024 EP I Generated tackled artificial intelligence — it’s in their sound too, from Liang Yi’s theatrical vocals to the band’s high-octane fusion of techno and rock.

When they released previous LP Eroded Creation in 2022 however, I wrote that it felt “oddly hollow”. Fortunately, that’s not a criticism you can level at Cacophonic Symphony. Stolen are very much back with a bang on this new record.

The band, who’ve previously supported New Order on tour and worked extensively with Factory Records promoter Mark Reeder, say their latest LP was created in around 20 days in London and — much like Red Mountain above — it seems to have benefitted from being put together in such a tight window. The recording process, which happened back home in Chengdu, may have been longer, but the songs have retained a certain urgency. There’s also a clearer thrust to the record’s sound; electronic elements persist but this is probably the most ‘rock’ the band have ever sounded.

Not that they’ve shaken off their tendency for a high concept blurb, however:

“The contemporary world itself is a paradox. When we are immersed in it, everything feels overwhelmingly noisy; restlessness and contradiction are everywhere. Society keeps filling itself with all kinds of "placebos", from which we try to draw brief moments of relief and escape.

”Yet when the perspective pulls back, those conflicting voices and emotions, the contradictory actions and currents of the times, begin to reveal an inexpressible sense of order. "Cacophonic Symphony" is a response to this condition.”

It’s a powerful response, at that.

Cacophonic Symphony is out now. To promote it, Stolen are undertaking a massive tour, including dates across Europe.

Experimental round-up: 18 hours of logistics, messages in bottles, and “hard, dry sounds”

Sterling work here from Yan Jun’s Sub Jam label, who’ve released an album of sounds captured by a “cheap digital recorder” that was switched on while it was being transported from China to Switzerland.

“Someone pressed the REC button before placing the device in a thin plastic foil and in its cardboard box. It's still unclear if it was done on purpose or if it's an accident. The recording stopped 18 hours, 11 minutes and 50 seconds later, once the battery had run down,” explains Swiss artist Laurent Güdel, who found and edited the recording once the package had arrived at their address. “As the device progresses on its path through shipping facilities we can listen to the sonic environment of a logistic center but also hear how the recording process itself is affected by the transport.”

The release includes an edited 180-minute version from Güdel, but also the full 18 hours of original recordings if you really get into it. As Yan says of the full version, “let’s eat time”.

Also dealing with distance, but in a quite different way, is a new release on Wuhan’s Tailnia label. It pairs two London-based artists — Zheng Hao, a Wuhan native who has worked with the likes of Sun Yizhou and organises regular events at the excellent Hundred Years Gallery venue, and Hello Spiral, an alias of improvisationalist Joseph Tony Baldwin, whose sounds are “assembled from a motley array of materials”. The premise is that the two “found themselves stranded on desert islands”:

“They were able to fashion crude fishing apparatus from the detritus on their respective islands. They cast their nets within the sea of automatically uploaded YouTube videos. Messages in bottles were exchanged, as regards to the ‘rules’.”

The result is four intriguing sound collages.

Speaking of Sun Yizhou, he recently released a collaboration with Berlin-based trumpeter Axel Dörner on the follow-worthy Japanese label Ftarri. Dörner has been active in European experimental circles since the 1990s, while Sun is billed as “a representative of China's new generation of experimental musicians”, making for an interesting cross-generational as well as international context for their recording.

“With Sun Yizhou using electronics feedback and noise floor, and Axel Dörner playing trumpet and electronics, the two musicians produced hard, dry sounds,” Ftarri explains.

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Closing out with some horsehead fiddle-infused metal music.

Mongolian outfit Nine Treasures have remastered their 2012 album Arvan Ald Guulin Honshoor, a record that the official intro describes as “a classic and foundational work in Chinese folk metal”, but came with some slightly muddy production in parts. The new release looks to rectify those issues; the LP also features a cover of Metallica classic ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

The Beijing-formed band are always good value live and are touring the US later this year, opening for Mushroomhead and Fear Factory on an extensive tour stretching from Portland to Nashville across October and November. Catch and / or support them if you can.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: exciting alternative hip hop from Xi’an, glorious coming-of-age shoegaze, nature-inspired deep bass, “a ‘Frankenstein-like’ musical world of urban legends”, Record Store Day 2026, and a magical reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz in rural China.

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Falling out the sky: left-field hip hop duo impress on experimental-leaning LP

Just over a quarter of the way through 2026 and we have a record that is being talked about in certain corners of the Chinese music world as a strong album of the year candidate. Who knows what the next seven months or so will bring us, but Xi’an experimental hip hop duo Guo Yinan and Yuan have certainly laid down an exciting marker.

Released on Hong Kong label AfterSound, the album comes with a title that can be translated as The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment. That imagery of a vortex certainly feels appropriate as producer Guo pulls listeners into a swirl of sounds — from snippets of much-sampled favourites such as Marlena Shaw and Blowfly, to more unusual (and recent) selections such as the music of Sam Wilkes. There are also samples from closer to home: at one point a sweetly-sung melody by Guo’s young niece is deployed. It’s a mix that’s far removed from the run-of-the-mill trap beats that feel so dominant at the moment; instead the album is more akin to the Anticon label’s output, or that of Billy Woods, if you want a more contemporary reference point.

Faced with the slightly intimidating task of rapping over the top of all this is wordsmith Yuan. He rises to the challenge. His delivery can sometimes feel raw, but that’s intentional — he’s not an MC who’s looking to filter his emotions; his bars are hard-hitting. Yet he also provides something for the listener to hang onto in the midst of the album’s sonic whirlpool. His purposeful, powerful flow brings a certain cohesion to the album, anchoring it while Guo stirs the vortex of experimental production in the background, and occasionally picks up the mic himself.

The lyrics are sometimes as dense as the music underpinning them, but cutting through are frequent moments of righteous anger. Cutting, conscious examinations of social issues, youthful disenchantment and frustration are mixed with surges of emotional reflection. “We will not erupt in silence,” he declares at one point.

While Yuan and Guo are the main characters, a handful of guests also wade in across the album’s 17 tracks. Notable among them is Li Wenjun, whose noisy, unpredictable, Death Grips-esque album The Vigil of Oriental Youth That Never Ends is a similarly exhilarating listen, though annoyingly one that’s yet to legitimately make it to international platforms. Leap — another leading light of China’s more abstract hip hop scene and one whose 2024 album helped pave the way for this record — also makes an appearance (see below for more on his LP).

Away from the mainstream spotlight and the often shiny commercialism of the Rap of China cohort, there are some fascinating sounds bubbling away in Chinese hip hop circles. Guo and Yuan’s Vortex is well worth diving into.

The Vortex Reconstruction Experiment is out now.

More beats and pieces: bonus material for those in search of alternative Chinese hip hop

Speaking of the wave of more interesting alternative Chinese hip hop that’s emerged in recent years, Hangzhou label Happy Records have just updated their Bandcamp, adding a host of records that have helped define this exciting new movement.

Highlights include the aforementioned 2024 album from Leap, which the label proclaims “undoubtedly changed the Chinese rap game”, and the similarly disruptive collaboration between Xihong and CNdY that came out just a few weeks before it (and made Concrete Avalanche’s best of the year mix). There are also works from Soulooper, the hip hop alter ego of cassette player romance creator Luo Oumeng. Here’s a compilation to start you off:

Elsewhere, it’s more in the soulful, funky instrumental vein, but while we’re talking alternative Chinese hip hop, here’s a new beattape from Beijing-based producer Jinsfake, who reunites with long-time collaborator Dancancook, a Hong Kong-born producer based in Shanghai and the Netherlands. “I’m just digging/chopping/truncating/looping..try to make some raw beat and enjoy the process,” Jinsfake said of his first full-length beattape back in 2017, and almost a decade on, it seems he’s still finding fun in fusing together new instrumentals.

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April skies: spring-appropriate shoegaze from Hana Fuki

‘What if The Jesus and Mary Chain were from Zhejiang?’ I asked when posting ‘A beginner’s guide to Chinese shoegaze’ a couple of years ago. Well, now the actual Jesus and Mary Chain are headed to Zhejiang — they’re headlining Can Festival this weekend, on the Zhoushan Islands. And just as they do, we get a reminder that shoegaze is still in vogue in certain Chinese music circles, with the lovely new album from Hani Fuki.

“For the past few years, I always hid in the crowd, afraid of the light. Now, I have the courage to share my moments,” writes Po, the main creative force behind these songs, as part of a lengthy, heartfelt letter posted to Bandcamp explaining how this album came to fruition. It may have been a slightly meandering route to get here, but the destination is delightful — After 19 is a treat.

Po’s exorcism of end-of-teenage-years memories is carried out over a clutch of sweet songs — hazy enough to feel part of the shoegaze tradition, but with plenty of melody rising above the fuzziness to make it instantly accessible. It’s earnest and honest throughout — just like the letter that accompanies it.

“The songs contain words I want to say to [co-producer] Cucumber,” Po writes. “He recently turned 19, and I want to wish him a happy birthday. I also wish the same for you. Whether your 19th year is behind you or not yet, may you always be fearless.”

After 19 is out now.

Recommended reading: Omnipotent Youth Society, Leah Dou as lesbian icon, and DIY Chinese idols

Omnipotent Youth Society toured Europe last month. Tickets were very expensive, there was no support act, and — with no hint of a new album on the horizon — everyone knew they’d be playing pretty much the exact same set they’ve been playing for the last few years. And yet. And yet venues were packed, with audiences singing to the rafters.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see them live multiple times over the years, but I still get tingles seeing them perform, even when the sets are very similar (albeit with some significant enforced changes at times, as the article below notes). Yes, I’m a foreigner and my perspective on what they’re singing about is different, but that doesn’t mean seeing them is without emotional resonance for me. This fantastic piece from uses one of the band’s recent European tour stops to reflect upon why Omnipotent Youth Society’s music means so much to so many, and why they stand out in China for their independent spirit.

READ: Living Like This for Thirty Years, Until the Building Collapses

Another fascinating read here from on how Leah Dou — elusive pop star and daughter of Faye Wong and Dou Wei — became an “accidental queer icon” in China. In the process, concerts by the singer, who is sometimes referred to as ‘the People’s husband’, have become important, all-too-rare spaces for LGBTQ+ expression or at least comfort.

READ: China’s Gen Z Lesbian Party: The Rise of Leah Dou as an Accidental Queer Idol

Years ago, I spent a fascinating / horrifying afternoon backstage at the ‘election’ event of SNH48, Shanghai’s (acrimoniously unofficial) AKB48 spin-off. It was a thoroughly weird window into the pop idol machine and how it chewed up and spat out young female performers. But here’s an interesting take on that whole world: “exhausted” by the likes of Blackpink and BTS, fans and performers in China are forming their own ‘grass-roots’ idol pop groups, as discovered in this piece for The Guardian, which also quotes the always insightful . (Side note: Collin also recently wrote about, err, me in a post for No Chambers.)

READ: ‘People are exhausted by Blackpink and BTS’: the DIY Chinese bands redefining corporate ‘idol’ pop

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New (Oriental) Order: Yunnan electro-punk and nature-inspired deep bass on Chengdu label’s double-bill

From the names alone, the new Wind Erosion LP by Water Grass Project sounds like it should be a field recording- or ambient-based record. Nope. Although the duo do reference “reconnecting with nature”, the more pertinent part of their bio is where they talk about “deep bass”. Note also the album’s tags of ‘jungle’ and ‘drum&bass’ and its release on Chengdu label Oriental Order, whose discography includes the likes of Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang electronic duo Taiga.

Water Grass Project is comprised of former DaBang bassist Daya and producer X4M, but despite them starting the project back in 2018, Wind Erosion is their debut full-length release. Here’s the full record and one of their nature-themed music videos:

Wind Erosion is one of two recent releases on Oriental Order, the other being the new album from Run! Rabbit Run!, a Yunnan-based electro-punk duo who previously appeared in this newsletter with their riot grrrl covers of the Stooges, George Gershwin, and The Ink Spots. Back then I noted their sound’s debt to fellow Yunnanese act South Acid Mimi, but on this new record it’s clear that Run! Rabbit Run! are increasingly finding their own identity.

The eponymous LP is billed as “an album about motion—not escape, but reaching wider horizons”, and that sense of constant movement certainly comes across. Performers Lulu and Starstar bring a restless energy as they attempt to “fuse Trip-hop, Drum & Bass, Breaks, and Electronic sounds to craft a ‘Frankenstein-like’ musical world of urban legends, mysticism, and playful apocalypse,” as the official intro to the record has it.

Wind Erosion and Run! Rabbit Run! are out now.

RSD in the PRC: Record Store Day 2026 in China

Record Store Day 2026 is this weekend, so here’s my now-customary plug for this previous piece:

This year there are a bunch of events going on across China to celebrate, from Chengdu and Chongqing to Xi’an, Wuhan, Beijing, and Hangzhou. Some cities even have multiple events (there are at least three in Guangzhou), a sign of how vinyl culture continues to grow in the country.

Unsurprisingly, for an event that’s intended to be predominantly offline, online releases from Chinese artists for RSD2026 are a little hard to come by, but there is this carefully-crafted Li Jianhong release from Beijing’s UFO Creations, which is available as a limited edition CDr accompanied by a hand-printed woodcut and special handwritten calligraphy:

Go support your local record shop!

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Rounding off with a magical music video from folk eccentric Xiao He.

Since 2018, he’s been traversing China interviewing elderly residents about traditional nursery rhymes and childhood songs, recording as many as he can. With his Nursery Rhyme Project Band, he then reinterprets these songs, often with accompaniment from the old folks themselves, and performs them for local audiences of all ages, hoping to transmit these old songs to new generations. It’s a lovely project and led to a full album release last year (full disclosure: I helped Xiao He with some song searches in Shanghai and, together with , helped translate the liner notes for the LP).

Below is the video for one of the tracks, ‘Fetching Water Song’, which reworks and combines two traditional Yao minority songs which the project discovered in Hunan. Featuring He’s Nursery Rhyme Project Band and regular co-conspirators such as Top Floor Circus frontman Lu Chen, the video is described as “a Chinese rural version of The Wizard of Oz.” It’s well worth a watch.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: UFO sighting-inspired electronic music, summery lo-fi rock, soothing ambient, a major emo rap collaboration, spectacular Mongolian experimental rock, Sino-Japanese noise, and an album blending Soweto-style Amapiano with ethnic minority folk songs from Yunnan.

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Space is the place: Wu Zhuoling sets her sights on the stars with NASA-sampling downtempo EP

It’s a big day for space exploration. I’m talking, of course, about the new intergalactic-themed EP from Wu Zhuoling.

Back in the spring of 2023, Wu took us on “a journey into deep space with a post-apocalyptic and futuristic atmosphere” with her excellent downtempo and ambient EP Uncharted. Three years later, the Chengdu-based producer is once again evoking “the mysteries and hopes of cosmic exploration” with Uncharted II.

A key figure on the Chinese electronic music scene, Wu has been making music for over two decades. She came up in the early ’00s scene around legendary Chengdu hang out Little Bar before following her rock dreams to Beijing, and then becoming intoxicated with trip hop sounds at a time when few were experimenting with the genre in China. After suffering from Beijing burn-out, she spent time in Tibet writing folk songs and resetting her perspective before returning home to Chengdu and reintegrating herself with the city’s alternative music scene. You should read her talk about this in her own words rather than mine, it’s much more interesting.

Uncharted II very much picks up where the original EP left off, blending twinkling, atmospheric instrumentation with gently rhythmic, downtempo beats. For the new collection of tracks, Wu also collected audio samples from NASA’s public archives, and these snatches of communication lend a narrative element to her musical study of space, a subject she’s been fascinated by since witnessing one of China’s most famous UFO sightings as a child.

