Outdustry’s in-house net-label MicroMu is proud to present a special performance from it’s first international signing, Fink…..

As the first acoustic act on legendary electronic label Ninja Tune, Fink has carved a unique path as a singer-songwriter. With a background in downtempo beat production and top level remix work, his brand of acoustic music is distinctly modern while remaining deeply intimate as a live show; a formula which has seen him share the stage with the likes of Zero 7 and Massive Attack and earned him rave reviews around the world:

“Mean moody and magnificent. One of the most original singer-songwriters around.” – Clash

“…say hello to your new soundtrack.” – NME

“Surprises when you least expect it. Sort of Revolution refuses to succumb to the obvious.” - Mojo

Fink will be performing solo-acoustic for two small shows in Beijing (MAO Live on Nov 5th) and Shanghai (Yuyintang on Nov 6th), followed by a mainstage appearance at Clockenflap Festival in Hong Kong (Nov 8th).

Acoustic legend Wan Xiaoli will be supporting Fink in Beijing. Shanghai support to be announced…

Tickets 50RMB in advance, 60RMB on the door

http://micromu.com

http://douban.com/artist/finkmusic

http://myspace.com/finkmusic

]]> http://www.outdustry.com/2009/10/26/micromu-presents-fink/feed/ 0 http://www.outdustry.com/2009/06/12/micromu-turns-1/ http://www.outdustry.com/2009/06/12/micromu-turns-1/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:25:55 +0000 Outdustry http://outdustry.com/?p=515 Happy Birthday MicroMu

It seems like it has been a hell of a lot longer, but our little concept record label MicroMu (known in Chinese as 不插店, or ‘Buchadian’), turns 1 year old today. You can feel paternal pride radiating throughout Outdustry HQ as we package up a one year compilation album of b-sides and rarities to celebrate:

Zip file album download, or track by track:

1.Zhao Guang – No Cloud In The Sky

2.Liu Dongming – Bird’s Nest

3.Gangzi – Untitled

4.Zhang Yiding – Red Scarf

5.Zhang Weiwei – Song

6.Wu Ningyue – The Lotus Blossom

7.Zhang Qianqian – Improvisation

8.6 Kings – Drinking Song

9.Di Ku Ai – Migrant Bird

10.Shouwang – Run Away

11.Liquid Oxygen – All Things Are Uncertain

12.Wu Junde – Lullaby

13.Li Zhi – Happy When You Feel Pain

MicroMu is our attempt at a sustainable record label model in an environment where people, by and large, aren’t used to paying for music. The solution? Give music (and lots of other things) away for free, build a loyal community around it all, and then support this (largely) through a partnership with a brand who shares your audience. Or, as we say in our label intro:

MicroMu is an experimental, sponsor-driven, free-to-user record label model designed to discover new talent, create original music and reward artists in seemingly impossible conditions.

It is obviously a lot more complicated in reality and in the long run involves a number of other areas of revenue generation, but you get the gist. I’m sure at some point we will get round to laying the whole thing out for you but we are still in a very ‘developmental’ stage so don’t feel justified in holding ourselves up as a successful case study quite yet.

How It All Began

Back in June 2008, we were putting on a show for folk legend Zhou Yunpeng in Beijing and were looking for a suitable support act. We heard demos from a young singer songwriter in Nanjing called Zhao Guang and liked what we heard to the extent that we paid for the engineering student to travel up to Beijing and support one of his all time heros. It seemed a waste for Zhao Guang to come and go without doing some recording while he was up here. It’s just that we didn’t have a record label.

The MicroMu concept had been fully laid out at Outdustry some time before, but this recording opportunity with a new artist seemed to get those fires going again, except this time we had a deadline of a few days to get things rolling. One phone call to Plastered T-Shirts supremo Dominic Johnson-Hill later and we had our cash sponsor. Dominic’s clothing brand has seen rapid growth in recent years, largely thanks to his relentlessly creative marketing and appreciation of audience (and, of course, cool t-shirts). It was a perfect match. We were aiming at a young, alternative-culture loving audience, so was he. Money well spent on his behalf, money gratefully receieved on ours…

After the Zhou Yunpeng show we took Zhao Guang for a midnight recording session at rehearsal rooms up near Gulou. He was in and out within an hour, having laid down six tracks, most in the first take = our first release.

Within the following week we had come up with a name, MicroMu (in reference to the compact nature of the business model, amongst other things), set up our website and, exactly a year ago today, made our first blog post:

So, What Is MicroMu?

Lets keep this simple to start with:

MicroMu is a record label – We discover musicians, record these musicians and then release the recordings to you, the fan.

It is obviously a lot more complicated than this in practice but, to be honest with you, this is a huge experiment so lets start slowly. The most important thing for you to know at the moment is that we are going to give away all of our recordings for free through this blog.

