A long-delayed (if not long-awaited) follow-up to Part 1. I would also suggest (re)reading my first impressions of the Beijing indie rock scene, and I strongly advise you to listen to the following track while you read this post (and, hopefully, while you do other things in the future):

» Carsick Cars – 中南海 (6:45) – 11.22MB mp3 @ 232kbps

All photos by the amazing Matthew Niederhauser, who offers an insider’s perspective on the Chinese rock underground, specifically D-22/Maybe Mars:

Wired.com: As an indie rock fan in the United States, I don’t feel like a similar scene could exist here anymore without the bands being marginalized as posers and hipsters. But in your photos there seems to be an authenticity in the subjects that can’t be faked. Is this just my perception as a Westerner looking in, or do you think there’s something about really tough circumstances in China leading to more authentic rock and attitude?

Niederhauser: The socioeconomic circumstances of China cannot be divorced from the music scene.
…
[These musicians] are repelled by and don’t wish to participate in a largely vacuous and inherently unsustainable consumer culture taking hold of China. While they might not brazenly attack the government, their embrace of such a fringe lifestyle along with the music they produce is a powerful statement in and of itself. This choice comes with a social stigma that is hard to imagine outside of China.

–Matthew Niederhauser, Scenes from the Beijing Rock Underground,
Wired, December 2009 (highly recommended)

During my second month in Beijing, I continued to explore the indie rock scene, to the extent that this lengthy postscript to my initial thoughts on ‘Beijing Rock City‘ is a felicitous introduction to this second look at the Fabled Chinese Hipster.

With no idea how to go about pirating music, I went out of my way to catch hyped bands such as ReTROS and Pet Conspiracy at their concerts. Meanwhile, I came to enjoy the likes of Carsick Cars and B6—probably my two favorite Chinese acts, at this point—by purchasing their albums (in retrospect, I should have gone pre-teen rock-virgin style and bought every CD I could get my hands on).

In fact, in many ways, it was like going back a decade in time, to those glorious teenage days when every five minutes on Napster yielded a new rock ‘n’ roll gem. In a particularly portentous coincidence, I happened to discover the likes of the Velvet Underground, early Red Hot Chili Peppers and Radiohead in Chinese bootleg form on the relatively lawless streets of Beijing in the early days of cheap CD-burners—as did many of my fellow countrymen (the rebellious teens of my generation, at least), including Zhang Shouwang of Carsick Cars:

The generation before us didn’t have as many chances to get to know the rock music of Western countries, but nowadays we listen to music from many other countries. I believe that when my bands write songs, we might be influenced some elements of Western culture. I think the next generation of bands will be much different than ours.

Carsick Cars is China’s answer to New York’s (/NJ) holy trinity of feedback-drenched songcraft: Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo; in keeping with the fuzz aesthetic, a couple of their songs from the first album are deadringers for Jesus & Mary Chain. Say what you want about influences and imitation, it’s pure rock ‘n’ roll: guitar tones that are simultaneously warm and bright, backed by thick slabs of bass and unfussy drums—and Carsick Cars a damn good band for it.

I’ve been hooked on their hit single (for lack of a better term) “中南海” since I first heard it last fall, after buying their albums directly from Maybe Mars’ headquarters near where I was staying. It’s a fairly simple song: the lyrics consist mostly of one phrase (”中南海”; literally “Middle South Sea” [Zhōng nánhǎi; sounds vaguely like "drunk not high"]) repeated over a catchy riff; the album version disintegrates into a pleasantly noisy breakdown—just to prove that they can—where the song would normally be truncated for radio, before cutting back for one last uplifting refrain.

And before you know, it’s over.

Is it a question of nature or nurture, as with La Loupe? Am I somehow predisposed to like Carsick Cars based on a felicitous confluence of certain conditions of my birth (i.e., ethnicity) and certain formative cultural stimuli (viz., high school friend Mark burning Modest Mouse, Belle & Sebastian, etc. for me)? Am I just the product of an unlikely punnet square, a cross between Chinese nature and indie kid (read: artsy suburban teenager) nurture?

Well, short answer: no. First of all, I think I can safely venture that Carsick Cars are a legitimately good indie rock band, Chinese or otherwise. In fact, there is absolutely no indication that they’re Chinese on the songs in which Zhang Shouwang sings in English. Yet he clearly feels strongly about his cultural identity, in a bizarro twist on my hybrid nature:

I would say my music is very Chinese, because I China is where I’m from. Because China doesn’t really have a history in rock ‘n’ roll, my generation has grown up on and been influenced by Western music. Thus, our process of making music has been very Western.