In addition to being made available digitally, the new EP has been combined with its predecessor for a special vinyl release. Those tracks are also joined by remixes from Frank Vigroux and HowHigh of songs from Uncharted, and tp Dutchkiss and Cola Ren of songs from Uncharted II. Ren’s reworking of the ethereal ambient number ‘Gaia’s Breath’ — which sees her repay the favour after Wu remixed her song ‘Mekong Ballad’ earlier this year — is especially captivating.

And if you want yet another interesting take on Wu’s work, lead single ‘Warp’ — which featured early on in my mix for On the Wire — was also previously given the remix treatment by SHAO. He and Wu, both Chinese electronic music stalwarts, are currently on tour, with shows in Shenzhen and Beijing on the horizon.

But ultimately, whether the stars align for you to catch her live or not, and whether you opt for just this EP or for the whole Uncharted package, there’s plenty to enjoy from Wu’s continued exploration of the final frontier.

Uncharted II is out now. The vinyl record combining it with Uncharted and four remixes should be available for international shipping in April. If you’re in China, you can pick up a copy via SmallProjects’ official WeChat.

Very much related:

Swiss army sounds: one-man band cassette player romance mixes a multitude of genres on debut LP

The solo project of Hangzhou-born, Ohio-based musician Luo Oumeng — a key member of emo act The Beneficial Society — cassette player romance’s name is apparently a nod to Dashboard Confessional’s first LP, which helped shape the emo genre. So cassette player romance’s own debut album is solidly emo then, right? Well, not exactly. While some of the sounds from Luo’s solo vehicle neatly dovetail with China’s emo revival, there’s a lot more going on on Meaning of Home than just Midwest twinkle.

The opening track, for example, suggests the influence of Sweet Trip in its title, but by its climax it’s sounding like something off of Cornelius’ Fantasma. ‘they had a huge fight back in June’ opens almost like a Milton Nascimento tribute before strutting off into psych territory, with guitar parts reminiscent of Cindy Lee. There’s more besides, a diversity that Luo seems to revel in — when cassette player romance supported emo act Whetherday for their album release show in Hangzhou last summer, the bio read “bedroom pop/lofi/indie folk, you name it”. Qiii Snacks, the excellent Guangdong DIY label behind this release, call the album one for “Slowcore/Indietronica/5th-wave Emo/Lofi-Pop/Slacker rock enthusiasts” in their own attempt to name what it is that Luo is doing here.

Thankfully, this grab-bag of sounds somehow all comes together. It’s not always the most cohesive of records, but neither is Meaning of Home a discombobulating mess, as all those genre tags might suggest. It’s helped by some solid songwriting throughout and short, sharp tracks that don’t take themselves too seriously. It also feels genuine. Luo has long been a genre agnostic musician — in addition to The Beneficial Society (who incidentally made Concrete Avalanche’s best of 2025 list), he’s previously been involved with hip hop and ambient electronica projects.

Maybe it’s because the sun was shining when I first listened to it, but there’s an uplifting, almost summery feeling on this LP too. Who cares what genre it is, Meaning of Home is an enjoyable listen.

Meaning of Home is out now. Buy it on CD and you’ll get a comic book by RiceBeing, with art specially designed for each of the album tracks.

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Sweet dreams: new guqin-centred ambient album will help you deal with… y’know, everything

Given the state of the world right now, I can’t be the only one upping their ambient quotient. Here’s a lovely new addition to my rotation: an album released for International Sleep Day, which was apparently on March 21st.

A wonderfully mellow collection of five atmospheric tracks, with the latter two stretching out to over 20-minutes each, Waking Moments revolves around the traditional Chinese string instrument the guqin (played here by Gao Xin) as well as the bamboo bansuri flute and qiteqin zither (played by Du Jiaxuan). Percussionist Mufasa adds some low-key accompaniment on the handpan, while producer JF Lee sprinkles in some scattered electronic elements.

The sounds are reminiscent of the work of hair metal-turned-ambient experimentalist Dou Wei, whose meditative pieces I’ve been leaning on a lot lately (and one of which closes the Concrete Avalanche ambient playlist). Coincidentally, Lee is also a rocker-turned-ambient electronic artist, and similar to many of Dou Wei’s experimental projects, for this album he‘s convened a group of talented musicians who all seem to be on the same wavelength.

On Waking Moments, the guqin and bansuri largely take it in turns to be the focus, but throughout there’s an easy balance to the instrumentation — there’s no jostling for position here, just gentle transitions. Soothing without being overly sentimental or soporific, the music feels like a balm.

Waking Moments is out now.

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Just briefly: Chengdu noise-rock, Sino-Japanese noise, and Yunnan-Soweto Amapiano

Hailing from Chengdu, Hemananshou (loosely translated as Hippo Uncomfortable) are a young noise-rock outfit taking cues from the likes of At the Drive-In and the various projects that came in that band’s wake, plus a little early Radiohead (see the ‘Just’-like bassline on ‘我你我我‘). It’s a mix the trio pull together well and this is a fun record from a band to watch.

Staying in Sichuan, but for something sonically quite different, here’s a recently-released recording from Chinese artist Xiang (who’s also one half of performance duo Soldier) with Japanese experimental great Otomo Yoshihide. Taken from a set the pair delivered at Sichuan University in March last year, the remarkable recording features “hit, rubbed and scraped” non-instruments, violin, broken guitar, whistling, tongue-clicking and more.

Shanghai Restoration Project, a long-running Chinese-American electronic music duo, have released a new album on Modern Sky entitled Finding Bakoena in a SoJo Cloud. The record is a collaboration with South African rapper Tebza Majaivane and fuses the Amapiano and gqom styles he’s known for with samples from the folk music traditions of ethnic minorities in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan. Case in point: single ‘Ice Boy’, about a young man’s struggles in the club, mixes in a field recording of a traditional Dai drinking song. Similarly, the title track sees Majaivane rapping about his Lesotho roots while “a trio of Bulang women from Yunnan [sing] about the wisdom of their ancestors”.

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There will be bloodzebra: cloud rap and plugg stars Bloodz Boi and jackzebra join forces

bloodzebra brings together two stars of China’s cloud rap scene. Beijing’s Bloodz Boi is an established figure with a long, quality emo rap back catalogue, including a fantastic collaboration with Claire Rousay and more eaze; jackzebra is a rising talent from Chengdu who popped up on Lucy Bedroque’s Unmusique mixtape last year and who “raps in an Auto-Tuned slurry that leaves even native Mandarin speakers scratching their heads”, according to Pitchfork.

Their mixtape also brings in some key figures from the experimental hip hop scene on production duty, with .cutspace, whatever51 and katebi featuring heavily across the record’s 10 tracks. Bloodz and jack toured China together last year touting their new collaboration, but for whatever reason the recorded results have only just emerged, sparking a fair bit of excitement in certain internet circles.

Four tracks in and you might begin to think that this meeting of musical minds from different generations has failed to live up to its billing. ‘timezone’ and ‘anorexia’ seem to revel in the kind of incomprehensibility Pitchfork referenced, and while ‘npc’ shows glimmers of something more and ‘whisper’ is intriguing as a stand-alone track, taken together the mixtape’s opening feels a little one note. Thankfully, it then comes alive with a punchy one-two-three of ‘The Truman Show’, ‘10000 questions’, and ‘copy & paste’. The beats suddenly get more interesting as Bloodz and jack swap bars about consumerism, vacuous social media flexing, class divides and more.

It can of course come with the territory for this style of music, but overall bloodzebra leaves you feeling a little cold. Not that either artist will really care. This isn’t meant to be an easily accessible, highly likeable release in that sense. Their output will probably continue to be divisive, but the pair will also continue to be worth paying attention to.

bloodzebra is out now.

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Exit music

Ts. Bayandalai is a Xinjiang-born ethnically Mongolian musician who grew up in a nomadic family. He makes utterly beautiful atmospheric sounds as a solo artist — see the brilliant Kimel on SpaceFruity Records from 2020 — and is one of the main creative forces behind the band Horse Radio. For the last few years, he’s had a series on WeChat where he posts videos of himself making immersive music in areas of outstanding natural beauty across Inner Mongolia and beyond; just last week he put one up where he travelled up the Minya Konka mountain in western Sichuan and noted the difficulty of singing at over 4,700 metres above sea level.

Finally, finally, this series has come to YouTube, with multiple Bayandalai videos being uploaded to the platform in recent days. The occasion is his forthcoming debut solo album, which is set for release in May on Salzburg’s Night Defined Recordings.

Here’s the lead single from that record, along with a couple of favourites from his ‘Live Anywhere’ series:

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: a special edition, an interview with Wu Zhuoling. Ahead of the release of her new EP, the “chameleonic pioneer at the forefront of China’s live electronic counterculture” (as her official bio puts it) talks early influences, her brush with a UFO, and why Chinese people need ambient music now more than ever.

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“I strive to use sound to paint the pictures I have in my mind”

As a child, Wu Zhuoling was witness to one of China’s most famous UFO sightings. Now, she’s releasing a new space-themed EP featuring audio from NASA’s archives.

The dazzling downtempo / ambient record is a sequel of sorts to her 2023 EP Uncharted, with a special vinyl release combining the two EPs and adding remixes from Cola Ren, tp.Dutchkiss and more. It’s the latest milestone in a music-making career that over the course of two decades has seen her experiment with rock, folk, trip hop and more, tour Europe and the US, and provide support for the likes of Max Cooper and Rival Consoles. Little wonder she’s seen as a lynchpin of the Chengdu scene.

Ahead of Uncharted II’s release, Wu was kind enough to take time out from preparing for a five-city China tour (not to mention her support slot for Bonobo in a few weeks’ time) to answer my questions. Below is the full interview, in which she covers her diverse musical career, influences from Wham! to Led Zeppelin to Portishead, and her view on the future of music in China.

What are some of your earliest memories related to music? Were there any albums or artists that really captivated you, that made you truly take notice of music at a young age?

I remember hearing a piece of music on the radio when I was very young—it was melodious yet melancholic. It felt both distant and beautiful, and it left a deep impression on me. I never heard it again until one afternoon, over 30 years later, I suddenly heard someone playing it on his phone. In that moment, I stood frozen in place, feeling as though I had been transported back to my childhood. I hurried over to ask the name of the song—and it turned out to be a name so simple that seemed unreal: ‘Pastoral Song’. After searching online, I discovered it was originally a mournful folk song from the Inner Mongolian grasslands dating back to the 1920s.

[Above is a short clip of ‘Pastoral Song’, performed here by Dedema (not necessarily the version Wu is talking about here)]

Another piece from the radio that stayed with me was the ‘Dance of the Yi People’ played on the guzheng; I found the melody both strange and fascinating. By the late 1980s, when I was in primary school, Western pop music began flowing into Mainland China. I remember listening to tapes by Wham! — those songs were so catchy and full of energy that I never forgot them.

Later on, the son of a neighbor across from my building returned from Beijing and would occasionally sit on their balcony playing guitar and singing. That was the first time I heard the sound of a guitar; I was so captivated that I’d lean against the balcony railing, listening intently out of pure curiosity. These are my most vivid childhood memories of music.

Were you a dakou (“cut-out” cassette or CD) collector?

When I was in university, I could buy dakou cassettes at street stalls on campus or in record shops. I wasn’t a hardcore collector who actively hunted them down. Usually, if I happened to come across some, I’d just use my pocket money to pick up a tape or two. In the beginning, I had no idea which bands or genres to look for. The stall owners would recommend a bunch of things to me, and I’d choose the ones where the cover art looked best. I remember coming across albums by The Cranberries, The Doors and Led Zeppelin that I really loved, as well as a live recording by Dire Straits.

Later on, I bought many dakou CDs or swapped them with friends. Before MP3s came along, these were my only source of information on international music. Unfortunately, after moving house countless times, almost none of my original tapes or CDs have survived.

You grew up in Chengdu, but have also lived in Beijing and Lhasa. Can you talk a little about how each of these places has influenced you and your music?

It was in Chengdu that I learned instruments like the guitar, bass, and drums; I started joining bands and writing my own songs. Back then, I didn’t have much financial pressure—life was easygoing, though it lacked a certain challenge. In 2000, I moved to Beijing, because at that time, anyone in China playing in a band was heading there. Beijing taught me so much and helped me grow; I lived in the famous ‘rock village’ of Shucun [树村, an area of Beijing where rock musicians from across the country congregated and lived in the early ’00s], but I also worked a white-collar job in the CBD. I met many fellow musicians and gained a real understanding of the music industry. I formed a new band, Wednesday’s Trip, performed at music festivals, signed with a record label, and released our first album.

However, after four years, I grew completely weary of the frantic pace of big city life, which felt directionless and meaningless. I wanted to go somewhere remote and exotic, and fate led me to Lhasa. During my two-plus years in Tibet, I hardly touched music at all. I started as a tourist but gradually integrated into the local way of life. Lhasa showed me aspects of the real world that exist far beyond the bubble of rock music and the arts; it deeply reshaped my worldview and my values. During my final period living in Lhasa, I wrote many simple, soulful folk songs.

What drew you back to Chengdu?

Chengdu is my hometown, and there is nowhere else where I feel more comfortable. Additionally, the cost of living in Chengdu is relatively low; making music or taking on some part-time work is enough to support myself. Chengdu has also always had a great musical atmosphere—in China, it is second only to Beijing and Shanghai. There are many independent bands and live performances, making it very suitable for musical creation. Therefore, returning to settle in Chengdu was the best choice for me.

Can you talk a little about how you first got into playing music? How did you first get involved in bands and the scene around Little Bar, the renowned Chengdu gig spot?

Right at the start of my freshman year of university, I saw the various campus clubs recruiting new members. As soon as I saw the Guitar Association, I signed up immediately because I loved the sound of guitar and was eager to learn. My family actually had a very old guitar that my brother used to play, so I went home, dug it out, and started practicing. About three months later, I had learned enough to represent the association in a university talent show. I think I performed a cover of a 罗大佑 [Taiwanese pop singer Luo Ta-yu] song.

At that time, there happened to be a rock band at my university. I tracked down their rehearsal space and told them I wanted to be in a band and play the drums. They were pleasantly surprised because it was rare to find a girl interested in drumming, so they let me practice on their kit. A few months later, I had more or less learned the basics, so I formed a band with three other students. We played covers of acts like Cui Jian, Black Panther, and Beyond.

One day while we were rehearsing, a young man with a camera slung over his shoulder showed up. He took a lot of photos of us and mentioned that he knew many other bands in Chengdu. He told us about a bar that was a lot of fun and offered to take us there. So, one day I went—it was a place called ‘Little Bar’ (小酒馆), right next to my middle school. I started going there regularly to watch bands playing shows, and before long, I became a regular part of the Chengdu rock scene.

How did Wednesday’s Trip come together? There weren’t many artists in China making trip-hop-influenced music back then…

In 2000, I went to Beijing and lived in Shucun with other rock musicians. I told my friends there that I wanted to start a band. After some recommendations and advice, I quickly found a drummer and a guitarist, and recruited a bassist from the band Sound Fragments 声音碎片. We gave the band a very artsy name: “Wednesday’s Trip.” As the guitarist and lead singer, I was responsible for creating the melodic motifs and lyrics, and then the band would work together to finalize the structure and rehearse the details.

Back then, we listened to a lot of foreign music to learn from and draw inspirations. One day, I happened to hear Massive Attack, and that’s when I first learned about trip hop. I went on to listen to other albums by Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky, and I genuinely loved them. Plus, the style suited my voice perfectly, so I decided the band would make trip hop/dream pop music.