The whole process is funded by one sponsor: Beijing based T-Shirt company Plastered. Why are they doing it? Simply because they love the idea and want to support independent music. Did we mention that they make the best t-shirts in China ?

We will obviously explain a lot more about how this will work as we go, through the blog. There is a long journey ahead of us and we hope you can help us along the way. Please, download our music, leave comments, tell a friend. Together we can change the way that music is made in China, in a way where everyone wins.

It’s all about the music.

MicroMu

Simple enough really. We then obviously had to go on and explain how this music could be free in another post, the idea being to involve the fans in the whole thinking behind the label in a never ending dialogue conducted through the blog. Nice and transparent:

How Can This Music Be Free?

MicroMu is an incredibly simple idea. Here is a handy bullet point guide for you:

• MicroMu records some music
• This music is put on MicroMu.com for free download.
• All of this amazing, free music means loads of people come to our website.
• Loads of people coming to our website means that a brand will want to share all the attention and will pay money to do so.
• Plastered T-Shirts is that brand. They are making the whole thing possible by paying us money to be our brand partner.
• We use this money to cover all of our costs and pay the artists.
• The more people that visit the site, the more money Plastered will give us.
• The more money Plastered gives us, the more music we can make, the more royalties we can pay artists…..the more free downloads we can have on the site!

You see how simple it is? The most important thing for us….is YOU! You are ‘paying’ for this music just by being on this site.

Tips on how to help:

• Visit the site often for updates.
• Leave comments, tell us what you think.
• Tell a friend
• Tell them to tell a friend
• Tell them to tell a friend to tell a friend
• Instead of emailing/bluetoothing our songs to people, send a link to where they can download them for free on MicroMu.com
• Write about us on your blog
• Turn up to our shows.

Very kind of you. Thanks a lot..

Fifteen releases, 100 blog posts, 2000 comments later and here we are. Oh, and a whole heap of videos:

Dead Flower by Shouwang

There are big plans in the pipeline for MicroMu but as with all big plans they are prone to big changes. As I said, it is all a huge experiment and we are amazed and hugely encouraged to have gotten this far. Particularly encouraging is the warmth of reaction we have received from the Chinese music fans. Our music has quickly found its place in the hearts of an impressively wide audience as well as plaudits in some of the most demanding forums of the Chinese media and internet. We have also been lucky enough to work with, and in some cases record, some of the biggest and best names in Chinese independent music. That’s about as good a start as we could have hoped for. Onwards and upwards!

Many thanks to Dominic Johnson-Hill: Scholar, philanthropist, patron of the arts, dyslexic. Many thanks also to Eggplant and all of our artists: Zhao Guang, Liu Dongming, Gangzi, Zhang Yiding, Zhang Weiwei + Guo Long, Wu Ningyue, Zhang Qianqian, 6 Kings, Di Ku Ai, Shouwang, Liquid Oxygen, Travellers, Li Zhi, Zhou Lao Er, Zhang Guonian.

© Outdustry 2009

I was at the “Techno Papa” Juan Atkins’ show the other night, talking with top Hip-Hop critic Badbrain about this year’s live music market. We both felt that there’s nothing to say but “sigh”.

Back in 2007, however, this market was full of hope.

Crowds at Beijing Pop Festival ’07

In 2005, I started to work for a magazine that covers western pop music. I had a lot of regret for leaving there in the end of 2007 because, as I predicted, that was the year live western pop music “took off” in China. Everything that happened before was just laying the groundwork, and pathetic jokes like the Suede in Beijing show happened too, but since that year I started to feel that there’s something going on in this market.

Suede’s Brett Anderson plays Beijing Pop Festival ’07

The strongest evidence is the blooming of music festivals. 2007′s Beijing Pop Festival staged the best international lineup ever in China: Nine Inch Nails, New York Dolls, Brett Anderson, Public Enemy, and the drummer of Ramones. In the same year, Yeah Yeah Yeahs headlined Modern Sky Festival and Faithless appeared in Yue Festival.

Though there was still a sizeable gap between this lineup and what the fans dreamed of, the reaction in the market is pretty positive. There were rumours that two promotion companies backed by foreign funds were preparing for an even bigger festival, and one of them had already sent staff to Korea to take lessons from the promoters there. At that time, it seemed that they are going to do something never has been done in China.

At the same time, the organizers of Beijing Pop Festival, which had scored three successes in a row, were looking forward to 2008 too. Someone working for them told me that they were going to get a bigger lineup than 2007′s.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor plays Beijing Pop Festival ’07

Other than those festivals, the who’s-who of acts performing here in 2007 included Roger Waters, Eric Clapton, Avril Lavigne, Sonic Youth, and Christina Aguilera. These things meant the market appeared to be flourishing. Unlike the fake flourishing which The Rolling Stones brought in 2006 – where 70% of the audience were foreign – the main consuming force in 2007 were Chinese people.