–Zhang Shouwang

Of course, if we share two counts of difference—ethnicity and musical taste— he is the one who can truly call China his home (not to mention the fact that he’s a successful musician and not just a fan).

I think the songs I write are Chinese in style because I live in China, and no matter how I am influenced by the West my main concepts are based on my country.

This is not to say that there is not or will never be an Original Chinese Sound, though I stand by my thesis that it is still pubescent.

Nearly 60 years of rock and punk was suddenly dumped on Chinese youth about 10 years ago, and how they continue to pick it apart and digest the fragments manifests in many different ways [sic].

–Matthew Niederhauser, Scenes from the Beijing Rock Underground,
Wired, December 2009

So yes, there is a legitimate indie rock subculture in Beijing, whether you compare it to New York (or Portland, London, or wherever) in the 70’s (or 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, or whenever). But I don’t think that it has evolved into a full-fledged hipster culture (at least not of its own accord): that is what supposedly comes next. While the resurgence of, say, 80’s style is regarded as the surest symptom of hipsteria in American cities, Niederhauser (and Goodman, from Part 1, for that matter) seems amenable to Chinese hipsterwear as an overt identifier, at least to the extent that there is some level of risk in aligning oneself with an alternative subculture. If contemporary alt fashion in the Western world—be it punk, hip-hop, skater, whatever—simply lacks the significance that it did when it reflected an original subculture, it does represent an authentic one for Chinese youth.

Other commentators are less sympathetic:

[Kids at rock shows] give cool looks and are aloof, eyes gazing idly towards the bands. They dress retro, hip, bohemian, punk, creative, whatever. Consuming this “alternative” trend has become the mainstream fashion of the day.
…
There was a time when rock meant more. But twenty years have passed… and a more fashionable reason, namely having style, has sprung up and overtaken what the old rockers stood for—freedom of speech and liberalization. Bands now sing about material things, observing people’s opinions on money and the need for affluent lives. Not only this, increasingly more people on the scene need to have an outfit first—an outfit that befits the lifestyle.
…
Like the hipsters who congregate around Brooklyn, Chinese hipsters wear outdated things, conceived by the older generation as cheap, ugly, or simply sportswear for semi-professionals or soccer-flaying boys.

–Alice Xin Liu, Beijing Rock Scene Is Inspired by Hipster Chic,
Huffington Post, May 6 2010

Her commentary serves as a nice cliffhanger/segué into the forthcoming conclusion of this series of essays, but a few more notes on the FCH in Beijing Rock City:

• Young people in Chinese are a secondary audience to Western mass media—i.e., outside observers to the media that caters to, shapes, and all but defines youth culture in the West. The one-time gold standard for that elusive demographic was MTV, since deposed by a series of tubes, which was (and perhaps still is) much a marketing machine as a media outlet, which understood its audience at least as much as its audience understood it. (This must be related, somehow.)

  Perhaps a misguided MTV approach inspired the latest series of grossly overbranded, highly disorganized, and regrettably underproduced music festivals that marked the May Holiday in Beijing.

Westerners working in marketing in China often spout forth that Chinese kids do not mind branding. In fact, our research actually shows that youth in China actually feel safer about an event if there is some level of branding involved. Strawberry Festival organizers are certainly taking this philosophy to the limit.

–Art vs Commerce – A Review of Beijing Festival Weekend,
China Music Radar, May 4 2010

• As with any buzzworthy creative movement, there is bound to be backlash: Max-Leonhard von Schaper of Rock in China, a wiki for rock in China, recently posted a couple of articles contesting the prevalence D-22/Maybe Mars’ media campaign (cf. Pitchfork backlash?) Call me biased, but Niederhauser singlehandedly dismantles these arguments in his intensely passionate riposte (I recommend reading it in full if you’re remotely interested).
• More Niederhauser (between him and Zhang Shouwang: two more things I should just marry already).

Ines Brunn after Li Wei

Some notes on the People’s Republic before the second chapter on the Fabled C[hinese]hipster…

---- --- -- - -- --- ----

Wu Yulu’s amazing mechanical men:

After suffering a series of life changing set backs such as a burnt down home, spraying himself with battery acid, and experiencing great financial debt—all in the name of art—Chinese farmer Wu Yulu is finally gaining some recognition for his homemade robots.