Was there a specific moment when you became more interested in electronic music and, specifically, in creating your own productions?

Shortly after I first moved to Beijing, a friend installed FruityLoops on my computer and gave me a rough idea of how to use it, but at the time, I had no interest in making music with a computer. A few years later, I happened to open the software again and decided to see what I could do with it. I tried to use it to recreate a Wednesday’s Trip song called ‘Magic Hours.’ What I made was very simple, but it actually sounded quite good. Later, I used FruityLoops to play around with a more experimental little track. Both of those pieces eventually ended up on Wednesday’s Trip’s first album, Secret Mission.

In 2007, I installed Ableton Live on my laptop. My original intention was to use it to record some of the folk songs I had written in Lhasa, but I soon discovered it was much better suited for electronic music. In 2009, I used Ableton Live to produce an EP called ‘Can This Erase The Distance?’ (是否这就能消除掉距离), which combined Singer-songwriter songs with electronic music.

By 2013, I had essentially stopped using the guitar and was composing entirely with software; my interest in electronic music was only growing stronger. By 2016, as Wednesday’s Trip had fewer performances and activities, I shifted almost completely toward my solo projects.

Is there a common thread that you feel has connected your approach or your sound from those early days—from your folk and trip hop music to your current productions?

There might be one common thread running through everything: I love using music to tell stories, many of which are imaginary. Even though the music I make now has no lyrics, I still strive to use sound to paint the pictures I have in my mind. Another commonality might be that I’ve always preferred beautiful, somewhat melancholic melodies, and I find myself naturally gravitating toward rhythmically driven genres like trip hop.

Today, you only use hardware for your live sets. Where does that preference come from?

Yes, I feel like performing with a laptop doesn’t feel like a real performance. Also, back when I used to perform with a laptop and an audio interface, I’d run into issues like the interface dropping out or the software freezing up (that was many years ago—it’s unlikely to happen with the laptops nowadays), so I felt that approach wasn’t as stable as hardware. Ever since I built a complete performance setup using hardware, I’ve been creating almost entirely on hardware instruments, so I no longer use laptops or software during performances.

It’s been three years since Uncharted. What made you want to return to the themes you explored on that first EP for this new record?

Actually, at first I didn’t intend to continue the story of Uncharted. The main inspiration for Uncharted II came from a game I was deeply immersed in in the winter of 2024/25: Outer Wilds. For a long time, I was absorbed in the game’s atmosphere and storyline. Around that time, I also started playing a new instrument, Elektron Syntakt, and was trying to integrate it into my live setup. I composed a new track primarily using Syntakt. One of its sounds resembled a radio signal, which reminded me of the story in Outer Wilds, so I titled it ‘The Signal’.

Perhaps by coincidence or subconsciously, the three tracks I created afterward all aligned with the theme of space exploration. I thought these four tracks could form a new EP, but I couldn’t settle on a title. Then last summer, it occurred to me that I could release this new EP together with the original Uncharted—which never had a physical release—as a double LP. I realized these four new stories actually bridged perfectly with the original Uncharted narrative, serving as a sequel of sorts. And that’s how it became Uncharted II.

Reverie, the album you released after Uncharted in 2024, also featured several tracks that seemed inspired by outer space and the stars. What is it about space that inspires you to create music about it?

It’s because I saw a UFO when I was a child. My family, many neighbors, and I all witnessed a spiral-shaped flash in the night sky, about the size of the moon, slowly rotating as it flew away and then vanished. You can still find news reports about it today—the 1981 spiral UFO sighting in western China. That event had a profound impact on me, and ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by space and mysterious phenomena.

For the first Uncharted, the introduction noted that “The Zen philosophy of classical poetry and painting and contemporary ambient music share the same vision with different perspectives.” Are these historical references also a key part of your work on this new record?

What I meant is that both appreciating classical poetry and painting and listening to ambient electronic music can evoke a sense of Zen. In 2023, when I was choosing a title for that EP, a line of ancient poetry suddenly popped into my head: ‘Deep in the clouds, their whereabouts unknown’ (云深不知处). It happened to be the exact imagery I had in mind while creating that music. To keep with the classical theme I chose part of the Tang Dynasty painting “Emperor Xuanzong’s Journey to Shu” (明皇幸蜀图) as the cover artwork for the EP.

I think pairing a very modern style of music with classical poetry and traditional landscape painting is quite interesting; it creates an unexpected contrast. But at their core, these art forms share the same aesthetic and point toward the same Zen philosophy—they just differ in form and medium.

Can you talk a little about your process for making new music?

I don’t have a fixed method, but I usually start with a single sound element and develop it freely. Sometimes it’s a synth pad, sometimes I set the tempo first and program a drum kit, and sometimes it’s a chord loop. Then I build on these foundations by adding other sounds—it feels like I’m jamming with myself. Once all the parts are in place, I arrange the overall structure of the piece. Most of this is done on my usual hardware setup, though if needed, I’ll use software to create additional elements or incorporate interesting sound samples.

When I used to compose on a computer, my sole focus was on producing a polished final work. Now, when I compose on hardware instruments, I’ll also consider how to perform it live with my usual gear—and sometimes I even compose tracks specifically for certain settings, such as a club dance floor, an outdoor ambient music event, or a concert with art installations in a museum.

On Uncharted II, you incorporate audio clips from the NASA archive. What led you to using those recordings?

If I only used music to tell a story about space exploration, I was worried it might be too abstract for the audience to follow the narrative I was trying to depict. But with some vocal samples, listeners are naturally drawn into the scene, as if they were listening to a sci-fi movie soundtrack. So I searched for authentic recordings related to spaceflight and exploration, which led me to NASA’s public archives.

I mainly looked for conversations between mission control staff or astronauts, selecting the clearest and most representative clips. I recall that many of these recordings likely originated from the Apollo moon landing missions decades ago. The voices and tones coming through those walkie-talkies were incredibly warm and evoked a distinct sense of nostalgia—very similar to the vibe of the game Outer Wilds. I was deeply moved when I heard those recordings, which carried such historical significance. Every time I hear those samples in the music, I feel like the music becomes even more vivid and alive.

I should add that the sample in the track ‘Warp’ comes from a film about warp drive created by Columbia University’s Cool Worlds Lab. This is because the story I wanted to tell in ‘Warp’ is also about the dilemmas humans face when researching warp drive.

You have a number of remixes on the full album, including Cola Ren returning the favor after your remix of ‘Mekong Ballad’. How did these collaborations come about?

Cola Ren is a new-generation female producer I really admire; her work has inspired me, so we came up with this mutual remix project. Spencer, aka tp.Dutchkiss, is a producer based in LA. We were introduced through a mutual friend, and last spring, when he and two other artists from the Leaving Records label came to Chengdu for a tour, we performed together. In June, when I toured California, he also invited me to perform with him in LA. I really admire his talent, so I asked him to do a remix. It turned out absolutely amazing—way beyond my expectations.

For the Uncharted EP, I reached out to Frank Vigroux, an experimental music artist who toured with me in China and France last year; the track he chose, ‘The Watch Tower’, fits his personal style perfectly. Another remix, for ‘Neptune Rings’, comes from Howhigh, a mentor and close friend of mine who lives in Chengdu. A long time ago, he worked as a sound engineer for Wednesday’s Trip at a music festival, and a few years back, he mastered several of my very popular singles.

I try to seek out people from different cultural backgrounds and musical styles to create remixes—it makes things much more interesting.

A few years ago, you said in an interview that, “Ambient music is what China needs most right now [...] because most people here are very restless. It’s hard for people to calm down, face their inner selves, and quietly reflect on things.” Does that still apply today do you think?

That is still the case today; in fact, it feels even more restless. People are now addicted to short videos every day, and their patience lasts less than a minute. However, I feel that the live scene for ambient music is actually developing quite well. Perhaps it’s precisely because daily life is so frantic that people feel the need to occasionally switch gears—to just space out, clear their heads, and rest.

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You’ve played in bands, made electronic music, performed at shows and festivals all over the country, and lived in multiple different places… this is kind of a big question, but how do you feel about where music in China is at the moment? Do you feel optimistic about where it’s headed?

In China today, music is still essentially a secondary consumer product. Most people have no real demand for it, and even when they do, they are completely indifferent to quality—it often feels as though the audience just needs a layer of constant, noisy background sound.

Regarding musical aesthetics and demand, a clear polarization has emerged in China, and the gap is only widening. While there are more people with great taste than before, there are even more who have poor taste or simply don’t care. Now, with the help of computer software and AI, the barrier to entry for music production has dropped significantly, but this has also allowed works lacking in soul or aesthetic value to flood the market. High-quality niche music struggles to break into the mainstream, while the music that achieves commercial success is often uninspired.

To be honest, I am not optimistic about the future of music development in China.

Wu Zhuoling’s Uncharted II is out digitally on March 27th. The vinyl release, with the addition of the tracks from the first Uncharted EP plus four special remixes, is due for release the following day.

There’s a special release event taking place in Chengdu on March 28th, before Wu begins her China tour with fellow Chinese electronic music stalwart SHAO in Shanghai on March 29th.

For details on all of the above, check out the official 小计划SmallProjects account on WeChat. International orders for the vinyl will hopefully be available next month.

I also highly recommend spending some time with Wu’s solo back catalogue, which is available on Bandcamp.

And if you’re still reading this and happen to be a venue booker in Europe, Wu is currently lining up some dates for a European tour this summer and is open to adding more. Find her on socials or drop me a line and I can put you in touch.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: the new album from a one-man Lanzhou metal band who’s moving beyond metal, a round-up of new developments in Chinese emo, post-rock with traditional Chinese instrumentation, J Dilla-inspired beats out of Shanxi, “the ghosts of 1990s rock”, an album of field recordings, and more.

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Brave New World: bedroom black metal soloist DeadTrees returns with a jazz- and string-laden new record

Last year, one-man Lanzhou band DeadTrees released an album that was a fascinating exploration of atmosphere and texture. There were bursts of instrumentation that hinted at the artist’s black metal past as well as a developing interest in free-jazz, but there was also a sense that he was preoccupied with relatively abstract experimentations rather than out-and-out ‘songs’. His follow-up New World, which has been given a vinyl release by leading Chinese metal label Pest Productions, is no less compelling, but is sonically something quite different.

Opening with the rousing strings, piano twinkles, crashing guitars and pummelling percussion of ‘Extinguished City’, the fully instrumental six-track record feels much more focused on songs and structure, on a sense of clear-cut drama rather than slow-burn atmospherics. Even with most of the tracks clocking in at seven or eight minutes, there’s a punchiness throughout New World, aided by DeadTrees’ dialing up of the jazz elements — and by some fast-moving drums. Ma Meiming, the musician behind the project, describes the sound as “chaotic” (while recommending that it’s listened to loudly on a quiet night), but a better word for it is “impressive”, especially for a record produced in a bedroom.

Ma is disarmingly humble about his output. In a text posted on Pest’s official WeChat, he refers to himself as “a complete novice in music” and states that he doesn’t feel he’s yet “produced a completely satisfying work”. He also self-deprecatingly posits that this will likely be DeadTrees’ “first and last release on vinyl”. With the ideas and talent on display on New World, not to mention its predecessors, it seems a safe bet that he’ll happily be proven wrong.

New World is out now. If you buy Pest’s vinyl version, they’ll throw in a copy of last year’s One Hundred Thousand Meat Horns on CD for free.

Not-tortured poets department: a new dispatch from Modern Sky’s contemporary poetry and experimental music series

Back in 2022, Yunnan-based instrumentalist Huan Qing combined with Sichuanese scribe Yang Li for an album of music and poetry collaborations. Produced as a book with a CD insert by Modern Sky spin-off label Badhead, it was billed as the first in a series focusing on contemporary Chinese poets. Last year, we got the follow-up: an offering that expanded the scope and ambition, pulling together a who’s who of experimental Chinese musicians to provide backing for the words of Han Dong. Last month, part three arrived.

Released on streaming platforms and cassette, the third installment is compiled from recordings made in Guangdong as part of a special poetry festival hosted by Badhead to celebrate the release of the Han Dong record last year. Naturally Han is involved, but so too are Yang and fellow poets He Xiaozhu, Fang Xianhai, Shen Haobo, Yuan Wei, and Yu Youyou. On the music side, participants include Huan, Yang Haisong, Zhang Jian, Zhang Fangze, and Jiang Zhuyun.

Although the record opens with Yang Haisong whipping up a load of fuzzy static and reciting in his distinctive yelp-like style — as his wont with these projects — the broad ensemble of readers and musicians means it quickly switches pace, with Yu Youyou, Zhang Jian and Huan Qing joining forces for a pair of gentle, reflective tracks. The album continues to move around in terms of atmosphere from there, in part thanks to the music’s largely improvised nature and a more diverse cast of writers than its predecessors, even if the second half is dominated by the works of Li and Han.

It’s another intriguing edition in a worthwhile series.

For more poetry and music, ’s Poetry x Music project recently released a new album, All of Those Times. Depicting a relationship cycle, the collection looks to “highlight what is universal amongst us: struggle and uncertainty, yes, but also joy and pleasure and quiet moments of contemplation and pride and the perception of beauty.” It’s available in both English and Mandarin.

Chinese Contemporary Poets Collection: Bright Moon Descends is out now.

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Strings of life: two experimental records test the limits of the guitar and the ‘thunder instrument’

From poetry and music to Poems Without Words. That’s the title of the latest release from ever-excellent cassette label Dusty Ballz, who continue their mission of bringing the sounds of China’s experimental underground to more ears with a collection of improvisations from Xu Cheng. Xu was once a member of harsh noise project Torturing Nurse in its formative years, but has since focused more on experimental electronics. On Poems, he picks up the guitar.

“The project originated in Xu Cheng’s attempt to restore a broken instrument he had picked up in a vintage store some fifteen years ago, and to play it as though a guitar reborn,” Dusty Ballz explain. “In this process, he came to realise that the art of improvisation consists of endless exercises in forgetting: to forget what the body has learned before, and to learn how to play in a state of ‘having forgotten’.”

The result is this collection of 14 improvised pieces, with Xu probing and prodding at his instrument as he pushes it to find new (old?) sounds. Half of the recordings were made in a small park in the Shanghai suburbs and, as Dusty Ballz notes, “Occasionally, the sound of insects in the atmosphere interfered with guitar harmonics, a gentle hum piercing through the eye of the storm that is life.”

There’s a similar sense of searching for new sounds from a long-used instrument on Blast of Wind and Thunderbolts, a new album focused around the leiqin (a name which literally translates to the ‘thunder instrument’). The leiqin is a bowed string instrument invented in the 1920s and renowned for its ability to mimic human and animal noises. Blast of Wind begins with a gentle piece featuring another Chinese string instrument, the (far older) guqin, but from then on it gets markedly less conventional.

Leiqin player Zhang Peng begins to push her instrument’s limits, while guitarist and producer Zhou Fengling, guqin player Zhang Xi, and percussionist Xing Kai interact with the sounds she makes. Zhou, who convened the quartet, speaks of the musicians as “constructing dimensions of space and narrative, dynamic and static, abstract and concrete, broad and subtle... a fusion of tradition and modernity, a contemporary Eastern aesthetic charm.”

Poems Without Words and Blast of Wind and Thunderbolts are both out now.

Where are we now? Checking in on Chinese emo

Henan band Jimi’s Guess, who featured in Concrete Avalanche’s quick guide to the Chinese emo revival recently, have a new EP out, entitled UndeRwaTer, a swift run. There’s more than just emo going on across the record’s five tracks however, with upbeat indie rock, trap-like percussion and bedroom pop all in the mix. It’s an eclectic release from a highly creative band.