Mick Jagger + Cui Jian play Shanghai

October 4th, 2007 10pm, when I was standing in the muddy water under the pouring rain with thousands of audience of the Modern Sky Festival, and shouting for Yeah Yeah Yeahs together, I cannot help but felt a change is gonna come.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Modern Sky Festival ’07

Then all of a sudden the market is almost totally ruined by the incident in Shanghai on March 2nd 2008.

Before the incident, the market was still going on well. Dream Theater and Nightwish made a good start of the year. Even shortly after the incident, the Maroon5 show in Shanghai (March 24th) was a huge success. My only regret is that Smashing Pumpkins cancelled their show that was almost confirmed.

As the aftermath of the incident surfaced, and the bumpy political situations at home and abroad, it has finally become the turning point of the market. The promoters and officials of relative departments got punished, and the procedures for examination and approval were getting harder.

The one direct responsible for the March 2nd incident is a company (Emma) backed by considerable foreign funds, and then had done the Rolling Stones, Avril Lavigne, Eric Clapton and Xtina before. Because of this “accident”, many gigs and festivals rumored to be organized by them vanished.

Many other shows were impacted too. As the Olympic issue became obvious and political risk and cost soar, Modern Sky Festival, which was said to have foreign star acts headlined, announced that they won’t invite them in, and Beijing Pop Festival cancelled as a whole, to name but a few.

Some minor shows went ahead: the British pop phenomenon James Blunt, renowned French singer Keren Ann and long-established electronic duo Air became the only ripples in the stagnant water. Even Air’s second show was almost cut in half.

Everyone was looking forward to the post-Olympic era, especially Linkin Park‘s China tour. As the best selling band in 2007, Linkin Park would become the biggest contemporary band ever in the history of western popular music show in China. After the huge success of the film Transformers, in which they performed the theme song, Linkin Park’s popularity in China was brought up to a whole new level. Their tour in China could become a shot in the arm in the much-suffered market of 2008.

You have to expect the unexpected. The singer of Linkin Park broke his back and cancelled their whole Asian tour including the stops in China, another heavy blow in the performance market in the Mainland.

Maybe it was not that bad, at least Live Nation came in. As the biggest promoter in the world, Live Nation not only serves the top bands like Coldplay, they also signed the 360 degree contract with superstars like Madonna, U2, Jay-Z and Shakira. The Ge Hua Lai En promotion company that Ge Hua co-found with Live Nation, made a Chinese market – that had been longing for superstars like Coldplay, Madonna and U2 – finally see a light of hope. And the Kanye West and Kylie Minogue show, which Ge Hua Lai En organized, made the light even brighter.

This year the light keeps on shining. Shortly before the Spring Festival, the news that Oasis was coming over made the fans shocked and are telling one another about it. Brit-pop is the one of most accepted genre among Chinese rocks fans, and Oasis’ reputation here is only second to the Beatles. If this gig was carried out, it’s meaning could not be over-estimated. Of all the bands who have come over before, including Linkin Park, none of them has influenced this generaion of Chinese youth as much as Oasis. Their value was made clear when the promoters claimed one million RMB worth of tickets were sold in 8 days.

And then…

The impact of the”Oasis incident” might be even serious than the Bjork one. Because the almost forgotten Free Tibet gig has now been blown up, along with the bands involved with it, they might no longer be able to slip through as Sonic Youth did. The blacklist of bands is now considerably longer, including long expected bands like Radiohead, U2 and Blur. This put the promoters in a very awkward situation. The acts accepted by this market are mainly well-established ones, and because of the western culture and political environment, most of those bands are involved with “that” issue. (Oasis is famously not political).

Mainland Chinese fans after Oasis’ show at Hong Kong’s Asia Expo Centre, April 7th. Photo found here

As for the new bands, even Kings of Leon or Fall Out Boys would struggle to fulfill a 3000 seats venue, and their cost cannot be covered by the ticket sales of that kind of venue alone.

Of course we cannot come to the conclusion that the international acts’ live market in China has already crashed. Small indie or novelty groups still have enough room to breath. But for those fans who want big time parties, they might have to be patient. All the same, the market that was going to be a big cake, has been zhetenged into something like this, is not too far away from “crashed”. You see, the promoter (China West) that brought James Brown and Black Eyed Peas disappeared without a trace, they wanted to do music festival too. And there’s no sign of the Beijing Pop Festival will come back to life.

Pilos Chan

Modern Sky boss Shen Lihui says that “compared with the enthusiasm of the Modern Sky Festival, the Strawberry Festival will have a warmer tone….the park will be your pleasure ground”.