–Designboom

DB also has a gallery of Wu Yulu’s ‘Peasant Da Vincis’ for Cai Guo-Qiang’s inaugural exhibition at the newly restored Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai; some images interpolated below (cue egregiously ironic juxtaposition of images + text):

---- --- -- - -- --- ----

Click image to see Robo-Pollock in action at DB

Chinese news site Southern Weekend recently sent intern Liu Zhiyi undercover at the Shenzhen site of Foxconn, “the world’s biggest contract electronics maker and a major supplier to Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other companies,” which has been under scrutiny for the suicides of nine workers this year (more background info at NYT):

I know of two groups of young people.

One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and kept company by libraries and lake views. The other group works alongside steel machineries and large containers, all inside a factory of high-precision manufacturing environment.

–Liu Zhiyi, Southern Weekend via Engadget

The translated article is definitely worth reading, though the Apple connection clearly raises the profile of these otherwise-overlooked incidents.

Skeptics (or fans of Apple) have taken to pointing out that this suicide rate, in a plant with four hundred and twenty thousand workers, is no higher than that in a Chinese city of comparable size.

–Evan Osnos, Items of Interest, Letter from China blog on the New Yorker, May 25 2010

Again, clickthrough for sweet vids on DB...

On a lighter note:

“I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

–Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans, The Onion

---- --- -- - -- --- ----

Essay Question (10 pts): To what degree does electronic music reflect the alienation of technology and hyperindustrialization?

Let me take this opportunity to explain my music. At first I liked drums, they were fast and noisy and that’s what I first produced. After a while I listened to more electronic, quieter music. I like fast music, but it’s more melodic as a general rule. I added more melody into my music, more baritone. My latest work has slowed down in comparison to my older music. In the past it’s always been very young, punkish, full of joy. Now, I like slower, blacker, darker music. Also, I like the Chinese influence. I cant explain it, I just like it. I add a little bit of Chinese music in everything.

–Sulumi, via Intel×Vice’s Creators Project

---- --- -- - -- --- ----

A few more for good flavor:

• Wild Wild Westernization: “16 Items They Only Sell at Chinese Walmarts” (Buzzfeed)

Henri Cartier-Bresson – Shanghai, 1948

• A glimpse into a Chinese toy factory.

Li Wei via the Guardian

It’s pretty stupid and boring.

Honestly though, I don’t really know why I’m doing this—especially without photos, which might somehow justify the tedious and grossly underdeveloped prose. (It reads like something I would’ve written for a 9th-grade English class.) The closest approximation of a rationalization I can come up with is that I’d like to have some really terrible, shameful writing on the record to spite the rest of the content on my blog.

It’s also littered with hip NYC namedroppings and a cast of ancillary characters who barely qualify as devices. There is no symbolism or allegorical value to speak of. I’ve done my best to minimize foreshadowing… but that’s asking a lot and I’m not that good of a writer.

At best, it’s an exercise, an uncharacteristically intimate portrait of contemporary bohemia, largely unembellished albeit esoteric to the point of being skewed. At worst, it may be remembered as the first symptom of an otherwise untold descent into madness.

We’ll see how long it says online before I decide to delete it. (I’m tracking stats now so I’ll know exactly how many people clickthrough and read it.)

9:55 – Wake up. Already off to a late start. iTunes shuffle is doing a pretty good job of keeping me in bed (a few incongruous songs in a row is a sign to get my ass up), so I read about 15 internets—the Times, Gothamist, Hypebeast, Designboom, etc.—on my MacBook Pro before venturing into the kitchen to fix some breakfast. I think about making a donation towards Red Cross efforts in Haiti.

11:11 – I spend the rest of the morning working on a new version of my resume, which I started yesterday afternoon. (I’ve decided that I don’t like the bulleted list format for my previous work experience, but I’m struggling with paragraphs, which inherently look dense and unreadable.) It’s not going well.

At some point my roommate Tony wakes up and we probably shoot the shit for a while. He suggests that we get some lunch. I have leftover pork fried rice, which I made yesterday, but I decide that it will be just as good, if not better, for dinner.

12:52 – He wants to try a Filipino place called Umi Nom, a couple blocks up Classon, on the corner of Dekalb. I consider bringing my camera but I don’t (their website happens to have decent photos). We talk about Twitter during the short walk.

Umi Nom’s sign is painted over a ‘Coin-Operated Laundry’ sign. The logo suddenly reveals a striking similarity between Helvetica Neue Condensed—which I’ve been using for the header of my resume—and Impact, a font that I’ve never particularly liked (though it works for Umi Nom). As for the interior, the decor is natural and elegant, unambiguously Asian without seeming generic or contrived.