Another act blending emo with other influences are 憂鬱的亞熱帶. The group, who hail from Guangzhou, make emogaze (emo plus shoegaze), as evidenced on their eponymous six-track EP, which was released through Guangdong DIY label QiiiSnacks on New Year’s Day.

And (perhaps straying away from emo into math-rock territory) Shanghai Qiutian have announced a new album, Love You, out just a few days after this newsletter is published. If you’re reading this before March 20th, you can listen to a handful of tracks from the new LP now:

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Field music: Seippelabel whisk you away with a compilation of field recordings

I’ve written a few times about the Seippelabel compilations in this newsletter and the latest — volume 15, released earlier this month — is another that’s well worth your attention. One of the interesting things about the series is its ability to flit between wildly different genres yet retain its quality, in no small part thanks to the curation of founder Brad Seippel (aka thruoutin). After recent editions exploring gqom and footwork, volume 15 is a collection of fascinating field recordings.

“What constitutes a field recording?” an introductory text from the label asks. “In the broadest sense, it is any sound captured outside a conventional music studio. In the modern era, the democratization of recording technology — much noise is made of the camera in every pocket, far less of the microphone — combined with a growing desire to return to the “real world,” has made the medium increasingly popular. Music producers use field recordings to evoke specific times and places; listeners seek them out to be whisked away.”

Alas, there’s no Family Mart freezer drone recording here, but there’s plenty to pique your interest, with artists including Jyugam label runner mafmadmaf, experimental cellist and sound artist Sheng Jie, and French producer Laurent Jeanneau, who has released reams of recordings of ethnic minorities from across China under his Kink Gong moniker (and has a new release coming up on Discrepant next month).

Seippelabel Vol. 15 is out now.

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Just briefly: “the ghosts of 1990s guitar rock”, Dilla-inspired beats, and slow-burn post-rock

“‘Awkwardness’ has always been the keyword of our work,” say Guangzhou-formed rock act The Step. “You can hear it everywhere: inexplicable song structures, self-indulgent lyrics, and all kinds of clumsy attempts to summon the ghosts of 1990s guitar rock.” Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine are among the bands referenced on the Qiii Snacks-released LP Before the Echo Fades, an attempt by The Step’s members to lay down some recordings before they scattered to different corners of the world.

For something entirely different, Dilla-inspired beatmaker Illasoul has released a new mixtape. Dirty Jin Southside II is a collection of 10 tracks from the Shanxi-based producer billed as a musical “pilgrimage” and “a journey in search of the healing herbs”.

Suzhou post-rock act Grace Latecomer are not a band to be rushed. Having formed in 2005, it took them almost a decade to release their debut album. The follow-up — the three-track Whispering — arrived in early February, some 12 years later. It takes inspiration from a deposed Yuan dynasty ruler (from 658 years ago) as well as a more contemporary reference point: opener ‘All That is Solid Melts Into Air’ features lyrics by Xu Bo, frontman for Wuhan emo heroes Chinese Football.

For the motherwolf: Beijing post-metal act Sounds of Alienation release debut record

Another Pest Productions release here (like DeadTrees’ LP), and another one that puts an interesting twist on the conventional metal formula. Sounds of Alienation are a post-metal act from Beijing, and the six-track Tianwen is their debut album.

The group are keen to emphasise that their music “remains firmly rooted in Chinese aesthetics”, with the official introductory text for the record adding that,

“motifs and queries over which our forefathers once obsessed centuries ago, were retold within a soundscape both romantic and philosophical—like a traditional painting scroll, emotions sublime and heartwrenching were intuitively wielded into these six songs.”

Some of the band’s imagery sees them sporting black douli hats, which immediately brings to mind the great Zuriaake. Yet while there are occasional echoes of the esteemed Chinese black metal group in the work of Sounds of Alienation, the younger band mix doom influences with some at-times ferocious drumming to propel their tracks along. And though they “acknowledge and revere our own folks, history, and culture”, the group is not stuck in the past, stating that their music is also for “modern lives trapped within algorithms”.

It’s a fierce and exhilarating concoction.

Tianwen is out now.

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Exit music

Electrified guqin-led post-rock band Zhaoze put out “a small EP” last autumn, featuring two tracks that are really one: ‘Wind Rising Before Storm Coming’, which is effectively an intro or prelude, and ‘In Snow Storm, Yet Not Back Home’. The EP also combined the two into one piece, which has now been released on Bandcamp and given a suitably wintry music video courtesy of fan footage of snowscapes and rime.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can. It’s Bandcamp Friday on March 6th, so that’d be an especially good time to purchase one or more of these releases.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

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In this issue: an experimental electronic producer returns to the club, Pu Poo Platter serve up warming funky jazz, a pair of RnB mixtapes, frozen rock from Xinjiang, bubbly indie from Zhang ‘Nono’ Xingchan’s full band project, and more.

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Mm..food: excellent instrumental act Pu Poo Platter return with tasty new EP

Brooklyn-formed instrumental jazz and funk act Pu Poo Platter are back with a new four track EP — and it might just be their best work yet.

The group, who have Cola Ren collaborator tga on tenor sax (and sometimes on bass and glockenspiel), have previously listed Pharoah Sanders, Smokey Robinson, MF DOOM, J Dilla, and the “atmosphere of ’70s blaxploitation film soundtracks” among their inspirations, and on new record Undercurrent they continue to “make a hotpot of music culture”, with their jazz influences coming through especially strong.

Tong Zhou’s infectious guitar melodies and tga’s sax flourishes are particularly on point on Undercurrent and are given solid foundations to build on via Bolun’s rhythmic basslines and Leon Wang Ohlsson’s skillful drumming. The EP also features flute and “droning sounds” from Zuho, who appeared on the Hiatus ambient compilation I wrote about not too long ago and is currently out on tour with the band. Recorded in Shanghai’s Cashmere Studios, the four tracks were mixed and mastered by Eric Lau, who you might know from his instrumental hip hop productions.

Cooked up with the band’s intrinsic sense of rhythm and knack for enjoyable grooves, the various ingredients on Undercurrent come together to make for a delectable offering. In a world going to shit, Pu Poo Platter provide a little light, a little relief.

Undercurrent is out now, with a 10” vinyl version on the way.

Wriggle room: Gooooose returns with club-focused EP on Svbkvlt

This newsletter will always be indebted to Gooooose. The Anhui-born musician, also known as Han Han, was the driving force behind math-rock band Lava | Ox | Sea, a fantastic group and one that gave us the song ‘Concrete Avalanche’. That was almost two decades ago now, and these days Gooooose is better known for his experimental electronic work.

For his new EP Wriggle, he’s is back on his long-term label home of Svbkvlt, the imprint built by Gaz Williams, co-founder of The Shelter and its successor ALL. It’s billed as a “club-focussed EP” and the music here is certainly among Gooooose’s most dancefloor-centric, relatively speaking. (Compare it, for instance, to his previous release: an intriguing, but less forthright set of experimental studio improvisations.)

Not that Gooooose has completely jettisoned his experimental tendencies of course, it’s just that Wriggle nudges the bpm up a little. The producer’s playfulness and desire to deliver the unexpected are still present, but there’s also a clear propulsion across the EP’s five original tracks.

Things really pick up pace on renowned Bristol-based producer Hodge’s remix of ‘Relay’, before Bait founder Beatrice M. provides something a little different to close out the record. The Paris-based artist’s reworking of ‘Pistons’ retains the original’s off-kilter approach but adds a bit of warmth, a pleasing finale for an EP that’s largely defined by stark percussion, in tandem with its emphasis on alternative club rhythms.

Wriggle is out now.

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West side stories: pioneering Xinjiang rock act Puppet release a “spiritual autobiography”

Released at the end of last year, the ‘new’ album from Puppet features songs written over the course of the last three decades. Puppet started out back in 1991, making them one of China’s earliest original rock bands, yet while much the country’s rock ’n’ roll scene at that time was focused on the capital Beijing, Puppet were formed some 1,700 miles away in Urumqi, Xinjiang. That in itself feels remarkable; that the band are still going 35 years later, perhaps even more so.

Though there have been hiatuses and line-up changes in that time, the project’s driving force has remained the same throughout: Uyghur musician Feruh. On the new album, he plays guitar, bass, and synths, and while the songs may stretch back to 1995, they were rearranged and recorded as part of the same sessions, meaning that there’s a cohesive flow to the record.

Fellow Xinjiang-born musician Mamer was once part of Puppet, and for this LP Feruh has drafted in percussionist Zhang Dong, last seen in this newsletter playing with Mamer in Bande. Like Mamer, Feruh has explored more experimental sounds — another of his bands, 6501 (named for the first four digits on national ID cards in Xinjiang), focuses on noise-rock — but Puppet is his vehicle for accessible, classic rock tunes. This easy warmth is enhanced by cameos from mainstream folk-rock singer Lao Lang, who adds glossier vocals on ‘憂傷湖泊’ (‘Sorrowful Lake’) and ‘輓歌1994’ (‘Elegy 1994’), tracks written by the album’s executive producer and Badhead label runner Zhang Xiaozhou.

Feruh’s own vocals are (pleasingly) well-worn and throaty — not quite Johnny Cash on the American Recordings, but certainly a voice that sounds like it’s emanating from someone who has really lived. If the average Chinese citizen has seen extraordinary change in the past three decades, then the experiences of someone living in Xinjiang during this period feel almost unimaginable.

My Freezing Frozen Spirit, the artwork for which features Feruh’s own self-portraits, is billed as his “spiritual autobiography, witnessing the dramatic changes of the times”. There are clearly complex feelings at play, yet sometimes these “dramatic changes” are encapsulated in just a few words, such as on the emotional closing track:

“Tears prove you’re a failure. Acceptance proves you’re a failure.
When you feel tired, when you feel overwhelmed, when you feel helpless.”

My Freezing Frozen Spirit is out now. For more from Puppet, check out the ‘greatest hits’ compilation Selected Works (1995-2014) on Old Heaven Books.

Cold wind blows: indie-rock tales of winter in the northeast on Cool State

Part two in this issue’s wintry trilogy comes from Dongbei, China’s northeast. Like parts of Xinjiang, it can get bitter cold in Dongbei during the winter months, with temperatures well below freezing. “If you’ve never lived in northeast China, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to get up for school in the dead of winter,” notes label Big Nothing Records when introducing the new album from Dongbei-born musician Jailwhale, entitled Cool State. “[The artist] says the region gives you a feeling of being exiled in a frigid land from birth.”

Jailwhale is the solo project of Jia Wei, who also plays guitar in indie-rock band Uncle Hu. Produced by Uncle Hu frontman Hu Xike, Cool State has a similarly accessible sound to that found on the band’s records. And as with Puppet’s album, there’s a warmth to this LP, even as Jia sketches stark imagery with his lyrics. Songs about the frozen industrial landscapes of the region and the little people overlooked and neglected by society are carried on cosy chords and pleasant melodies.

It’s another record that’s tinged with sadness — with Jailwhale searching for meaning without necessarily finding answers — but one that’s highly listenable nonetheless.

Cool State is out now.

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When winter comes: experimental guitarist Mai Mai completes four seasons series in style

Once the keystone in mid-’00s noise-rock outfit Muscle Snog (of which 33EMYBW was also a member), Mai Mai has long been focused on experimental sounds, producing feedback-heavy guitar works and unconventional Beatles covers. Last year, he released the fourth in a series of seasonal-themed LPs, Winter Training, which followed 2024’s Summer Babe, 2023’s Autumn Disturbance and 2021’s Spring Famine. All are now available on Bandcamp.

It’s difficult to pick a favourite from the series, but Winter Training’s foregrounding of Mai Mai’s guitar certainly makes it the most accessible. There are still flashes of feedback and noise throughout, but the guitar work lends the songs more of a sense of structure and melody than Mai’s recent experimental work, even if the classic ‘Moon River’ is given a heavily distorted reworking.

Winter Training is out now, as is the rest of Mai Mai’s seasons series. Start with winter and cycle through from there.

Just briefly: experimental electronics and bubbly indie rock

“PowerElectronics / HarshNoise / Ambient / BlackMetal / Pagan” artist Shiren (Diviner) seems intent on keeping things mysterious, at least when it comes to their bio. But while little is known about this solo producer’s background, they continue to release intriguing music at an impressive clip. “Apart from writing every day, I don’t really know what else to do,” they say in a comment on streaming platform NetEase under Guanyin Sand, one of five new records that they released last year.

The last of that 2025 quintet made its way onto Bandcamp in January, where it’s now been joined by the artist’s first release of 2026. Where Guanyin Sand is a more abstract, textural set of songs, 幻末 and 雾骸 find the artist in atmospheric black metal mode:

‘Something Through The Body’ is an absorbing 24 minute trip through a range of different sonic worlds from Guangzhou-based producer RESBina, fka Luo Qinlin. Part of a set recorded at Guangzhou venue Alkaline, the piece incorporates sounds that echo traditional instrumentation alongside experimental electronics, weaving in roadside field recordings over the top of steady, pulsing rhythms.

Not to be confused with the Shanghai experimental performance space of the same name, Wuhan band Trigger produce bright and bubbly rock music, as demonstrated on their first album Collision of Happiness, which came out on the first day of 2026. The young group are centred around the significant talents of Zhang ‘Nono’ Xingchan, the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter whose solo releases have created significant buzz, and while this record doesn’t have quite the same impact as her break-out debut, it’s still well worth a listen.

CrazySexyCool: Mintone belatedly celebrate their 15th birthday with a set of soulful mixes

Mintone Records, a Yunnan- and Sichuan-based record label with a lovely little hangout in Chengdu, has released a couple of R&B and laidback hip hop-centric mixtapes to celebrate their 15th birthday… which was last year. “Yes, we’re very late, and sincerely sorry,” they say. But really, no apologies are necessary when things are this chilled out.

Japanese DJ, producer, and Jazzy Sport crew lynchpin Spot-san is joined by longtime friend of the label and Chinese soul purveyor Dizkar in digging through Mintone’s back catalogue for a mixtape. (To be fair, Dizkar’s did come out last year, but it’s only just made it to Bandcamp.) Both mixes provide a pleasing taste of what the label has achieved in a decade and a half, with artists such as Xia Zhiyu and MIIIA featuring throughout. The mixtapes are also a good starting point for anyone intrigued by Chinese R&B. Here’s to another 15 years.

The MINTONE RECORDS 15TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION MIXTAPEs are out now.

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Exit music

A key figure on the Chinese jazz scene, Shanghai-based singer-songwriter Voision Xi released her impressive second full-length album Queen and Elf back in late 2024. Now, she’s unveiled an atmospheric new music video for, and a special remix of, one of the stand-out tracks from the record — one that was inspired by the great Joyce Moreno.

Here’s a bit of background:

“From Voision’s album Queen and Elf, the distinctive track ‘Muse (for Joyce)’ has, at the start of 2026, branched into two special versions: a 4:3 black-and-white retro-style Music Video, and a fresh, groove-driven remix by Amber Navran, core member of the soul collective Moonchild.”

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: a special edition looking at China’s recent emo revival. 新年快乐！

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Chinese bands have been making emo-influenced music for decades. As far back as 2006, Shanghai act TOOKOO put together a compilation featuring acts from across the country entitled 情绪中国, or Emo China. (The singer on the opening track? Xu Bo, who would go on to form Chinese Football — more on them below.) Yet around this time last year, there was such a rush of new acts making emo music in China that a lot of people in alternative music circles were suddenly talking about an emo revival.

One year on and many of those bands have toured, built followings across the country, and poured their hearts out on record. The below round-up is far from comprehensive — and relies on bands whose music has made it to international platforms — but here’s a rundown of a few of the acts to watch from China’s latest emo wave (plus an OG band who still wield a massive influence).