Organisers also suggest it will be the “biggest music festival in Beijing during the May holidays” and that the Modern Sky main festival will go ahead in October as well.

“every click or search [our users] have done, and any words they have posted on the Internet, have contributed to this report”

The results are presented in top ten popularity lists for everything from “Internet Hot Figures” (No.1, not surprisingly, is fallen Olympic hurdles hero Liu Xiang), through “Internet Hot Key Words” (Sichuan Earthquake) and “Movies” (John Woo historical, Red Cliff).

The top 10 “Musical Singles” list provides as accurate a chart as any as to what China was listening to in 2008. These are the mega-hits – with a predictable trend towards Olympics and Earthquake themes – presented here for you in handy video form:

No.1 : You And Me – Liu Huan & Sarah Brightman

The Olympic theme song, sung at the opening ceremony.

No.2 : The Air – Tan Jing

Another Olympic related song featured at the opening ceremony.

No.3 : Beijing Welcomes You – Various Artists

Sung by 100 artists from around China, this song celebrated the 100 day countdown to the Olympics. It was also played as the torch was being lit during the opening ceremony.

No.4 : Be Together, Alive Or Not – Jackie Chan

Reportedly written in the two days following the May 12th Sichuan earthquake by the staff at BOCOG (Beijing Olympics Organisation Committee). Jackie Chan flew up to Beijing, recorded the song on May 15th, it was receiving nationwide airplay by the 16th.

No.5 : Blue And White Porcelain – Jay Chou

CCTV’s annual Spring Festival TV Gala is a bona fide hit factory. This song benefited from the 200 million+ (approx.) viewership of the 2008 edition, guaranteeing it’s hit status amongst netizens.

No.6 : We Chinese – Various Artists

Another gathering of superstars – including Li Yuchun, He Jie, Su Xing and Yu Haoming – sing for victims of the Sichuan earthquake.

No.7 : Capricorn – Jay Chou

For some reason they have included Jay Chou’s album on a singles chart. His 2008 offering, Capricorn, spawned multiple hits including the two seen on this list.

No.8 : The Rice Aroma – Jay Chou

No.9 : I Know You Will Come – Xiao Ke

Recorded the day after the Sichuan earthquake.

No.10 : Painted Heart – Zhang Liangying

The theme song from the movie Painted Skin, sung by Zhang Liangying, performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

© Ed Peto 2009

This unlikely event had taken band manager Simon Napier-Bell 18 months of negotiations to organise; a process documented in his 2005 book I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch.

The idea to play China came about following the bands insistence that they become the biggest act in the world within two years. Napier-Bell and co-manager Jazz Summers knew that this would be impossible following the conventional route – namely touring America continuously for years – so came up with the China tour as a globally-press-worthy publicity stunt. Napier-Bell flew to China and sat in hotel rooms calling whatever government phone numbers he could get his hands on, usually leaving the message: “Tell them Simon Napier-Bell called to take them to lunch”.

“It was two years of lunches – I fed the whole government, 143 people three times each.”

The resulting shows were captured in a Popumentary which itself was not short of difficulties behind the scenes.

The final version, Wham! In China : Foreign Skies, seems to be out of print but is available in it’s full glory on Chinese YouTube-a-like, Youku:

The film was shown to 70,000 Wham! fans at their 1986 Wembley concert, the largest audience ever for a premiere. It might not be an enduring classic – it is slow and fairly insubstantial – but the impossibly absurd sight of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, replete with bouffant hair and metre-wide shoulder pads, meeting the staid Chinese bureaucracy mano-a-mano is too good to miss. Choice quotes abound throughout:

“Where are all the screaming girls?” – George Michael at Beijing Airport

Beyond this, Careless Whisper has now been added to my list of “Secret Shames”. Fantastic song.

© Ed Peto 2008

Now, despite an incredibly tough year for music in China (due to Government clampdowns surrounding the Olympics as well as the horribly misguided soap-boxing of a certain elfin Icelander), exactly a year later and the Beijing sound has come along leaps and bounds.

I thought it was about time I follow up on that year-old post, using the medium of budget video, to bring you up to speed a little:

• The Old-Guard: The older bands are still getting better (See SUBS, Re-TROS and Miserable Faith in the videos).
• Strength In Depth: The younger bands have come on from being self-conscious mimic-artists into snarling, full-blooded outfits of their own (See Snapline and Carsick Cars in the videos).
• Public Demand: A number of festival organisers still went ahead in seemingly impossible conditions with defiantly impressive results.