We end up splitting a grilled pork belly sandwich and a Filipino dish called Tapsilog. They are described (in the online menu, which presumably echoes the print one) as: “sliced pork belly, atchara, cucumbers, sweet chili aioli” and “house cured beef tapa, garlic fried rice & 2 eggs scrambled or fried,” respectively.

Both dishes are excellent. The sandwich is basically a Bánh mì (atchara is pickled carrots and daikon): the sweetness of the sauce complements an equally generous portion of super-tender meat, while the vegetables cut the richness and add texture. The beef, on the other hand, is at once more and less familiar: warm slices of jerky over a sparsely seasoned jasmine rice with two fried eggs and an essential side of rice vinegar. The beef itself is delicious; the rest of the calories are tasty but the dish seems less coherent as a whole.

2:02 – I get back home and back to work, alternating between researching potential employers and revising/reconfiguring my resume.

2:37 – I need coffee. I make coffee (a cup and a half worth of French press). I drink coffee.

3:30 – My resume is looking a little better. I’m finally satisfied with the copy but it still looks too busy and I can’t seem to get the spacing right.

I eventually have a (possibly deluded) epiphany and rework the header.

4:24 – I was hoping to finish by 4:30 (I specifically put on an album that would end by then) but it takes longer than I planned, as these things often do; any later and I would risk sending out cover letters at the end of the day, which I generally don’t like to do. I was also trying to squeeze in a bike ride while it was still light out, but I’m already past that point before I realize it.

I put on the another album, Disc 2 of The Bang Gang Deejays’ 2007 mix Light Sound Dance, hoping to finish before its runtime of 1:13:21.

5:14 – Coffee helps, but I still end up cutting it close. In my haste, I almost forget to hotlink the brand new PDF, so I have to spend a few minutes doing so in Acrobat. I finally send it nearly an hour after my self-imposed deadline and, just as I’ve finally prepared for my bike excursion, the album closes with “Sometimes” by Les Rythmes Digitales, a personal favorite.

5:39 – It’s not that cold out and I work up a little sweat during the 15-minute ride. It’s a straight shot up Classon to Kent, which takes me within a block of Brooklyn Bowl, my first stop.

5:58 – I’m trying to locate my keys, which I’m 95% sure I lost at Brooklyn Bowl on Saturday. I’ve been using a spare set since then, but the set that I lost has the only extant key to my U-lock, so I’ll have to buy a new one if I don’t track it down.

6:06 – No luck. I leave my name and number but I’m not expecting a call back. I head over to my friend Sean’s apartment.

I remembered to bring the Modern Sky Records compilation that I bought in China as a cheap and somewhat relevant gift (this was one of my preparations). He pops it into the CD player. It’s not that good: most of the songs are either too 90’s alt-rock or weirdly jammy.

Sean is also seeking employment (in independent music, hence the relevance) for some time now and we complain about job hunting, among other things.

7:32 – We eventually decide to grab a slice at Vinnie’s (instead of falafel at Oasis); the PFR will be just as good, if not better, tomorrow. I know Sean’s roommates to varying degrees and I decide to leave my bike at his apartment since I don’t have a usable lock. I smoke my first cigarette of the night. He has to stop at Matchless to pick something up. I wait for him outside, since I haven’t finished my cigarette, and I take the time to arrange to meet my other roommate Diego at Raandesk Gallery (see Images).

7:48 – The funny guy isn’t at Vinnie’s today. An older guy takes my order and somehow my slice is done before the two girls who ordered before me.

7:58 – On the way out of the restaurant, someone greets me on the street. I recognize Matt—a casual acquaintance at best—but he’s with someone and they keep walking in the same direction that Sean and I are going. We’re maybe ten feet behind them and it’s kind of awkward.

Sean and I part ways a block down the street when I head to the subway. I’m halfway down the stairs before I realize I’m behind Matt and his friend. Thankfully, one of them has to get a ticket so I pretend not to see them to save face and I walk about three quarters of the way down the platform, to the subway car that is closest to the NQRW transfer at Union Square. I don’t see Matt.

8:15 – The trains are pretty fast so I make good time to Madison Square Park, where I meet up with Diego. We find our way to 16 W 23rd Street, 4th floor, which appears to be some kind of shared office space that has temporarily been converted to a gallery.

The show is ok. While I knew that Jason Bryant worked in Kehinde Wiley’s studio, I learn that the two artists in the show—Bryant and Kevin Cyr—actually met while working for Wiley.