Listen along with the Chinese emo playlist here.

Chinese Football

Having formed 15 years ago, it’s fair to say that this band aren’t exactly part of the new wave of Chinese emo, but there’s really only one act to start with when it comes to the genre: Chinese Football. With a name and early sound inspired by American Football, the Wuhan band have since forged their own identity, building a reputation as one of the best acts in the country in the process. They might not be the youngest band on the scene any more, but there’s little denying their influence.

They’re also one of the few Chinese bands who can claim a significant following overseas. The group have toured Japan, Europe and the US, and in 2019 they also hit the pleasing milestone of opening for American Football in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Last year they marked the tenth anniversary of their eponymous debut album with a special vinyl re-release and a celebratory gig in their home city of Wuhan. “Without exaggeration, Chinese Football has changed the course of our lives,” the band said at the time.

Side note: there are at least two other emo bands in China with similarly-inspired names — Teochew Football from Guangdong and Henan Football from, well, Henan — and late last year Chinese Football frontman Xu Bo appeared at an event in Hangzhou called Make Emo Great Again, which featured Tokyo-based band Japanese Football.

Chinese Cuju

Speaking of American Football, the band’s enduring influence on Chinese rock kids was demonstrated in the spring of last year when nine young Chinese acts came together to cover tracks from LP1. They wittily called the compilation Chinese Cuju, cuju being the ancient East Asian kicking game touted as a precursor to football. The record was released in March, around the time that American Football returned to China as part of a tour marking the 25th anniversary of LP1, and features a number of the bands who’ve helped drive China’s emo revival.

A number of the bands on the compilation are written about in a little more detail below, but the album also features notable (but not otherwise on Bandcamp yet) acts such as Tianjin University band 即时成像 and Guangzhou ‘emo-gaze’ outfit 憂鬱的亞熱帶 — track them down if you can.

Jimi’s Guess

One of the bands appearing on that Chinese Cuju compilation, Jimi’s Guess hail from Henan and are a big part of the recent Chinese emo wave. With a band name inspired by a combination of Jimi Hendrix and the Zhou Xun-starring film The Equation of Love and Death, the quartet reference the likes of Number Girl, The Bootlegs, and Modern Baseball as influences. A more surprising influence: pop singer Wang Fei — the band cover her cover of The Cranberries classic ‘Dreams’ on their self-titled LP.

There’s also this:

v是兔子wishtoday

Another band from that Cuju comp, and another from Henan, wishtoday were formed by three friends from middle school who felt they had nothing to do once they finished the gaokao, China’s much-feared college entrance exam. Their first experiments together were Green Day covers and hardcore tracks, and that energy has carried over into their current screamo-ish sound. Now a fivepiece, the group’s recorded material has an unpolished feel that’s not for everyone, but the band undoubtably have an ear for a good riff.

Midwest Emo Mahjong

Guangdong four-piece Midwest Emo Mahjong released their first record back in July, just under a year after their formation. Following a series of singles such as ‘Always Sad’ and ‘Desolation’ that showed they very much understood the assignment when it came to emo song names, their first record proper landed with a slightly tongue-in-cheek title: I’m not from the Midwest. Maybe not, but the band seem to have an intuitive understanding of the midwest twinkle sound nonetheless.

Kyojintachi

They might have a Japanese name and — according to their Bandcamp page, at least — be based in Japan, but this group originally hail from Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shanghai. The Departed, as their name can be translated, brought together a number of ’90s rock sounds (and some low production values) on their DIY album Kyojintachi I last May, but the midwest emo influence was prominent among them and the band have been hailed as one to watch when it comes to China’s emo revival.

郁云EmoCloud

Another young Chinese emo band to keep an eye on, EmoCloud are a fourpiece from Shandong who — as their name suggests — are “obsessed with emo sounds”. Track titles such as ‘Ihatemyself.’ and ‘It’s raining all day in my heart’ seem to tick the standard emo rock boxes, but the group are capable of springing a surprise too. Songs such as ‘12’ and ‘#CRZluv&heartbreak’ — sandwiched in the middle of their recent debut EP I think I’ve forgotten now — demonstrate their willingness to experiment with the form. It’s emo, but not exactly as we know it — and that’s no bad thing.

The Beneficial Society

Like a lot of the acts spearheading China’s emo revival, Hangzhou’s The Beneficial Society are a band with members still in their teens. They released their debut album jointly on Chinese label Happy Records and Japanese imprint Ungulates last autumn, shortly before an October Golden Week tour of Japan. Describing themselves as an “emo/art-punk/screamo band”, the quintet tap into midwest emo’s typically engaging blend of catchy melodies and emotional lyrics, but also push beyond twinkle to take their sound toward emo’s noisier origins.

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CherryTop

One of a number of young Chinese acts currently straddling the emo-shoegaze divide, CherryTop make instantly infectious rock music whatever genre tag you want to put next to it. The Guangdong group covered ‘You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon’ from LP1 for the Chinese Cuju comp, and you can grab their debut LP from February 2025 and last summer’s two-track Projection EP for pay-what-you-want downloads on Bandcamp.

wish you could swim

On the twinkle end of the emo spectrum, Shanghai’s wish you could swim are the latest act to release a record on Sango Records, the Wuhan and Kyoto-based label founded by Chinese Football’s Xu Bo. Initially an instrumental math-rocky act, the band have now added vocals and other elements to their sound, as witnessed on Wild Swim.

Elsewhere on Sango, emo fans should seek out AmovingmoviE, Autumn Rush, screamo outfit Bennu is a Heron, and fifth-wave emo acts bedroom angel and Postmodernhippie (the same artist).

Diels-Alder

We started with a relatively older band, so we’ll end with one too. Lanzhou-formed Diels-Alder were slightly ahead of China’s latest emo wave, releasing their first proper LP Archives, a full-length concept album that comprised “ten songs [which] correspond to the small glimpses in the lives of ten ordinary travelers” on a long-distance train journey, back in 2022. The band members themselves have since undertaken some travel, with the trio now “scattered across different coordinates”, yet fortunately they “remain on the same frequency” and were able to reunite to capitalise on the emo revival with last year’s Backlash EP and a series of gigs to promote it.

While perhaps not on the same level as Chinese Football, the trio have proven a key influence for many a younger Chinese emo act, with the likes of xmo in Pearl Market specifically calling out their importance.

Thanks for reading. You can find a free playlist of emo from China — featuring the new wave and some more established acts — right here.

sad listening

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can. February 6th would be an especially good day to do so: it’s Bandcamp Friday.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: a soothing double dose of ambient-experimental sounds, “Sinocentric psychedelic spiritual jazz” from Yunnan, a horse-themed playlist (yup) and an alternative Lunar New Year soundtrack, a pair of new tracks from psych act Railway Suicide Train, field trips to a Fujian forest and the Himalayas, Hong Kong nihilism, and more.

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Concrete Avalanche, On The Wire

Before we get into the usual round-up… I was invited by the great Steve Barker to make a mix of Chinese music for his legendary On The Wire radio show recently. Listening links and more info in here:

Selected ambient works: two soothing compilations to get you through the winter

Released on December 31st, Vessel of Emptiness is a beautiful meditation on emptiness and absence. The compilation sees Beijing-based music collective Hiatus, who combine thought-provoking WeChat essays with occasional gigs and record releases, inviting nine Chinese artists and two “from other origins” (namely Uruguay and Canada) to provide their musical ruminations on the theme. The result is the kind of record where I want to add every single track to the Concrete Avalanche ambient playlist.

“‘Emptiness’ does not merely signify a ‘lack’ of elements—it becomes a state in itself, reshaping our connection to the outside world,” the accompanying text tells us, an idea the 11 tracks repeatedly return to. Changsha producer zuho, who provides an early highlight, references Debussy’s line about music being “the space between notes”. Hiatus founder ruhao, who mastered the record alongside opening producer yun.ling, speaks of how “emptiness shapes our material world, our understanding of music, and its rhythm. Utilising emptiness in music means utilising the background material provided by the universe itself.”

Not everyone sticks to the ambient script: there are tracks that flirt with experimental sounds too. In particular, lfo.A.nerves’ contribution (which the producer says is inspired by the life of Pope Francis) works in free jazz-like brass elements and traditional folk percussion and singing. How does such a full sound fit with the theme of ‘emptiness’? “Everything is an illusion,” they say, simply.

There’s a similarly ethereal sense to the work of Guangzhou producer WhiteCrow, who a couple of weeks prior to Hiatus’ release delivered a compilation of her own on the consistently high quality Jyugam label. The record stitches together 14 tracks spanning seven years, material that finds the artist, “Venturing between intricately designed beats and vast, shimmering layers of ambient texture,” as Jyugam’s introduction puts it, while “she subtly incorporates elements of pop, post-rock, all without sacrificing the experimental core that defined her early sound.”

WhiteCrow is the alter ego of Esther Li, a producer who has created music for advertisements by the likes of Mercedes-Benz. This project is far removed from the commercial world however, with Jyugam highlighting her “artful avant-garde electronics” that gently unfold over the course of the compilation.

In short: two lovely experimental-ambient records, to be listened to in tandem or in isolation.

Vessel of Emptiness and WhiteCrow’s Selected Pieces 2017-2024 are out now.

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“Sinocentric psychedelic spiritual jazz“: Li Daiguo and Slim Rothaus join forces on rhythmic new LP

Yunnan is an easy place to fall in love with. Almost everyone who’s set foot in the southwestern Chinese province, with its comfortable climate, cultural diversity, fantastic food, and stunning natural landscapes, has probably thought to themselves at some point, ‘this would be a great place to live’. Slim Rothaus — a Danish-born percussionist and pianist whose performance experience began when he drummed with his dad’s jazz band at just nine years old — and Li Daiguo — an Oklahoma-born multi-instrumentalist who plays everything from the pipa and upright bass to the erhu and cello — are two people who followed through on that thought, becoming long-time residents in Yunnan. In mid-January, the pair released a beautiful new album together: Humor Darkness and Absurdity.

Replete with Li’s tendency toward long track names (‘instead of trying to create the ultimate robot slave we could be imagining the birth of humankind’s godlike child’ and ‘successful AI developer cries in his beer after most human life is ruined’, for example), the LP features myriad multinational instruments and sounds. Traditional Chinese string instrument the guzheng, West African harp-lute the kamale ngoni, Korean reed instrument the piri, suitcases and other unconventional “percussion objects”, a plethora of gongs and drums, yodelling and throat-singing, plus “some ambient sounds from the village” are all deployed at some point.

Despite the dizzying array of elements featured overall, there’s an easy flow to the tracks, and a sense of comfort between two musicians who have played together multiple times over more than a decade, including on previous collaborative album Wa Cun. Li’s work in recent years has run the gamut from ambient piano pieces to noisier experimentalism (his recent 2025 Live LP is a good window into some of this work), but this record sits at a more rhythmic and accessible point on his musical spectrum. He’s described it as a record of “Sinocentric psychedelic spiritual jazz”.

The new LP also adheres to Li’s principles of trying to capture ‘real’ moments on record. “All the sounds were recorded in an extremely restrained manner: no effects were used, post-processing was minimised, and the true relationship between the materials, the air, and the body was preserved as much as possible,” an introductory text explains. It all makes for a captivating, highly listenable experience — the kind of album that’s easy to fall in love with.

Humor Darkness and Absurdity is out now.

Horse radio: songs for the Lunar New Year

It’s that time of year where I point you to Concrete Avalanche’s alternative Chinese New Year playlist, which encompasses everything from club-friendly reworkings of Spring Festival Gala classics to New Year’s Eve feast field recordings. A heads up that Liu Huirun’s Firecracker — half of which rounds off that playlist — just got a cassette reissue in an appropriately festive red.

If you’re after something horse-specific to kick off the new year with, then there’s Horses, a recent release from gogoj aka Sheng Jie and Shenggy Shen, with lovely horse artwork from Emily Ritchie. Not an album of Patti Smith covers, this is instead a pair of improvised recordings of electrified cello and percussion from Sheng’s visit to London late last year, during which she reunited with former Hang on the Box and White drummer Shen.

I’ve just about managed to eek together a horse-themed playlist for you as well, featuring the track ‘Neg Odor’ by the excellent Horse Radio, which comes with this lovely horse video:

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Field music: psych-ish rockers Railway Suicide Train return with jazzy two-track EP

Arriving shortly before Christmas, a new two-song EP from Railway Suicide Train made for a nice little present for dedicated followers of Chinese psych. Led by Shen Zhi, a hugely talented producer and multi-instrumentalist, Railway Suicide Train dive into jazzier territory on the pair of winding tracks, recorded with a five-person line-up that includes Li Zichao and Abing, both members of the excellent Sleeping Dogs.

The EP is entitled My Bland Field in English, but the music is anything but bland.

A follow on from spring 2025’s at the Theater live album, My Bland Field feels like it really encapsulates Shen’s sound at present. Unsurprisingly given the personnel involved, there’s a sense of the divide between Railway Suicide Train and Sleeping Dogs blurring. These two instrumental tracks also feel like they could sit happily on Jimao Big Band’s most recent EP, another Shen production.

That’s not a criticism or to say that these acts lack their own character however — with Shen being one of the most interesting producers in China right now, it’s a pleasure to spend a bit more time in his musical world.

My bland field is out now.

Just briefly: a Fujian forest field trip, a day in the Himalayas, and ‘War God in the Park’

In late December, DFU and Wen Zhiyong released Little Forest Tapestry, “a sonic journey and an experiment in sound”. DFU is Dave Situ, a producer and percussionist who also set up bar and live music venue Thank You in his adopted home city of Xiamen on the coast of Fujian. Wen is a renowned multi-instrumentalist whose trumpet work appeared on records with Yang Haisong and 不一定 last year.

On Little Forest Tapestry, DFU provides percussion, samples and synths, while Wen mostly plays a Ming dynasty bone flute, but the record’s real magic comes from the sense that you’re joining them on a camping trip: much of the music is seemingly recorded around a campfire and, as the introductory text explains, “Improvised soundscapes are layered with outdoor field recordings captured during a return to a hidden forest near Xiamen”. Head to the Bandcamp page and you can even find a video taster of the trip, by Cola Ren.

Ningbo indie-rockers der Berliner Nebel led listeners on an expedition of a different kind at the end of 2025, with a new EP entitled A Wonderful Day in the Himalayas. Emerging from a (ahem) fog of weariness and depression, the band say they looked to simplify things on the new record, which results in a synthy, dancey sound that’s easy to get into. The EP’s atmosphere therefore pulls toward its uplifting title, even as the lyrics deal with lingering self-doubt and helplessness along the way.

There’s little sense of such self-doubt on the latest outing from Beijing grindcore act Sludge Gal and Shit Boi. Entitled Want A.S.S, their new album is an exercise in in-your-face attitude set to intense musical backing. I could say more, but you’ve probably already decided whether you’re going to hit play or not just from the names…

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Exit music

Leaving you with the new David Boring album, Liminal Beings and Their Echoes. It’s the Hong Kong punk / industrial act’s first LP in almost nine years and is out now on Damnably, the UK-based label that’s also home to releases from Xiao Wang, Hiperson, and Japanese band Otoboke Beaver.

Read the ever-excellent Josh Feola on them at Bandcamp Daily: “A band always keenly attuned to the nihilistic undercurrents of life in Hong Kong, DAVID BORING has returned after a seven-year hiatus with their second album and a darker sound.”

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Steve has been presenting On The Wire since 1984, hosting guests ranging from Lee “Scratch” Perry to Neneh Cherry to 808 State. His playlists always turn up something I’ve never heard before and he remains firmly in tune with the most interesting music around — the episode my mix is on features tracks from Xavisphone and Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou, for example.