While 2007 will be the year the paper-trail leads back to in terms of the new Chinese bands really starting to find their own voices, 2008 is the year they perfected them. This video of Maybe Mars‘ artists Carsick Cars (taken last weekend) shows an increasingly confident band belting out their bona-fide indie anthem, ‘Zhong Nan Hai’. I really thought very little of them when I arrived in 2006 and it has been a pleasure having my initial assessment slowly being proven wrong:

Against all the odds both the Midi and Modern Sky Festivals went ahead in some form or other. Modern Sky resorted to a strange, half indoor, half outdoor, all-concrete affair just next to last year’s Haidian Park venue. There is no doubt that it lacked the grassy festival atmosphere but there was a pleasingly rough-around-the-edges industrial feel, made all the more so by the abysmal pollution which can be seen in the opening shots of this crudely put together festival video:

The daddy of Chinese music events, the Midi Festival, moved around it’s date and venue so many times that most news sources gave up reporting on it. For better or worse at the last minute they decided to host it back at the Midi School campus. This meant a huge scaling down and a number of sound issues. Combine this with some filthy weather and you would have thought it was a washout, but outstanding Saturday headliners and Midi School alumni Miserable Faith gaily skipped through the genres – ska, rap-metal, reggae, rock-ballads – to make my one trip up there totally worthwhile, as you can see from this next video. Their set closer, Life’s Most Perfect Day, is a hard-men-go-soft ballad that would play well anywhere. Also worth noting is the bemused crowd reaction to sugary Danish pop-mongers Summerhill: Two worlds collide with indifferent results:

So all things considered this place is shaping up nicely. If the post-Olympic landscape allows for more and more live music opportunities, then the crowds and the confidence will grow. The bands are certainly getting there. The night I filmed the Carsick Cars video also featured current buzz-band Ourselves Beside Me and The Gar, making a night of Chinese newcomers who would do themselves proud in any venue in the world.

© Ed Peto 2008

Midi claim that they would be free to go ahead but that the venue would have to remain open to joe public, obligating Midi to pay 700,000RMB a day for the mandatory use of strict Olympic security barriers. Obviously a crippling financial burden.

Festival organisers are in discussion with Haidian park, the site of recent Midi festivals, for the re-scheduled event. They are waiting to hear back from local government on this. The issue with this new venue – which also relegated everything but the main stage of the Modern Sky Festival to an indoor site next door at Haidian Exhibition Hall – is that the park is currently being used by a battery of anti-aircraft guns which were in place as, once again, part of the Olympic security measures.

What this set-back means for Air’s performance at Midi remains to be seen, although I suspect this might kill any hopes a lot of the international bands have to play the festival.

© Ed Peto 2008

The sad thing is that they have been forced to go head to head, time-wise, in most cases asking the limited pool of acts for exclusivity. They are also both largely taking place indoors – Modern Sky in Haidian Exhibition Hall and Midi in The Olympic Centre – making for an all the more surreal and stilted affair.

Modern Sky have already announced a full line up which is conspicuously free of foreign acts, as has been rumoured for some time now, namely :

While Midi, who have actually yet to officially receive a license (they said in a statement on Sept 12th that the government had ‘approved’ and that they would be getting their license on Sept 16th ie. Yesterday), have erred on the side of caution and gone for the more austere promotional flyer, without line-up, below:

This cautious, patient approach may have paid off as it looks like Midi have secured a license for their international bands this year. The obvious excitement here being the inclusion of downtempo-maestros Air in the line-up. The French duo already have two Yugong Yishan shows here in Beijing with the oft asked question being ‘why don’t they just stay on and play Midi’. Well, it looks like they are:

Here’s looking forward to what should be a really entertaining month of live music. Good luck to both festivals. Real lessons in persistence.

© Ed Peto 2008

As a musician and DJ (and regular pool hall patron) David couldn’t take much of this. He politely suggested to the management that he make compilations for them to play. The bosses were thrilled with the idea so the next day David brought back a lovingly compiled CD of vintage funk and soul. The pool hall played it, loved it and asked him to do the same again, which he did, a number of times. Before long, however, David began to suspect how much people were actually paying attention to his finely crafted mixes. His friend Matt suggested that, as a test, he make a CD which featured the same song repeated 18 times on it, the song being ‘What A Fool Believes’ by Michael McDonald/Doobie Brothers:

As normal the management put the CD on loop and, after two hours of playing pool to the same song, David asked the management and some of the regulars what they thought of it. The assembled staff and punters unanimously declared it to be their favourite CD so far. They absolutely loved it. That was the last CD David gave them.

It is difficult to know what conclusions to draw from this story, if any, suffice to say that the Chinese engage with music in a totally different way to the west. Recognition through repetition is a stock feature of the Chinese psyche, the most obvious example of which being the teaching of characters in Chinese schools (with some 11,000 characters in use in modern Chinese, classes are a necessarily ‘parrot fashion’ learning environment where children repeat pen strokes and character recognition ad nauseam). If a song hits a chord with the country and reaches a certain level of exposure/repetition, it will take on a life of it’s own, become a MONSTER hit to be played, replayed, covered, sync-ed, performed live and sung at KTVs (Karaoke bars) with a fervor very rarely seen in the west – it will become a part of the fabric of everyday life.