Cyr was actually the main attraction for me, since I was under the impression that his camper bike or kart would be on display. I’m disappointed to find that there are no three-dimensional works in the space, only paintings. I eventually conclude that Cyr’s ‘vehicular portraits‘ would make a good childrens’ book (I mean this in the best way possible).

As for Bryant, I was familiar with his photorealistic portraiture beforehand though I am rather surprised to see that he has incorporated trompe-l’oeil imagery (drawing inspiration from well-known skateboard graphics) into his latest work. I am undecided about this new development.

In any case, the complimentary wine helps.

8:42 – We leave. It’s still nice out, so we walk to Union Square. I smoke my second cigarette on the way to the Strand, my first time back since I returned from China. They’ve moved the bag check. Everything else is pretty much the same.

9:18 – We catch the L train right away even though I had to wait in line to refill my Metrocard.

9:31 – I decide that I want to get my bike from Sean’s apartment tonight instead of retrieving it tomorrow. Diego switches to the G train at Lorimer while I surface to figure out how to get my wheels. Sean’s still at Public Assembly so I call his roommate David, who I also know from college because we both had the same Arcade Fire shirt freshman year.

David doesn’t pick up but I figure it couldn’t hurt to walk to their place and try the bell hoping that one of their other two roommates might be home. As I walk under the BQE overpass at Union, I see a couple guys doing tricks on fixed-gears. I wonder if one of them is John Prolly.

9:49 – No one’s home. I arrange to pick Sean’s keys and listen to my iPod on the walk to and from Public Assembly. I smoke my third and final cigarette of the night on the walk there and I think about recounting my day in a blog post and donating money to the Red Cross.

10:24 – I get my bike.

10:33 – I return Sean’s keys.

10:50 – I get home.

11:00 – I start writing this blog entry.

Fin.

I retract my initial characterization of D-22: it could pass for a “Lower East Side hotspot.” It turns out that my previous warehouse-turned-clubhouse description is far more appropriate for neighboring metal venue 13 Club, with its spacious main floor, multiple side rooms and pentagonal windows. I stopped by 13 Club last Saturday for the first (and possibly last) time before heading over to a show (pictured below) at D-22, and I must say that my musical allegiance lies squarely with the latter venue. [Footnote: D-22's address is listed as 242 Chengfu Road and 13 Club is supposedly at 161 Chengfu Road, yet in reality they're two doors down from each other, a perfect example of the irrational street numbering here.]

Also, Weezer’s “In the Garage” is probably a more accurate description of this DIY practice space. I might have to go with Carsick Cars’ 中南海 as the D-22 theme song (more on this in a future post).

But hopefully, I wasn’t too far off the mark… and I have pictures now, to prove that it actually exists (as opposed to just being on other blogs.)

Noisemongers The Offset: Spectacles (who I had the pleasure of seeing again yesterday) were first up on last Saturday’s bill; they’re perhaps as good as a post-rock band can be without a drummer. While I respect their mastery of the tension between swirls of feedback and low-end drone—alternately ponderous and urgent, depending on the song—I am of the opinion that even a crappy drum machine (à la MBV) could take them to the next level.

Avant-punks 24 Hours were next up. The two chicks on guitar had chops to match the drummer as he laid the groundwork, deftly weaving between a dancy kick / open high-hat and taut toms / cymbals to complement impeccable snare rolls. Another band to watch.

Finally, 怪力 (Guai Li, or Strange Force) lived up to the hype as the unassuming female singer put on a sufficiently raw performance over shapeshifting post-punk guitarwork. 怪力 are one of the few bands that I actually researched prior to seeing them live and I wasn’t particularly impressed with their songs on Myspace, but the live act more than made up for it.

I found the new Chinese sound…

…or at least a sound that I was new to me, by way of a Chinese artist.

But first the requisite tedium of time, place, overanalysis and a dozen other tangents:

After catching La Loupe last Thursday, I opted not to see Au Revoir Simone or Rahzel (playing separate concerts—Chinese people are crazy but they’re not that crazy) and take it easy on Friday because 1.) the shows were relatively expensive—150RMB [$22] and 100RMB [$15]) respectively, which sounds cheap but taking drinks and cab fare into account, would have made a relatively expensive night out; 2.) I was afraid I would go through another pack of smokes (a health concern, not a financial one; more on this shortly); and 3.) I was saving my energy, money and health for Saturday’s cryptically-titled “Great Beer, Bad City” concert, showcasing China’s finest electronic music talent, at 2 Kolegas, “Beijing’s Hottest Dive Bar & Live Music Venue” (according to their website).