But Steve also has a strong connection to China. In fact, his bio makes a nod to the pioneering underground (literally) club space The Shelter: “Occasional DJ but never usually the same gig twice unless it was the Shelter in Shanghai.” I was fortunate enough to witness Steve at that venue and he’s been a strong supporter of Concrete Avalanche since its early days.

Here’s his introduction to the latest episode of On The Wire:

“Between the years 2002 and 2011 I was living in China, mostly in Beijing but regularly travelled to different provinces across the country. I was lucky enough to make quite a few friends involved in music scenes across different genres and widespread locations. Since leaving its been difficult to keep track but luckily these days I can rely on the excellent work of Jake Newby to help me keep up with his Concrete Avalanche column on Substack.”

LISTEN HERE

The mix features the likes of Cola Ren, Wu Zhuoling, and The River, Orchestration, Walkman! but there were also plenty of great tracks I couldn’t quite work in. For more of my favourites from last year, go here:

And be sure to follow Steve and On The Wire, broadcasting brilliant music every weekend.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have tip jar running on Ko-fi, which you can contribute to here if you’d like:

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In this issue: a look at the end of year lists from user reviews site Douban and some of China’s biggest streaming services.

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What was China listening to in 2025?

We might be three weeks into 2026 now on your Gregorian calendar, but in China the real end of year vibes are only just ramping up: the Year of the Snake doesn’t become the Year of the Horse for a few more weeks yet. Nevertheless, a few platforms in the country have published their end of year round-ups, so let’s take a look through.

As has become traditional with these posts, we’ll start with Douban. I usually describe Douban as an online community of hard-to-please users writing reviews of films, books, music and more. I liked ’s description of it (in an excellent recent piece looking at its best books of the year lists) as “the rare social media platform in China that has a lot of goodwill among young people” and one that “attracts a primarily young, urban, highly-educated userbase—very artsy, very international-minded, more than a little pretentious.”

So what were they listening to and liking in 2025? Here are the highest-rated foreign- and Mandarin-language albums:

Not a huge amount of overlap with Concrete Avalanche’s albums of the year list, but it’s pleasing to see Xia Zhiyu and Dizkar’s Everybody Loves Hip Hop make the cut, grabbing sixth place on the Mandarin list. That record also lands at number three on the ‘most paid attention to’ hip hop albums of the year, a list that includes Little Simz’s Lotus and Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out too.

Elsewhere on the genre-specific run-downs: Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures tops the folk list just ahead of Bon Iver’s latest; FKA Twigs takes two places in the electronic top five (first for Eusexua, fourth for Eusexua Afterglow), a list that also features DJ Gurl’s 头7 at number eight; Essex Honey by Blood Orange claims top spot for R&B; and Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter Laufey leads the blues / jazz list with A Matter of Time, with Concrete Avalanche favourites The River, Orchestration, Walkman!, Enji, and Alabaster DePlume also featuring.

Here’s how the rock list looks:

As ever, there’s very little information (well, none really) about how Douban put together these lists, hence an album rated 7.3 can beat an album rated 8.2 with no real explanation. Instead, at the end of their round-up, having broken down their records of the year by genre, they simply tell us that “music knows no genre”.

Apple Music in China also knows no genre — it really just knows the music of one man. Here’s our annual glance at the platform’s Jay Chou songs of the year:

A bit more relevant are the ‘end of year awards’ handed out by streaming giant NetEase. After naming pop legend Faye Wong’s ‘My Gifts from the World’ the Mandarin-language song of 2025, the platform reveals its hip hop-heavy top 10 albums list:

That’s ex-Super Boy Hua Chenyu at number one with Tipping Point, the star-studded soundtrack to TV show The First Frost at number two, and, well, you know who that is at number three.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the year-end round-ups from the Tencent empire follow similar trends, with pop absolutely dominating. The main point of interest is how prominent K-pop artists are, a sign that restrictions around them are continuing to ease. Jennie’s Ruby made it into the top five of QQ Music’s albums of the year list for example, a countdown topped by Gai, DamnShine, Kungfu-Pen and Key.L’s G-Block Mixtape.

Meanwhile over on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, Skai isyourgod and AR’s collaboration ‘大展鸿图 Blueprint Supreme’ was the ‘hottest’ song of 2025.

If you want to read a proper rundown of the year in Mandopop, as always the answer is Mando Gap.

To end on a less mainstream note, Hutong rock hang out School held their annual awards in Beijing in early January. The ceremony for the ‘Wudaokou Grammys’ was attended by Chinese rock royalty Cui Jian and saw hard rockers East Cotton No. 7 scoop the Band of the Year prize. Their reward? A giant tankard of beer, which they were then encouraged to down. Ganbei!

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3 trends from the year in alternative Chinese music

FEMINISM

A trio of stridently feminist albums in 2025 pointed to the pressures and prejudices faced by young women today.

Xi’an post-punk trio Rats&Pears unveiled an angry debut LP entitled Well of Shame, a reference to a once-banned lesbian novel from 1928. An electro-punk group once known as Fake Orgasm changed their name to Hex in Sparkle but didn’t compromise their approach, channelling Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and talking of their “strong desire to voice the hidden emotions of young women”. And young Shanghai rock act Fiery Medusa displayed a similarly palpable anger about contemporary society’s attitudes toward women on their debut LP Eyes Looking Down.

Given some of the references weaved into these works, it’s perhaps no surprise that Cold Window found similar themes in the world of literature in China last year (you really ought to subscribe to that newsletter).

(A CHINESE) EMO REVIVAL

China’s had emo bands for years (the great Chinese Football recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of their eponymous debut album, for example), but in 2025 they seemed to be everywhere. It wasn’t long before people were talking about a full-scale (Chinese) emo revival. I’ll be posting more of a guide in the coming weeks, but for now, here’s Guangdong band Midwest Emo Mahjong’s I’m not from the midwest, one of the best band and album name combos from the resurgence:

STRUGGLING VENUES

This was not a phenomenon that began in the last 12 months or, of course, one limited to China, but still, the number of high profile music venue closures in 2025 was sobering.

The year was barely a few hours old when the first major venue shuttered — the New Year’s Eve party at Hangzhou’s Loopy was the alternative music hub’s last. Hangzhou producer GG Lobster would later rail against the shallow influencer culture that he saw as contributing to the important venue’s demise:

Unfortunately, this became a key trend as the year progressed, with a string of significant, often long-running non-mainstream music spaces closing across the country. Beijing lost FruitySpace and Dada (although thankfully the latter was resurrected around a month after its ‘closing’ party). Chengdu lost .TAG, a lynchpin nightclub hidden in a tower block. And Shanghai lost ALL, successor to pioneering club space The Shelter. In December, the northern city of Harbin saw SubLive call it quits after 13 years of gigs.

The reasons behind the closures varied and of course, new venues also opened across China, but losing long-running, important creative spaces was a dispiritingly prevalent trend. Hopefully it’s not one that dominates the coming year.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: a fascinating (and sometimes contradictory) experimental electronic release, an ex-punk delivers absorbing sound diaries from Beijing, hyperpop hero DJ Gurl and ‘Chinese 1970s soul’ singer Dizkar drop anniversary singles, Cui Jian returns to rap, Brian Eno x Re-TROS, plus avant-garde Kazakh folk, progressive electronic sounds, and more.

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Rage, rage: Untechcircle delivers a fascinating experimental electronic debut in Dying Light

The central narrative behind Chen Jinkang’s new album Dying Light is that he spent four years collecting samples from across Asia and Europe to create the record. “Extensive samples about ‘existence’,” to be precise. “He faithfully documented the illusions and truths he experienced—those fleeting, decaying, lifeless, bygone, dissolving yet persistently ‘present’ sensations,” the accompanying text tells us.

On paper, four years’ worth of samples compressed into eight tracks sounds like the makings of a densely layered, intense listening experience. Yet the resulting experimental electronic release feels far from overwhelmed with sounds. Chen deploys the samples almost sparingly in places, over skittering percussion and deconstructed club elements.

It’s one of several intriguing contradictions at the heart of Dying Light, the debut release from a figure who has worked as a sound designer for commercial fashion shows by the likes of LV and Burberry while also nurturing connections to both the visual art world and the alternative club music scene in China.

Released under Chen’s producer alter ego Untechcircle, Dying Light is the first album to be put out by Shanghai club brand System (admittedly in collaboration with the experimental-leaning Detroit Underground label in the US). But it’s hardly a conventional club record. At one point, the tap-tap-tap of a pingpong ball on a table is spliced with ricocheting beats; on a later track, a traditional wooden temple block collides with electronic elements that veer between enticingly twinkly and harshly metallic. Another apparent contradiction: when Chen has taken the album on tour in recent weeks, he’s done so with a live band featuring drums, guitar, violin, and keys, together with a VJ.

Perhaps this speaks to Chen’s drive for experimentation and reinvention. Dying Light certainly doesn’t seem satisfied with staying in one place for long. The “fleeting” and “dissolving” sensations referred to above manifest in glitchy, unconventional electronic sounds that are almost constantly in flux. Yet as restless as it can feel at times, there’s an ethereal atmosphere throughout too.

These contradictions don’t subtract from the experience of listening to the album — far from it. They may well be part of the point. It’s clear that Chen has put considerable time and thought into the record, including its presentation. His choice of a work by artist Li Jingxiong for the cover, according to the album blurb, came because, “[Li’s] artistic practice explores the cruelty and tragedy of virtual existence, alongside the resulting psychopathologies of survival in contemporary life. His aesthetic framework resonates profoundly with the thematic motifs UNTECHCIRCLE seeks to interpret through their music.”

Dying Light’s release in late November meant I didn’t have enough time with it before my end of year round-up (a perennial problem with Chinese release schedules; PK14 put a new album out in late December, for example, though that’s yet to make it to international platforms in full so more on that another time). But it was certainly one of the more interesting electronic releases from China in 2025 — give it a listen.

Dying Light is out now.

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Let it snow: experimentalist Yan Jun and guqin player Wu Na reunite for ambient-experimental LP

One of Yan Jun and Wu Na’s collaborations did make it to Concrete Avalanche’s ‘best of 2025’ list. But this other link up between the experimental stalwart and the master guqin player might be even better. It originally came out in China in the summer of last year but only recently made it to Bandcamp, where it’s available digitally and as a nicely-presented vinyl record featuring photography taken from Zhuang Hui’s Qilianshan mountain range series.

Yan — who saw yet another of his collaborations make it to Thurston Moore’s 2025 favourites list — fiddles with feedback and field recordings, keeping things fairly restrained for the most part, before ratcheting up the noisiness levels as ‘the second snow’ reaches its climax. Meanwhile, Wu’s playing of her traditional Chinese string instrument is as delicate as the record’s theme suggests; she often seems content to pluck a single note and let it reverberate and resonate without ever being swamped by Yan’s experimental sounds. It makes for a trio of beautiful, largely ambient pieces.

If you like what you hear from Wu, late last year she also released a more straightforward but still beautiful album of guqin pieces entitled Limitless.

And if you’re wondering which of Yan’s many 2025 releases caught Moore’s ear, it was this one, with Taku Unami:

两场雪 snowing twice is out now.

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Bande a part: Mamer’s “ethnic avant-garde band” bring the noise with traditional Kazakh instruments

Xinjiang-born Kazakh musician Mamer is not one to rest on his laurels. Having found international acclaim through an album of intricate folk tracks released on Real World Records in 2009, he’s been deconstructing the form ever since, regularly reimagining traditional songs as out-there experimental pieces. He does this both under his own name and with a range of side projects, one of which (IZ) he’s on tour with right now.

The last tour he undertook with one of his bands took place as long ago as… late November. That was with Bande, an “ethnic avant-garde” group (as label and regular Mamer hang out Old Heaven Books puts it). Formed in 2012, they regularly perform in masks and hooded cloaks. The band released a tour-only physical release to accompany their recent seven-city run of shows, which is now available online through Old Heaven’s Bandcamp.

Entitled Toy ‎توي, the eight-track record sees Mamer joined by Xalhar, who performs on the kobyz (a traditional Kazakh bowed string instrument), and percussionist Zhang Dong, appearing here as ‘Jandos’ and primarily playing a shaman drum. Mamer’s focus is on the dombra (a kind of Kazakh lute), though he also provides two electric guitar improvisations.

That combination may sound like it’d produce a fairly straightforward folk album, but in the hands of this trio the instruments are put towards a series of chugging, noisy and often immersive tracks. It’s yet more evidence of why Mamer is always an artist worth watching.

Toy ‎توي is out now.

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Just briefly: Gooooose not Geese, Cui Jian rap, a DJ Gurl anniversary track, and more

Electronic producer Gooooose, a regular on the SVBKVLT label and a founding member (alongside 33EMYBW) of Shanghai band Duck Fight Goose, has released an album of “selected cuts of studio improvisations” recorded in the last two years. The tracks are very much in keeping with his experimental, sometimes stripped back, always progressive electronic sound.

Godfather of Chinese rock ’n’ roll Cui Jian appears on the new album from pop rapper Air, gruffly rapping his way through a verse on the track ‘Concrete Wall’. While Old Cui is best known for pioneering rock music in China and singing the anthemic ‘Nothing to My Name’, he’s no stranger to rap: he was experimenting with the form long before smash hit TV show The Rap of China brought a sanitised version of hip hop (and stars such as Air) into China’s mainstream.

A collaboration of a very different kind here: Beijing-based dark ambient producer thruoutin and Shanghai-based harsh noise provocateur Torturing Nurse have reunited after working together on a split cassette release back in 2014. Over a decade later, the pair present “a raw, handmade CD-R release from Jingweir, limited to just 35 copies”. The four-track Alluvial Split sees the two artists explore “the extremes of experimental sound”.

Yunnan-based singer Dizkar — who returned to his rap roots in 2025 on the local identity-focused Everybody Loves Hip Hop with Xia Zhiyu — released a new single late last year to mark the first anniversary of his album Fake Soul Music. That LP was an attempt to create a Chinese version of the 1970s Motown sound and ‘Ugly Medal’ is very much in the same vein, with Dizkar channelling What’s Going On-era Marvin Gaye as he calls for world peace.

Hyperpop hero DJ Gurl pulled a similar move to Dizkar in December, with a new single to mark the first birthday of their Slave to the Rhythm trilogy, which blew so many minds in China in late 2024.

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“Seeking refuge in another realm”: ex-punk Axiang’s sonic explorations

Wuhan-based label of “experimental/ weird/ beautiful/ unknown music” Tailnia have followed the considerable coup of putting out a record by Aaron Dilloway by releasing a collection of “sound diaries” from Beijing-based artist Axiang.

“Axiang has long participated in punk, post-punk, experimental, noise, and performance art scenes across Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Henan, Hong Kong, and Brazil, primarily as a drummer,” explains Tailnia’s introduction to the release.

“Following the pandemic, she began practising classical guitar pieces alongside her work brewing coffee and teaching children to paint. Now settled in Beijing’s suburban Yizhuang district for the fourth year, she has withdrawn from bustling scenes to create sound diaries from the sounds around her.”

Many of the tracks see Axiang seemingly taking a field recording and stretching it. There are metallic, industrial sounds alongside those that feel more natural in origin, but most are warped and distorted so that they sit just beyond recognition.

Axiang herself says of the pieces that,

“They capture the feelings and sonic explorations of that time, allowing me to briefly detach from the tedium and pressures of my current work and life, seeking refuge in another realm.”

On the final track, she starts to offer something more melodic, but never quite allows for such an easy, tangible listen. That would likely feel out of place alongside the other ‘diaries’, with the recordings’ abstract nature a key part of their intrigue.

Sound Diaries is out now.