If you were to compile a ‘Now That’s What I Call Chinese Pop Music’ you could get away with a five track EP (rather than the 40 track annual double albums we get in the west) and still cover 60% of the musical mindshare of urban China. The relentless repetition of these monster hits in almost every conceivable environment and incarnation mirrors the teaching of Chinese characters and the CD in the pool hall: There is an overriding comfort to be had from recognition alone.

That’s enough theorizing. Anyone who has spent any length of time in China, regardless of whether or not they listen to the radio or watch TV, will recognise at least one, and probably more, of the following songs. These are what the Chinese monster hits sound like, with Mouse Loves Rice being the biggest by some distance (a real phenomenon, the story of which neatly sums up the music environment in China, but that’s for another time):

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL CHINESE POP MUSIC Vol.1:

David Tao & Jolin Tsai – Jin Tian Ni Yao Jia Gei Wo (Today You Must Marry Me):

S.Wing – QQ Ai:

Yang Chen Gang – Lao Shu Ai Da Mi (Mouse Loves Rice):

A Niu – Tao Hua Duo Duo Kai (Peach Blossom):

Kenny G – Going Home:

© Ed Peto 2007

New podcast ‘Pissing On The Bamboo Curtain’ will be a real godsend to anyone looking at making sense of this exciting little scene. Podcasters Ian Sherman (who also happens to be Music Editor for Beijing Time Out) and Kyle Schaefer‘s high-brow, yet somehow low-brow, ramblings will also be a godsend to anyone who enjoys apocrypha, obscure references and general verbosity.

Kyle Schaefer and Ian Sherman

These guys know their stuff. They play good tunes as well. Here are links to the first two gloriously amateurish installments, hosted on the Tagteam Records site:

Sept ’07

Oct ’07

I took it upon myself to send a few questions their way – pulling back the curtain on Pissing On The Bamboo Curtain, if you will. They replied in a typically wordy and waggish fashion. Good stuff. Read on…

Ed Peto: DESCRIBE THE OTHER PERSON’S BACKGROUND A LITTLE BIT. WHAT QUALIFIES HIM TO COMMENT ON THE BEIJING MUSIC SCENE?

Ian Sherman: I always imagine him [Kyle] coming from a place where it’s always dusk, people are polite but wary and there’s always a cooler full of beer on the back porch. It’s essential that there is a back porch. Kyle has a history as a DJ on late night college radio where, as far as I understand, he would mix Ministry with Diamanda Galas and Star Wars samples and no one would give a shit, ‘cos no was listening, except whatever girl he happened to be corrupting at that point. Said girl would think that he was the greatest thing since the cheese grater and would no doubt demonstrate her admiration for him through the medium of repulsive carnal depravities. He is very good at radio/podcast stuff, even though he puts on a special ‘voice’ for broadcasting; In real life he has a voice like Betty Boop’s castrato cousin. Still, he actually thinks about what he says before he says it, unlike my impetuous self.

[Kyle] has been intimately connected with Tag Team for a few years now. He goes to a lot of shows – not as many as me, but then he’s an indolent fucker. Most important, I suppose, is that he, like me, wants to and we have both been here an awfully long time so, in our own small way, we’ve been witness to the development of the Beijing scene. That’s it.

N.B. The ‘Bamboo Curtain’ podcast is not exclusively about Beijing. We’ll play any Chinese music, no matter where it comes from. We’ll be starting a Beijing specific podcast within the next few months (it won’t be on the Tag Team site but elsewhere)

Kyle Schaefer: Well, aside from his professional credentials, Sherman is one of those people with an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of rock ephemera. I’m not sure if that ‘qualifies’ him to do anything (I don’t think we had to take a test or anything), but it’s nice to be able to find out who the back-up cymbalist was in the original line up of the Yardbirds and if there is any truth to the rumor that he made a series of novelty records with tape loops of whale song (Ian says no). As far as being an able commenter on the developments of independent music here in China… Ian’s an avid, enthusiastic and informed gig-goer, which is more than I can say for most.

EP: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONAL TASTES IN MUSIC?

IS: I know its a fatuous thing to say, but I simply like good music. Alright, I’ll try again. My ‘comfort blanket’ music is Van Morrison. The man can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. But much like the religion it borders on, that’s a personal thing and not really something that comes up all that often. I like slow and loud music: Mogwai, Godspeed, MBV etc. Or I like shit with a lot of guitar. Distortion please – lots of fucking distortion. I generally look for a melody – it can be as fucked up as you like, just as long as its there. Or I like good old fashioned power pop. Or I like Acid Rock. Or the holy trinity of 70s metal (Zep, Purp and, to a lesser extent, Sab). Or Ennio Morricone. Or mid-60s psych. I find most recent British music uninteresting – either prematurely ponderous or glorified stodgy pub rock. Enough, I hate being pinned down on this, it may well change tomorrow. Extremely broadly, though – I’m an indie kid.