You'll have to excuse the poor quality of my photos; low light, strobes, movement, inebriation and ineptitude are to blame.

Like D-22, 2 Kolegas has established itself as a legit venue since its founding by two expats a few years back, attracting indie acts from near and far (I regret missing YACHT’s Halloween show there). Also like D-22, it happens to be off the beaten path, but (unlike D-22) this does not work in my favor: 2 Kolegas is a 15 km / 25 minute / 45RMB taxi-ride away, in the northeastern reaches of Beijing… in the parking lot of a sketchy drive-in movie theater that I might have mistook for a carnival (further explanation is clearly necessary, but will not be provided.) As with most places I’ve tried to find in Beijing, I found it on the second try, after a 15-minute detour down a shady side street lined with empty cabs—I had hoped they were ferrying passengers to nightlife off the main road, but this was not the case.

I arrived to find a keffiyeh’d iLoop grinding out a hard techno set on his laptop. This was some heavy shit, from the relentless throb of the 4×4 beat and sawtooth snarl of overdriven basslines to the ghosts of melodies, mutilated into looped stutters and vocoded warbles, everything compressed as all hell. I wasn’t averse to the intensity, but I imagine that drugs and alcohol might have helped. (Insofar as Chinese drug culture seems conservative to the point of invisibility, it was no wonder that the place was fairly empty.) It was also too early for this shit—I figured more people would arrive later but the hypothetical crowd never quite materialized.

LIman was only nominally poppier: after opening with the telltale stabs of A-Trak’s remix of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll”, he faded into harder tech-house obscurata. Like iLoop, LIman scarcely strayed from a driving 130 BPM beat, settling for dynamic regulation via filter and killswitch effects. Still, he managed to get more people on the floor, as about half of the 50 or so clubgoers left their seats for his set. If iLoop was the heavy metal of techno, LIman was grunge… and everyone likes grunge.

Doshy, the night’s guest DJ from Germany, picked up where LIman left off, lacing his more diverse set with a hint of funk and a touch of dubstep. He was the only performer who was not (as the joke goes) checking his e-mail onstage, opting for a hardware setup instead. Whether it was the meager turnout or jet lag, he seemed slightly off, missing several cues, though it was a nice change of pace when he varied the tempo a bit.

Sulumi in 2008 via PSFK (K Hessel Edit) – I'm 99% sure that's 2Kolegas

The crowd had thinned out to a scant dozen diehards by the time Sulumi (the long-awaited topic of this post) started his set at 1:00 AM. Thankfully, he didn’t mind, cranking out a non-stop set of original 8-Bit compositions as though he were playing to a full house at Studio B (R.I.P.). For some uncanny reason, I had high hopes for Sulumi, and he did not disappoint: I can’t say that I’ve ever listened to 8-Bit in earnest, but his high-energy set earned him at least one more fan.

The closest reference points I can think of are Crystal Castles, Surkin’s remix of Bionic Commando, and maybe Octopus Project (from what I remember; I haven’t listened to them in forever). Like CC and indie-electro darlings (I hate that term) Ratatat, Sulumi re-invents the punk / rock aesthetic electronically as Ninetendo bleeps and sine waves against a thumping techno back beat.

Even as the audience dwindled to just a few tireless ravers, Sulumi continued to thrash and twitch about his laptop and mixer. At some point in the middle of his set, a particularly infectious melody caught my ear, amid the endless sequence of chiptune motifs emanating from his ad hoc electro rig. (This happened to be his outstanding remix of his own song, “Kill Me Sweetly,” a Dan Deacon-worthy fist-pumper.) It was one of those singularly rapturous moments where I was instantly transfixed by an artist I’d never heard perform a song that I’d never heard—at that point, I was sold.

Following the show, I did some research and tracked down Sulumi’s latest release, Chaotic Dances the Function, available as a free download (37.4MB zip file). Apparently Sun Dawei is not just a solo act but a label exec for Shanshui Records and a promoter for Shanghai’s Antidote collective. Fellow member B6’s eye-catching poster designs for Antidote shows are quite phenomenal and have apparently been the subject of some controversy; check out the full gallery here.