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Exit music

First PK14, next Re-TROS? Another of China’s early post-punk bands, Rebuilding the Rights of Statues recently updated their Bandcamp with physical formats for some of their older records, including the Brian Eno-featuring Cut Off! EP. They’ve also refreshed their YouTube channel, uploading a few music videos, old tour documentaries from when they played across Europe with Depeche Mode (watch below) and when they went to SXSW, plus archive footage of them performing live in Xiamen in 2007.

Are they gearing up for something or am I reading too much into it? Given it’s been over eight years since their last album, it’s probably best not to get too excited.

From an interview I did with them in 2017: “Clearly delighting in confounding expectations, the band are already plotting what [frontman Hua Dong] calls ‘the next stage’ of Re-TROS. […] Though of course, this being Re-TROS, fans know not to hold their breath. ‘Maybe it’ll be another eight years until the next record,’ says Hua with a mischievous smirk. ‘Maybe.’”

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have tip jar running on Ko-fi, which you can contribute to here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

This is probably the last of me bothering your inbox in 2025. Hopefully see you in 2026... Meanwhile, please hit the heart button, share, comment, encourage random people you meet to subscribe, etcetera.

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In this issue: the usual caveats apply, hence that * in the title, but here are 13 records that I enjoyed in 2025. I hope you enjoy them too — and if you do, please support the artists with a bit of money if you can.

You can listen to most of these, plus some extra bits, via this playlist.

Cola Ren — Mekong Ballad

Gloriously mellow, jazz-laced, ambient-adjacent electronic music from Guangzhou producer Cola Ren. The rest of these records are in no particular order but if I had to pick just one for you to listen to it’d be this one.

不一定乐队 — tiger

A meandering (in a good way), largely improvised jazz expedition from a group of renowned Chinese musicians reuniting on record for the first time in over 15 years.

Zhiyu Xia x Dizkar — Everybody Loves Hiphop

Skai isyourgod may have continued to garner international attention in 2025, not least with his recent tour of North America, but he’s not the only Chinese rapper tapping into regional identities. Dizkar, the Yunnanese singer who this time last year released a Chinese take on 1970s American soul music, teamed up with old friend Zhiyu Xia, the Sichuanese lyricist dubbed ‘the Jia Zhangke of rap’, for an album that revelled in China’s linguistic diversity. Beijing, Guiyang, Leshan, Hong Kong, and Naqu (in Tibet) were among the places represented on an LP celebrating dialects and local identities.

红发少年杀人事件 — Brutal Girl Delusion

Hugely-likeable, high-energy, driving guitar tunes from this young Guangzhou group.

Zhaoze — The Triangle

Long-running post-rock-plus-guqin (a traditional Chinese string instrument) band Zhaoze added a string quartet for this immersive live album.

DJ小女孩 — 头7

This album came out back in April but it’s still a bewildering listen no matter how many times you’ve heard it since then. Elements include experimental bursts of noise and static, Dong minority-like (funeral?) chants, soaring pop hooks, dirty club beats, warped vocals, rapped verses, random horror film screams and heavy breathing. And this was just one of the records that the beatmaker behind the DJ Gurl persona was involved in this year. Definitely the hyperpop producer of the moment in China.

TheCurly — Lonely Lover

Sumptuous shoegaze (with a dash of dreampop) from young Fujian band TheCurly.

The river, Orchestration, Walkman! — Eternal Summer

Guangdong kooks The river, Orchestration, Walkman! returned with their first formal release in a couple of years, a calmer but still pleasingly off-kilter set of recordings referencing everything from Erik Satie to Super Mario.

DaYe — Road to Spring

Quirky, lo-fi, not-quite-ambient electronica dedicated to young producer DaYe’s home city of Yangzhou.

Mamer — Awlaⱪta / Afar 离

Mesmerising work from Xinjiang-born musician Mamer, with the musician playing everything from ‘90s Kazakh rock anthems to traditional folk tracks solo on a nylon string guitar. A largely contemplative, gentle set of songs from a true master.

Fayzz — Patch

This Chengdu band railed against AI in a note accompanying their latest album, yet the record itself is a mellow, pleasing blend of math-rock, funk, jazz, and hip hop influences.

wu na and yan jun — wu na and yan jun

Renowned experimentalist Yan Jun plays foil capsules and a thermos on this release, but surprisingly he also adds his own vocals to Wu Na’s gentle guqin parts. This improvised set is one of Yan’s most accessible recordings to date.

The Beneficial Society — The Beneficial Society

Part of China’s midwest emo revival, The Beneficial Society hail from Hangzhou and mix screamo, punk, brass and string elements into their sound, as you can hear on their debut album, released jointly on Chinese label Happy Records and Japanese imprint Ungulates.

Just like listmas…

I was fortunate enough to be invited to contribute a few entries from China to the brilliant ’ end of year ambient list. I chose three not-entirely-ambient releases, sorry Stephan.

zensounds

The 25 Best Ambient Albums of 2025

Have you actually noticed that I’ve changed the tagline of this newsletter from experimental music and culture to ambient and experimental music…

Read more

6 months ago · 117 likes · 17 comments · Stephan Kunze

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can. And remember that it’s Bandcamp Friday on December 5th.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: rising Chongqing producer Rev appears on renowned label Planet Mu, a Jia Zhangke collaborator turns his hand to experimental music, psych group Jimao Big Band offer up a winter-appropriate EP, David Boring return, Torturing Nurse teams up with an American experimental pioneer, new ambient, new Yu Su, and new animal rights punk, plus ‘Who’s the rock girl taking the Chinese indie scene by storm?’.

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Nomad city: Chongqing producer Rev summons ghostly electronic sounds on Planet Mu debut

Jlin, RP Boo, Slikback, Rian Treanor, µ-Ziq. Just a few of the names to have graced Planet Mu over its three decade history. And now joining their ranks is Chongqing native Raymond Hu, better known under his producer alias Rev.

Arriving hot on the heels of Cola Ren’s Mekong Ballad on New York imprint Human Pitch, Rev’s Stay, Nomad is another example of an exciting young Chinese producer gaining international recognition from a highly regarded label. Like Ren’s work, Rev’s also has one foot in downtempo and ambient-adjacent territory — the early moments of Stay, Nomad’s ‘Infant Lullaby’ in particular would feel right at home on one of Ren’s records — but also explores more off-kilter tones, never quite settling for a straightforward listen.

Opening track ‘Mind Game’ encapsulates this approach, beginning with gentle piano notes yet soon submitting to waves of deconstructed dub and detached vocals, cut through with skittering, distorted static. These elements resurface throughout Stay, Nomad, with ghostly vocals a regular feature of Rev’s work — sounds that Planet Mu accurately describe as being like “eerie holograms”.

The label notes that his approach is partly informed by Chongqing’s status as a Chinese hip hop stronghold:

“This scene initially inspired Raymond to produce music, but unable to find a satisfactory vocalist/songwriter to ‘complete’ his sound, he started to build his own by cutting up, reordering and editing mostly feminine pop vocals instead of working with a rapper. It’s a process with an element of chance, a proxy that balances the familiar and the uncanny.”

Forgive the random tangent, but it reminds me of a quote recently resurfaced by Bristol-based publishing press Strange Region, originally from an 1887 article in Scientific American about a visit to a new-fangled telephone exchange:

“My own material existence I am reasonably assured of. I can imagine my friend at the other end of the line. But between us two there is an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else […] The vocal inhabitants of this strange region have an amazing vanishing quality.”

Rev seems to provides listeners with a passport to this “airy nowhere”.

Stay, Nomad is out now.

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Strawberry feels: Jia Zhangke collaborator Zhang Yang’s Ingmar Bergman-inspired sounds

Sound designer Zhang Yang isn’t exactly a household name, especially in the Anglophone world, but you might be more familiar with his work than you realise. Zhang is a frequent collaborator with Jia Zhangke, having worked on the celebrated filmmaker’s early films such as Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) and Platform, through to his more recent features Mountains May Depart and Ash is the Purest White. Zhang has also collaborated with another of China’s leading contemporary filmmakers, Diao Yinan, providing sound design for the Shaanxi director’s noir thrillers Black Coal, Thin Ice and Wild Goose Lake.

His latest project has been to form a band, which he’s entitled Non-Narrative Shot. Their first album is named after Smultronstället, the classic Ingmar Bergman film from 1957 known in English as Wild Strawberries.

Comprising four pieces that span almost an hour in total, the album is a live recording made in Beijing’s Solo Club in January of this year. The set it captures is one that Zhang describes as “a grand dream of free improvisation”. Joining him in this dream sequence were experimental electronic musician Li Yanzeng and Wang Xiaofang, a member of China’s first all-female rock group Cobra (formed in 1989) who more recently has played the yangqin (a traditional Chinese hammered dulcimer) with the likes of Dou Wei and Yang Haisong.

The resulting pieces, all named after poems by Tomas Tranströmer, contain an interesting interplay between static-filled, staccato electronics and Wang’s dynamic yangqin melodies, with Zhang adding occasional, almost absent-minded acoustic guitar over the top. “The first time my yangqin met an acoustic guitar, I was initially worried about whether the two instruments’ timbres would harmonise,” Wang writes of the collaboration. “That day I asked Zhang Yang: What kind of music do you play on your acoustic guitar? He replied: Unsure! Let’s follow our emotions…”

This speaks to the unpredictable nature of the trio’s improvisation, while the band name gives you an idea of their sometimes abstract sound. But when it works, it really works.

Smultronstället is out now, and belatedly added to Badhead’s Bandcamp…

Badhead’s Bandcamp bounces back

Someone at Badhead, the experimental-leaning spin-off label from Chinese music industry behemoth Modern Sky, has remembered to update their Bandcamp page, adding a series of releases from recent months that I’d resorted to covering via YouTube embeds in previous newsletters.

There’s the wild live album from King Crimson-inspired Inner Mongolian rocker Hai Qing and his band Utopian Daymare, for example:

There’s “laptop player [and] noise improviser” Vavabond’s Functional Structures release, too:

And there’s the latest edition of the label’s poetry and music series, featuring wordsmith Han Dong in collaboration with Yang Haisong, Wang Wen’s Xie Yugang, Xiao He and an extensive cast of China’s leading experimental musicians, which has been released in full (previously, only around a third of the tracks were available on international platforms).

More on the album here, and more on that lovely woodblock cover art here.

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Cold water music: psych-folk act Jimao Big Band impress on winter-appropriate EP

Last time we heard from Jimao Big Band, they were serving up a series of food pairing suggestions to go with their second LP, a smörgåsbord of psych-folk, art punk, Balkan-ish percussion, and spaghetti Western-like guitar licks. There are no such gimmicks for their new EP, reflecting the music’s calmer, relatively pared back feel. The emphasis is on relatively there; Jimao are still full of ideas — the EP features prog, jazz, and indie pop elements — they’re just giving them a little more space to breath.

Shen Zhi, the talented producer behind many a psych-ish Chinese band’s best works, is at the helm for this new collection of four tracks, entitled I Only Sing in the Winter. The recordings took place at Shen’s The Room studio on Jilong mountain and at band member Cai Lanbing’s home, and there’s an intimacy to much of the music on the EP — even as Jimao live up to their big band name by involving 15 performers along the way. The lyrics may mix lines about lost love with the imagery of rain water, but there’s something inherently comforting about the record.

Closing track ‘Halo’ is the stand out, a seven minute piece that opens with seasonally appropriate touches (a choir cooing and a music box-like twinkle), ebbing and flowing into a stomp-along piano-propelled anthem. Part-way through. there’s a spoken word passage in Portuguese from Dirty Fingers’ Brazilian drummer Ale Amazonia that, paired with building instrumentation, feels lightly reminiscent of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. The rousing refrain of “tell me what you need” as the track reaches its climax provides the sort of moment that might just make your spine tingle, and not merely because it’s cold outside.

I Only Sing in the Winter is out now.

Just briefly: Hong Kong punk, new Yu Su, and more

David Boring are gearing up for the first album in nearly nine years. The Hong Kong no wave band, once endorsed by the late great Anthony Bourdain, are releasing Liminal Beings and Their Echoes in mid-January on Damnably and already have a couple of tracks for you to listen to:

Kaifeng-born London-based producer Yu Su is also teasing a new LP. She’s put out two new tracks on Short Span, which as the label notes are “the most dance-forward release from Yu in a minute”.

Regular readers of this newsletter will likely be familiar by now with ‘harsh as fuck’ noise artist Torturing Nurse. The latest release from the ever-productive Shanghai-based provocateur sees him team up with John Duncan, “a towering figure in experimental music and performance since the late 1970s”.

Chengdu hardcore act Gaiwaer — who once played live in a McDonald’s in the Sichuan capital — dropped a new album in late November, a day-in-the-life record entitled Negative Energy, Get Outta Here!. They then followed it a few days later with a short, sharp stand-alone track entitled ‘I Wish China Had an Animal Protection Law’:

Just a closer walk with trees: a long-running solo ambient project finds inspiration in Zhangjiajie

Zhangjiajie is considerably better known for its spectacular quartz-sandstone landscape than its musical output. Its stone columns, stalagmites, and stalactites attract huge crowds of visitors every year and were supposedly the inspiration behind the rocky settings in the original Avatar film. Yet the area is also home to Liu Yang, a musician whose minimalist ambient compositions feel a world away from the bombast of a James Cameron production.

As Muggle, Liu has been plugging away as a solo artist for the best part of twenty years. He was previously guitarist in post-rock band 48v in Hunan’s provincial capital of Changsha, before retreating back to his home town of Zhangjiajie.

Simply titled Forest Walk in English, Muggle’s latest release — available on limited edition cassette through 1724 Records — takes its Chinese name from a line in a poem by Tang dynasty landscape painter, politician, and wordsmith Wang Wei: “Reflected light enters the deep forest, shining once more upon the green moss.” As the Bandcamp introduction puts it, the verse “aligns seamlessly with Muggle’s creative intent and sonic language.”

Forest Walk is out now.

Related:

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Exit music

I teased this the other week, but here’s a Homegrown session with the supremely talented Zhang ‘Nono’ Xingchan that’s well worth a watch.

The Wuhan producer followed up 2024’s break-out LP No, No! with the EP No, Now! earlier this year, and continues to cause a stir in China. Here, you can watch her building ‘The B-Side of the World’:

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

Apologies for bothering your inbox more than usual, but in this issue: a special edition, an interview with Cola Ren. The internationally-acclaimed Guangzhou producer talks about her beautiful new record Mekong Ballad, how fracturing her foot led to her making music, and the importance of her time at renowned London experimental venue Cafe OTO.

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“When I make music, it feels like a conversation with myself, pulling up things that have been sitting quietly inside”

In the latest issue of Concrete Avalanche, I raved about the new EP from Cola Ren, 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 Beijing-based 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.

Not that you need to take my words for it when it comes to Ren’s talent. Her previous EPs have received glowing appraisals from music writers such as and of the essential Futurism Restated and First Floor respectively.

Sherburne wrote of her Hailu Remixes EP that it was “love at first listen”, but not just because of the stellar cast of producers assembled to reinterpret her work: “it’s clear that while the remixers have added their own respective brands of fairy dust, the magic was right there in the songs from the beginning.”

More recently, Reynaldo followed up his effusive praise for Ren’s 2024 EP Forest Drone by describing her latest record as “both wonderfully colorful and refreshingly organic”.

But enough of other people’s words, here’s Cola in her own…

Can you talk a little about how you first became interested in music? Was the piano your first instrument?

I’ve been drawn to music since I was very young—from anime music to whatever I heard in my parents’ car.

Piano was my first instrument, but the training was very exam-focused, and the pressure made it feel dry and not very joyful, so I eventually stopped. I only reconnected with music later on, when I began exploring sounds for myself rather than playing for a test.