Kyle’s inner goth is barely hidden, but he manages to function nonetheless. He and I have rather different but quite complementary tastes in music. He’s kind of hard to nail down – just when I think I have him pegged as a machine-music person (which he is, very), he’s an archetypal yank indie kid, and then he’s a punk, but wait… now he’s into weird shit like hyper hardcore. I think we share a love of mesolithic riffheavy sludge rock, but I could be wrong. I have a fairly extensive, not to mention anal, knowlege of the dark nooks and crannies of music – past and current – but when we DJ together, I spend most of the night in a state of awe at the endless succession of wonderful obscurities (to me) he pulls out of nowhere. Bastard. It’s an education with Kyle.

KS: I cut my teeth on horrible noise. Shuddering distortion is my bread and butter. I’m also rather fond of gloomy things and absolutely anything synthetic. Ian is bit like the rainy-day craft drawer, all these bits and bobs and glue-on wiggly eyes. Just a little something of everything. He’ll probably say ‘shoe-gaze’ after agonizing for a few hours, but the man can comfortably shift from Van Morrison to Norwegian death-twee.

EP: HOW DID THE PODCAST IDEA COME ABOUT?

IS: Well, I think I once heard a podcast back in 2002 and thought ‘fuck I could do that’. Of course, I couldn’t – not without someone who actually could. One of us bought it up last year, I think, and nothing happened. But I have these rare, and really rather shocking, spurts of decisiveness. Every morning I wake up, stare into space and let my mind fill with brilliant plans, then I’ll have my weetabix and fall asleep on the sofa. Occasionally, though, I’ll actually follow through on these plans. This would be one of those instances. It’s all a question of presentation really. If you go to the pub and float the idea of a podcast, it’ll get kicked around the table for a bit and then the conversation’ll get back to Kagler’s latest distribution deal; but if you stride in purposefully and slam an actual plan down on the table, it’ll happen.

KS: It was Ian’s idea. He started bugging me and I went along with it. I’m a remarkably passive person. I’d had a similar idea for Tagteam, that we should do a podcast of b-sides and live stuff and interviews to coincide with new releases. Everybody thought it was a good idea but I couldn’t manage the motivation to actually produce it. When Ian said we should do a music thing I jumped on his wagon (Seriously, he has a wagon).

EP: WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE WITH THIS PODCAST?

IS: Less time asleep on the sofa. Oh… and demos, lots and lots of demos. Basically, shitloads of free stuff. Maybe a girlfriend as well. Doesn’t seem too much to ask.

KS: The usual: Global Domination of Popular Culture. But I’d settle for getting Ian a date.

EP: DESCRIBE THE PREPARATION THAT GOES INTO EACH SHOW AND HOW YOU GO ABOUT RECORDING IT.

IS: To be honest not much. We both negotiate with each other about time and place of recording (probably the most complicated part of the whole process), show up. There’s a slight internal struggle – whereas I would be happier with an hour long podcast, Kyle is more of a short and sweet kind of bloke. He tends to win because otherwise he gets all passive aggressive and I am powerless in the face of a steath sulk. We each bring three or four tunes with us and erm… that’s about it. We don’t necessarily know anything about the music the other wants to play. I’m happy with that. I’ll like to learn and be suprised and that’s mainly what keeps me interested, that and the sound of my voice. I don’t really want to do that much preparation or, god forbid, rehearsal. That just sucks the life out of a cast. We’ve had complaints from would-be-management that we should have a big meeting before hand and share all information. Those people can eat my shit, in the best possible way.

Generally, we’ll waste all the best banter just talking to each other as we set up. The mikes are switched on and then… well, as is easy to tell, then we just make it up as we go. I like it that way, but inevitably we will get more organised and professional as time goes on.

For source material, I’ve got a pretty good pipeline for new demos and albums, but I tend to spend a lot of time scouring the interwebs for good stuff that I may have missed over the past few years. Kyle has this enourmous library of older Chinese music from his days in the wilderness when that’s all there was. As for newer stuff, he probably gets most of it from me – that’s how cool I am.

KS: We spend about two weeks putting off actually seeing one another. Then we sort of rush around and try to get mics hooked into computers. We’re sorting out the technical stuff as we go (we’ve learned that mics need to be turned on, etc.) We assemble all the music and trade off on selections, generally pontificate a bit and then cut it together on Ian’s laptop. It takes about six hours longer than it needs to, but most of the fun is actually making the damn things. I try to forget about it as soon as we finish and start thinking about the next one.