This is what Time Magazine had to say about him a year ago:

Considered a linchpin of the avant-garde, Sulumi — the working name of 26-year-old Sun Dawei — cites Yellow Magic Orchestra and Aphex Twin as his influences, and his music correspondingly moves between the genres of 8-bit (electronic music that mimics the sounds of outdated computers and gaming consoles) and IDM (”intelligent dance music”). Live shows can be geeky affairs, with Sulumi hunched over a laptop, a hooded sweatshirt obscuring his chiseled cheekbones.

He is also a promoter and the founder of Beijing electronica label Shanshui Records. “The great thing about the experimental scene in Beijing,” he says, “is that it’s easy for musicians to get a foot in the door.” But it’s not that easy to make a living—in fact, Sulumi is one of the few to pull it off. “I do commercial performances sometimes, which is where I get my income,” he shrugs. “But making music is my life—I don’t need any other motivation.”

–Come On Feel the Noise
Time Magazine, 10/23/08

A brief review of the EP, should you choose to download it: opening track “Sweetly” is a sort of 8-bit ballad, which is pleasant enough, but the killer remix is more in keeping with Sulumi’s frenetic live show. While the rest of the songs tend towards the IDM end of the spectrum, his live set was more accessible: I recall a melody that echoed some Múm song from Finally We Are No One, as well as what might have been an interpretation of Blur’s “Girls and Boys,” though I would just as soon credit these to Sulumi himself.

The album version of the remix, linked below, can only give you an idea of what Sulumi is like, since it’s definitely best experienced in the club setting. I can’t say it’s for everyone, but it’s easily my new favorite song.

» Sulumi – Kill Me Sweetly – 4.5MB mp3 @ 192kbps

Related:

• Blip Festival 2009 is going down in Brooklyn. (Sulumi played Blip last year.)
• Yesterday’s New York Times Opinionator features a curmudgeonly piece by composer Glenn Branca entitled “The End of Music”. (My counterpoint is that I happened to be listening to Battles when I came across the article.)

One of my primary concerns about leaving Brooklyn, indie rock epicenter of the world, for the relatively conservative environs of Beijing was that I would be subjecting myself to the padded walls of my existing mp3 collection while the Western world partook in the likes of new Jay-Z remixes, Lil Wayne mixtapes, Yeasayer singles, etc., etc. This, clearly, has not been the case: while Piratebay, Blogspot and Wordpress are strictly off-limits, any number of other services can more or less fill this void with the mellifluous sounds of The xx and Au Revoir Simone. (I even picked up Chinese copies of the new Basement Jaxx and Calvin Harris albums at a record store.)

P.K.14 by Matthew Niederhauser via NY Times; click to see the whole slideshow.

About three weeks ago, an errant search on Hype Machine led to a fateful click on a link to the subtly-named blog “Fuck Bad Music”. I didn’t find the track I was looking for, but I did discover that one of FBM’s contributors, as far as I can tell, shares my situation: an American (from Portland, OR) who recently landed in Beijing. In her quest to conquer the Beijing rock scene, she finds her way to its latest, greatest outpost: D-22. The name was somewhat familiar from nightlife listings, but I finally got around to checking it out only after reading her review.

While Angel takes comfort in the familiarity of the small-ish venue, I am at a loss for an analog in New York: D-22 is slightly too big to fit the bill as a Lower East Side hotspot and slightly too nice—in that tacky Chinese way—to come off as a word-of-mouth Brooklyn ’space’. To be fair, D-22 could definitely pass for an East Atlanta haunt: the venue attracts a regular (if somewhat scant) mix of bona fide Beijing hipsters, Azn bros, fangirls and a fair proportion of curious expats, despite (or due to?) the fact that the unassuming storefront is tucked away in a strip mall several miles from the city center.

As for the music itself, Chinese rock music is highly (and inevitably) derivative of Western rock music. Still, increasing recognition has substantiated the emergence of a Chinese sound. I had actually downloaded a couple of Hang On The Box and P.K.14 albums a few years back, when I first heard that the Chinese had taken to rock ‘n’ roll, but (if you’ll excuse the forthcoming pretension), as an amateur anthropologist, I believe in collecting ethnographic data before passing judgment—in other words, actually experiencing the subculture.

Matthew Niederhauser again; I will echo Angel's praise for his work.

An initial survey of D-22 suggested that the nascent scene might better be described as pubescent, given the prevalent 90’s alt-rock influence. Any given song might—at best—sound like the band had just discovered Weezer; uninspired Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots or Red Hot Chili Peppers imitations were more common. In retrospect, this was actually a good sign, as it suggested that every subgenre of guitar-based music might see some play in Beijing.