When did you start collecting records? And how did you go from being a record collector to becoming a DJ?

I started buying CDs in middle school—mostly anime and video game soundtracks. I was also obsessed with “dakou” CDs back then (I’m from Guangzhou… if you know, you know).

More on “dakou”:

In high school I shifted toward collecting albums from indie bands I loved and some jazz records. I only got into vinyl in university, after a friend gave me a turntable—and things escalated quickly from there.

Becoming a DJ felt like a natural progression: once you own that many records, you just want to share them with people in a live setting.

Did the move into production also feel quite natural?

I’d always wanted to try making my own music, but I actually started in 2022 during the Shanghai lockdown. I fractured my left foot around that time and had to return to Guangzhou to recover, which forced me into a slower, quieter state.

Ironically, that “being stuck” period gave me the space to finally open my laptop and turn what I was feeling into sound. Once I started, I realized how naturally it suited me.

You’re also a photographer. Is there any overlap in how you approach photography and how you approach music?

To me, both photography and music are about capturing how I feel in a specific moment. Photography freezes the image, while music preserves the air, the emotion, the breath around it.

They both come from the same place—just trying to show how I see the world at that time.

Each of your records so far has referenced spirituality and consciousness at some point. What role do they play in your music-making?

For me, spirituality isn’t something mystical—it’s more like a way of sorting through my emotions. When I make music, it feels like a conversation with myself, pulling up things that have been sitting quietly inside. So spirituality is simply an inner space where I can hear myself more clearly.

Can you talk a little about the creative process behind your music?

I don’t have a rigid process—sometimes I start with a field recording, other times with a chord or a simple rhythm. Usually I just look for a sound that makes me want to keep listening. From there, I build it layer by layer, almost like constructing a small room.

Once the atmosphere feels right, I begin shaping the structure.

How and when did the concept for Mekong Ballad first take shape?

The concept didn’t appear all at once—it really began with my trips to Cambodia and Thailand in early 2020 and again in 2023. Those journeys left me with a deep impression of the rivers, the humidity, and the air in Southeast Asia.

When J-Fever wrote the lyrics [for lead single ‘Mekong Ballad’], he included imagery of the Mekong River, almost as if he translated the pictures in my mind into words. So in this case, the lyrics came first, and the music followed—I shaped the track around the world he created.

That’s also how the water theme gradually became the core of the record.

On that title track, we hear you sing for the first time. What made you want to add your own vocals?

The main reason was simply that J-Fever had already written the lyrics. I loved what he wrote, and as soon as I read it, I felt it should be sung by me.

I’ve always wanted to include vocals in my music—it just never felt like the right moment before. This track finally gave me a natural opening, so I just went with it.

How did you end up working with J-Fever in the first place? Any chance of him rapping on a Cola Ren track some time?

I met J-Fever through our mutual friend Endy. One day I casually played him a demo of a completely different track, and it sparked something—he wrote the lyrics for this song almost immediately. But I didn’t end up using the lyrics for that original track; instead, I created a brand new piece to carry them.

As for him rapping on one of my tracks someday—I think it’s definitely possible. It really depends on when inspiration strikes again.

You’ve also got guest instrumentation from tga and rrrrrm on the new record, how did your collaborations with them come about?

We’ve all admired each other’s music for a while, so the collaborations came very naturally.

Their improvisations added a sense of “breath” to the tracks—something I couldn’t create alone. The best part of collaborating is that the music often goes somewhere you wouldn’t have predicted.

Hailu had a fantastic international remix line up and for Mekong Ballad you have Wu Zhuoling, Mong Tong and Guohan. How have the various remixes of your work come about?

Most of the remixes came about simply because I genuinely love these artists’ work, so I reached out to them directly.

I usually give a loose direction like “feel free to rebuild it from zero” or “play however you want.” I try not to interfere too much—I want them to reinterpret my music in their own language.

And when the final versions come back, they often surprise me in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

I’ve seen photos of your home studio with a trumpet, guitars, a marimba, a dombra, synths of course… are you constantly picking up new instruments?

At home I have a trumpet, several synthesizers, an electric piano, and some percussion instruments I picked up while traveling. Some were things I heard on the road and instantly fell in love with, and others were random gems I found online because their tone felt inspiring.

On Mekong Ballad, the main elements are actually synths, software instruments, and samples. The signature string-like drone in ‘Be Water’ comes from a Tambura I bought in India—I processed it into a long, sustained texture.

I choose instruments simply by whether their sound gives me a strong visual or emotional image.

Is there an instrument that you don’t have yet that you’d like to own and learn how to play?

Lately I’ve been wanting to learn the double bass—I love how grounded and powerful its sound is.

When I was younger, I played percussion in my school wind band, including marimba, drums, and all sorts of other percussion instruments. I often miss the feeling of being completely synced with rhythm, so I’d love to revisit those instruments someday. But they’re all so expensive and take up so much space, so for now they remain something I “secretly dream about,” haha.

You recently taught yourself to play the trumpet and posted about it regularly online. How was that process for you?

Learning the trumpet has been a surprisingly sweet experience—it’s difficult and slow, but I can feel small progress every day.

Posting about it is mostly a way to document the process and remind myself not to give up. People’s responses have been really encouraging, which makes me want to keep going.

It also brought back the feeling of “being a student,” which is grounding in a nice way.

You mention that some of your instrument collection has come from your travels… how important is travel to you as a person and to your music?

Travel keeps me curious about the world. It’s like switching to a different way of breathing—it lets me feel a new kind of rhythm.

I naturally pay attention to the local sounds wherever I go, not just music but also markets, rivers, conversations… everyday soundscapes. These things eventually slip into my work, sometimes as a rhythm, a recording, or just a mood.

Is there a bit of Guangzhou in there too?

I think the biggest influence Guangzhou has on me is rhythm and atmosphere. The humidity, the heat, and the slower, more fluid way people live here all seep into my music.

People in Guangzhou are relaxed—they don’t push everything to extremes. That sense of being able to “take a breath anytime” definitely shapes how I approach making music.

You lived in London for a while and worked at Cafe OTO I believe. How influential was that period on your music?

My time at Cafe OTO had a huge impact on me because I was surrounded by completely free, boundary-less sounds every day. It really expanded my imagination of what music and sound could be—far wider than what I used to think.

And the magical thing about OTO is that you might find legendary musicians casually sitting right next to you, watching the same show.

I also joined a lot of interesting workshops there, which deepened my understanding of sound, improvisation, and space. Some improvised performances were unforgettable—you don’t understand them at first, but eventually they pull you in.

That period made me much more curious and much braver in exploring sound.

Mekong Ballad is out now.

More on Cola Ren:

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can. The Halloween playlist has recently been refreshed, incidentally. 👻

I also have a tip jar running on Ko-fi. You can contribute here if you’d like:

Buy me a coffee / Bandcamp download

In this issue: a clutch of Chinese midwest emo records to wallow in, the return of hyperpop hero DJ Gurl, experimental jazz from a post-punk pioneer, new dark club tracks from Hangzhou and Shanghai, ‘Oriental psych’ on a boat, and tracing the lines from revolutionary woodblock art to wood cut print album covers in China.

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Here comes a new challenger: new Chinese midwest emo bands to get into

There’s more to Chinese midwest emo than Chinese Football. The Wuhan band, who were influenced by American Football in their early days but have increasingly pushed into indie-rock territory, are rightly one of China’s most internationally-known bands. But they’re far from the only ones FFO Dashboard Confessional and The Get Up Kids, as a handful of new and notable Chinese emo releases demonstrate.

Guangdong four-piece Midwest Emo Mahjong released their first record back in July, just under a year after their formation. Following a series of singles such as ‘Always Sad’ and ‘Desolation’ that showed they very much understood the assignment when it came to emo track names, their first record proper landed with a slightly tongue-in-cheek title: I’m not from the Midwest.

“We’re absolutely not from the American midwest,” the band clarified when introducing the record on their WeChat account. “We’re not from there, [yet] you don’t have to be to understand the feeling you get upon first hearing emo music. We might be adults now, but we still feel like there are stories about the regrets of our youth that remain unfinished.”

While Midwest Emo Mahjong have referred to the release as an EP, at eight tracks long it feels not far off a full album. Their “unfinished” tales of youth and angst are delivered over a sparkling set of twinkle riffs, with lyrics about teenage memories and the world being “a fucking mess”. It’s not hard to pick out the band’s influences, but they deliver on the promise of understanding the midwest emo genre, despite being from a different part of the world.

Annoyingly, a few months on from the EP’s release, it’s still yet to make it to international platforms, but there are a few tracks from the band available on YouTube and via other music services (if you have an account on Chinese streaming service NetEase, you can hear the record here).

More widely available is the debut release from Hangzhou’s The Beneficial Society. A band with members still in their teens, they released their debut album jointly on Chinese label Happy Records and Japanese imprint Ungulates late last month, shortly before an October Golden Week tour of Japan. Describing themselves as an “emo/art-punk/screamo band”, the quintet tap into midwest emo’s typically engaging blend of catchy melodies and emotional lyrics, which are sung and occasionally shouted in English on their eponymous record, while sometimes pushing the sound toward its noisier extremes.

The release is a blast, with fast and furious guitar parts offset by bursts of clarinet and saxophone, screamo vocals counterbalanced by more sweetly sung hooks (and a nod to Cap’n Jazz). It’s little surprise that the act, who once played a random gig in an office building, have had rooms bouncing from Hangzhou to Tokyo.

Wrapping up our tour of midwest emo not from the midwest are Lanzhou-formed Diels-Alder, whose four track EP Backlash I mentioned a few issues back. They say the record deals with “a painful collective memory” and represents “a form of resistance against the pressures of life” — further proof that emo is alive and well in China.

Backlash is the follow-up to 2022’s Archives, a full-length concept album that comprised “ten songs [which] correspond to the small glimpses in the lives of ten ordinary travelers” on a long-distance train journey. The band members themselves have since undertaken some travel, with the trio now “scattered across different coordinates”, yet fortunately they “remain on the same frequency”, as demonstrated through this new EP and a series of recent gigs to promote it.

Teenage angst is nothing new of course, but at a time when Chinese youth face myriad challenges, hopefully midwest emo can help bring a little catharsis at least.

The Beneficial Society and Backlash are out now. You can listen to more Midwest Emo Mahjong here.

Block party: read this piece on Chinese woodblock cover art

I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the wonderful on a piece about woodblock print album covers from China. Covers like this one by Tiemei for Dusty Ballz:

Check out some more deep cuts here:

The Art of Cover Art

The Visual Artists Behind China's Woodblock Album Covers

The Art of Cover Art is and will remain a free resource for all readers. If you have the means this month, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work. A small donation to my ongoing coffee fund is also always appreciated. Happy reading…

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8 months ago · 24 likes · 1 comment · Rachel Cabitt and Jake

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Gurl talk: hyperpop master DJ Gurl returns

DJ Gurl is back with another head spinner. Six months after the startling 头7 demonstrated that rumours of the persona’s demise had been greatly exaggerated, Master of the Rhythm is another delirious record.

For the uninitiated, a bit of background: late last year, a previously unknown artist called DJ小女孩 (officially DJ Gurl in English) caused a stir with a trio of releases. Entitled Slave to the Rhythm I, II, and III, the records seemingly came out of nowhere, but presented a blistering, bewildering blend of genres, all backed by club-ready, sometimes ridiculously in-your-face beats. DJ Gurl turned out to be one of a number of personas from a Guizhou-based producer also known as Liè, and after the initial trio of records there were widespread rumours that the project was complete. Then, in April, DJ Gurl dropped 头7 and fans promptly lost their shit all over again.

And now we get Master. Whereas its predecessor was put together in just 12 days, this new release feels relatively considered. Master has more ‘complete’ tracks; ‘最天使’ in particular, which features previous collaborator DJ小男孩 (or DJ Little Boy, the naming inspiration for Gurl), feels like a consistent pop ballad. Perhaps this more ‘controlled’ sound is a reflection of going from ‘slave’ to ‘master’ of the rhythm.

Not that DJ Gurl has gone conventional — there are still discrepant moments where it feels like you’re listening to someone scrolling through their TikTok feed. After the album opens with a pair of pounding, but relatively easy-to-follow pieces, ‘爱我的请爱我’ is where things get especially interesting: the track skips through strings that echo Björk’s ‘Jóga’, traditional Chinese string instrument parts, and deconstructed club sounds, before, just as you think you’re settling into something, DJ Gurl pulls the rug right from underneath you with a sample of a rustic, erhu-driven folk track. It’s a reminder of DJ Gurl’s genre agnosticism and ability to weave a multitude of sounds together.

At times, their work can come off as brash, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s also knowing and at times tongue-in-cheek. And with one of Liè’s other personas, DJ Gonorrhea, recently providing production support on The Face favourite Billionhappy’s LP, they’re fast establishing themself as an indispensable part of China’s hyperpop scene.

Master of the Rhythm is out now.

More dance music: driving beats and dark techno

Guan Boyang has been a key figure on the Hangzhou electronic music scene for a number of years now. Once a student at the China Academy of Art in the city, he co-founded cutting-edge label FunctionLab and was a regular at the dearly departed venue Loopy, appearing under his producer and DJ name GUAN.

FunctionLab has been mothballed for a while now, but GUAN’s latest releases see him lending his production talents to a new label with a likeminded mission, Hong Kong- and Beijing-based Nu-s3rvo. In mid-September they released Training in the Parking Lot, an EP of five lean, revved-up tracks that was followed less than a week later by a remix EP. Both are sharp, no-filler records that are worth a listen.

Another long-term presence on China’s alternative nightlife scene, techno collective VOID have brought the likes of Robert Hood and Juan Atkins to Shanghai over the course of nearly two decades embedded in the city’s underground. Set to celebrate their 18th birthday later this year, the group have finally launched their own label, with the first release coming from Scottish co-founder Cameron Wilson under his Prismatic Force moniker.

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What kind of wind is blowing: post-punk pioneer Yang Haisong joins jazz musicians for a new improvised album

Godfather of Chinese post-punk Yang Haisong’s experiments with more abstract, static-filled guitar works continue with this new release on Dansh, yet another sub-label from Chinese music behemoth Modern Sky. Yang’s work with yangqin player Wang Xiaofeng and cellist Song Zhao have resulted in some of his most interesting recordings in years, and this new four track collection continues in that vein, even if sonically it offers something a little different.

Recorded live at Beijing’s Omni Club in 2023, 刹那江湖 finds Yang pursuing similar textures to the aforementioned collaborations, but this time with Wen Zhiyong’s trumpet providing the more melodic details.

Indeed, while these tracks feel of a piece with much of Yang’s recent work, it’s Wen who often leads the way on 刹那江湖. Wen is a multi-instrumentalist and poet who co-founded the experimental-leaning STO Records with Yang, frequently works with hair metal rocker-turned-zen ambient maestro Dou Wei, and has played in bands such as improvisational jazz act 不一定. While he’s often the most prominent figure on the album, he’s not the only significant collaborator: also present are two well-established jazz musicians in Liu Xingyu and Wang Chenhuai.

Perhaps it’s these musicians’ shared jazz heritage, perhaps it’s Yang taking more of a back seat with his wall-of-static approach (though he does grab the mic part-way for some typically distorted staccato poetry), but the music feels a little freer here, allowing more space for Wen’s trumpet to meander. The result is an absorbing listen.

刹那江湖 is out now.

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Exit music

Leaving you with funky Wuhan ‘Oriental psych’ act A Wordless Orange performing on a boat, because why not?

If you’d like to listen to lots of great music from China for free, all in one place, check out the Concrete Avalanche playlists here. Please support the artists if you can.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.