EP: D-22′s MICHAEL PETTIS HAS BEEN QUOTED AS SAYING THAT “2007 WILL BE THE YEAR BEIJING BROKE”. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT?

IS: Sheesh. How many thousand words do you want on that? Pettis would say that. I think the argument is moot. Pointless. If he means ‘break’ as in San Francisco ’67, New York ’78, Chicago ’86 or Seattle ’91 then no. Who cares whether Beijing ‘breaks’ internationally – what is important is that Beijing in 2007 finally had a great scene that you could talk about without having to couch it in terms of regional context. A scene is made up of bands. Bands break, cities do not. Bollocks to that. Pettis’ hyperbole is unfair. Plenty of bands ‘broke’ in Beijing in 2007, but not in the way he means it. No one sold out Madison Square Gardens or had Rolling Stone blowing coke up their arse, but finally bands that we know and love started putting out decent records and non-derivative bands were on the rise in 2007 – Hedgehog, Guai Li, etc – spun out of nowhere and didn’t really sound like ONE BAND, which has blighted the beijing scene in the past. The dynamic changed. Typically Beijing bands who blazed live put out shit, unrepresentative albums that turned everyone off. This year not only have excellent live bands been putting out excellent discs (cf. Hedgehog), but even bands who want to make me kill myself when I see them live have put out great – and I mean great – fucking albums (cf. Carsick Cars and Queen Sea Big Shark). That is the way it should be. Bands, if they have to chose, should suck live, not in the studio.

2007 has been enormous for the Beijing scene, as m’collegue Kyle says; ‘all of a sudden you turn around and you’re in a city with good bands’. Credit where credit is due – a lot of this has been down to Pettis and D-22. At a press conference this summer, Jason Magnus, mediocrity-loving honcho of the Beijing Pop Festival, used the expression ‘a D22 band’. At that one instant not only was the expression rendered incredibly passe, but also pervasive. D22 was set up to encourage and propogate a scene and by criminy that’s exactly what they’ve done.

KS: I think that’s total bullshit and probably true. The environment for music and musicians has been relentlessly improving since Wham! played Beijing in 1984 and I think it’s impossible not to feel like we are reaching some sort of critical musical mass here, but people said the same thing in ’87 and ’97 and they might still be saying it in 2027. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves and, frankly, M. Pettis has more invested in the local scene than most. What’s been different this year is the number of promising new bands and albums and the amount of international press Beijing is starting to receive. (White) people are finally really taking an interest in Chinese music, and in 50 years when music historians start digging through the documentation, the paper trail may certainly look like it all started now. However, until Chinese musicians start forging truly unique musical paths that ignite something in the collective imagination, Beijing’s just another big city with a great local scene. I also feel, quite firmly, that if Beijing breaks it will be beholden on us to fix it pretty quick.

EP: WHICH BANDS ARE YOU CURRENTLY MOST EXCITED ABOUT?

IS: Every single band in beijing, because most of them are so nearly there… except Mafeisan.

KS: Fistpig, The Boyfriends of Nancy Drew, Sudden Infant Sex Syndrome, The Prone Position… which aren’t real bands but I’m going to make some t-shirts anyway and I’ve got a rad stencil for Fistpig I made to put on all my notebooks and my Trapper Keeper. Seriously, do people still get ‘excited’ about bands? Ian and I will choose the exact same ones anyway… Guaili, Muscle Snog out of Shanghai, basically everything we put on the podcast, or I wouldn’t put it on.

© Ed Peto 2007

There’s no doubt as to who the hot new prospects are though. I put Hedgehog on for a show here in June after being impressed with a few D-22 gigs and they were outstanding.

They describe themselves as being ‘Noise Pop’ which actually isn’t far off the mark: The scuzzy side of guitar pop; catchy as hell without being disposable, with Cure basslines, plenty of invention and the best drummer in the world bar none. ‘Atom’, as she is called, may measure in at well under five foot and have the face of a cherub but she can’t half smack the crap out of a drum kit, in time, while singing backing vocals. In the words of so many tv talent searches, she has ‘the x-factor’. Here they are blowing away a mid-afternoon crowd at last week’s inaugural Modern Sky Festival. Atom broke a drum stick one minute into the first song and two more through the rest of the set:

International scrutiny might be wildly premature but while the rest of Beijing gears up for the Olympics in 2008 with all it’s obscene construction and flag waving, the indie rock scene is quietly developing into something pretty special. Don’t begin the hype yet as this scene is simply too fragile to deliver. With bands like these on the up though, there is an unquestionable optimism about town. For the moment, however, please take Beijing off your ‘cities to watch’ lists, talk about Sheffield for a while longer and come back in 2009.

© Ed Peto 2007