Indeed, subsequent visits have attested the breadth of the Beijing’s punk rock underbelly, and I must admit, to Angel’s point, that I’m about ready to call D-22 home. (Almost literally: the venue happens to be just under a kilometer from where I’m staying. At an average of 30RMB [$4.50] per show, I really have no excuse not to become a fixture at the end of D-22’s bar.)

La Loupe

Thursday’s headliners La Loupe—a couple of sinophilic Oberlin grads—turned out to be quite the winsome pair, contrary to my entirely rational reservations concerning their dubious PR story. On one hand, a band billed as two white hipsters singing predominantly Mandarin lyrics (covering the usual twee territory: 朋友 [friends] and 爱 [love]… just those two things, really) is easily dismissed as a transparent, premeditated or altogether ingratiating gimmick. On the other hand, their predictable folk-duo demeanor—from self-effacing banter to use of melodica—is, at best, considered coffeeshop or college open-mic fare. [For the record, I wrote that line before came across this enlightening Oberlin Review article, which tellingly mentions La Loupe's gig at the college's student-run coffeehouse/venue.]

Yet this curious combination—Chinese lyrics in American voices singing pop melodies over simple four-chord songs—somehow just worked (I say voices and not accents because they actually spoke/sang passable Mandarin). I’m not sure if they resonated with my inner indie-kid or my inner 华人 [Google translates this as Chinaman, which I find acceptable]; perhaps they appealed my hybrid essence and, from an objective standpoint, they really are as contrived as I had originally feared.

Whatever the case, La Loupe happened to attract by far the biggest crowd I’d seen at D-22, perhaps just short of twice the audience of other (presumably lower-profile) shows. As far as I could tell, the balance consisted of expats, who, like myself, had never heard La Loupe before. (Obscure is an understatement: La Loupe turned out 0 Search Results on the likes of Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan. Again, the Oberlin article tells all.) Even so, it didn’t take much for the legions of inebriated exchange students (is there any other kind?) to warm up to the band—by the time La Loupe had crammed a dozen two-minute ditties into their prescribed half-hour set (standard length at D-22), they couldn’t help but heed the audience’s chanted demand for “再来一个!” ["One more song!"].

Streets Kill Strange Animals via Picasa

Meanwhile, a concert last week showcased yet another side of Beijing rock: headliners Streets Kill Strange Animals were by far the most avant-garde band I’ve encountered here, alternating between a Television-y post-punk stutter and a dancy take Sonic Youth’s poppy side (or maybe they were just channeling Beijing post-punk poster boys P.K.14). Although I appreciated SKSA for what they were—an inkling of an original Chinese sound—their experimental proclivities failed to hold the interest of an already-flagging audience, despite (again: or due to?) the fact that they play D-22 regularly.

The me灌me

In fact, I, too, was more taken with the second band that night, me灌me, who executed their upbeat tunes with real technical chops and showmanship. Their studied Britpop-revival aesthetic—fuzzy blues à la early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, inflected with a Franz Ferdinand swing—was as much as I could hope for from a random band at a random gig in the heart of the Middle Kingdom.

Jaded and inflated (if not altogether skewed) New York standards aside, I must say that D-22 is the perfect place for Beijing’s aspiring rock saviors to cut their teeth. For what they lack in originality, the bands seem genuinely happy just to be there: playing their music, on stage, in a dingy club, with an audience—in other words, all the trappings of a real live rock band. As per Rivers Cuomo’s finite wisdom,

In the garage, I feel safe,
No one cares about my ways.
In the garage where I belong,
No one hears me sing this song.

–Weezer, “In the Garage”

In the final analysis, D-22 lives up to its growing reputation as Beijing’s quintessential rock dive. D-22 is a rare venue where no one—management or audience, local or expat—discriminates between folk and glammy spectacle; grunge wannabes share the bill with indie poppers; there are metal nights, student nights, and student metal nights. The club’s underground status only underscores its sense of inclusiveness: it feels like you’re witnessing the start of something big just by being there. CBGB’s it ain’t, but that’s exactly the point: we’re forty years and half a world away.

P.K.14 at Glasslands two days ago; photo by Lori Baily for BrooklynVegan

Finally, I know it’s short notice, but if you Brooklyn kids have nothing better to do tomorrow (Saturday) night, head over to Secret Project Robot for the best $8 show you will see this side of the East River (slash Pacific Ocean). Hell, I might not even get a chance to see P.K.14 in their own damn town.

Beijing REPRESENT.