Monster-led psychedelic dance + hip hop mixtapes

Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a newsletter about music from China. Thanks very much for reading.

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In this issue: deconstructed club music, hip hop mixtapes, experimental electronics, a new emo compilation, shoegaze, post-rock, what happened when Wham! went to China, and weird creature-fronted psych-ish dance from the Beijing jungle.

Contradictions abound when it comes to 444theGod.

As a DJ in China’s underground clubs, he is known for frenetic, high-octane sets. Based in Hangzhou, he’s a regular at the resurrected Loopy, where he can be found bombarding the dancefloor with everything from dubstep to gabber to jungle (he’s also a member of the Peking Jungle Expedition Team, a group known for their love of UK dance styles).

Yet as a producer, he deals in more subtle forms. His back catalogue includes a handful of more out-and-out club tracks — notably a hard drum-inspired EP for ShyPeople last year — but his productions are more often atmospheric, focusing on sounds that “that linger between introspection and transcendence”, as his official bio puts it. Take 2024’s El poema inacabado on pioneering Chinese electronic label Genome 6.66Mbp, which provided one of the imprint’s most contemplative and least club-centric releases to date. Or May’s Reseda Odorata, a two-track, 45-minute long mix of slow-burn ambient meditations that periodically flared with pulsing alt-club beats.

It’s this realm “between introspection and transcendence” that he explores further on the ten-track 挽歌 (Elegy), an album which arrived a couple of days late on Bandcamp with no description or credit information to go on. So far, the Bandcamp page is the only trace of the record online — there’s been no Instagram posting flurry or WeChat media tour to tout the LP. This points to another contradiction: despite his name, 444theGod seems to be a fairly low-key figure; he certainly doesn’t appear to feel the need to be omnipresent online, something of a rarity for producers and DJs these days.

Perhaps this release strategy isn’t such a contradiction, after all: Elegy is arguably the Shanxi-born producer’s most abstract work to date. Whereas his previous works would offer glimpses of the influences that inform his DJ sets, usually via snatched moments of pulsing beats, on this new record even those abstruse nods to the dancefloor are few and far between, if they exist at all.

Instead, we get atmospheric ambient waves and static-filled surges of drumless sound, periodically punctuated with obfuscated vocals and field recordings such as temple recitations, the kind of suona-led exclamations that often accompany Daoist events, and wails of anguish (presumably funeral-related, given the album name). The track titles and the cover art similarly suggest that 444theGod has been pondering spiritual and religious matters, as well as mortality, in the creation of this record. Here, perhaps we get another contradiction: the album can feel opaque yet simultaneously as if the artist behind it is bearing his soul.

There’s pain and darkness here, but 挽歌 rewards those who stay the course with an ultimately engrossing listen.

挽歌 is out now.

We’ll get to something with more of a conventional ‘tune’ to it soon, but first: an album that makes for an interesting companion to 444theGod’s Elegy, from an artist at a very different stage of his career.

Feng Jiangzhou is an accomplished multimedia artist whose career has spanned directing theatre productions and work on Zhang Yimou’s modern Peking opera You and Me, as well as forming rock band The Fly in the early 1990s and recording female punk act Hang on the Box in 2000. As a solo musician, his work has progressed from fuzzed up rock and punk to electronic noise and now, to something a little softer.

“Maybe it’s that I'm getting older, and the music keeps growing easier on the ear,” Feng says by way of an introduction to his latest album, Cicada Clinging, released on Badhead, the Modern Sky spin-off label helmed by Zhang Xiaozhou. “The whole album brims with melody, to the point that I almost forget what my earlier work was like.”

“Brims with melody” should be taken as relative to some pretty noisy and abstract work that has gone before, but it’s true that Feng does appear to have mellowed after three decades of making music. Cicada Clinging is still built on glitchy electronic and noise-adjacent foundations (hence me linking it to Elegy above), but does feel “looser and more free-wheeling”, as the intro text puts it. Taken together with predecessor Shallow Red, which was recorded around the same time and came out in 2023 on Omnipotent Youth Society’s Cable Temple imprint, this LP points to a lighter, but no less interesting phase for Feng’s career.

Cicada Clinging is out now.

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Young duo NeoNew’s press photos for their self-titled debut album feature one member’s face covered in a golden shawl and the other dressed as some bizarre furry being, a super furry animal perhaps. This, presumably, is the “mysterious creature” referred to in the introduction to the record, which lays out a narrative that skips across mentions of the subconscious, an imaginary jungle, and a dream-eating beast.

Some of this begins to make sense when you listen to the album, which weaves together psych-ish electronic music with influences spanning traditional African percussion and southeast Asian gamelan. It sounds like NeoNew have emerged from the same trippy Yunnanese scene that spawned South Acid Mimi Dance Team, but no, the pair are from stodgily urban Beijing. Perhaps this is where all the dreaming comes in.

Much like a dream, parts of the album can be hard to recall, even after a few listens. But there are some worthwhile tracks as well, where the playfulness and mix of influences make more of an impact and where you can see why there’s a bit of buzz around NeoNew in the capital. They remain an act to watch.

拗拗NeoNew is out now.

It feels like every issue there’s a new Chinese emo update to tell you about, so it’s probably high time for a new Chinese emo compilation. Step forward the 20-track King-Size China III, the latest installment of a series that began 20 years ago. TOOKOO, who organised the first edition and recently reformed to release a new album, are involved once more as are a host of younger bands from across China’s emo spectrum: v是兔子wishtoday, 郁云Emo Cloud, Shanghai Qiutian, Midwest Emo Mahjong, Diels-Alder, and more. Flip Side, an early band from Chinese Football frontman Xu Bo who provided the first track on the original compilation, are once again on opener duty.

If that has you curious about Flip Side you’re in luck. The band haven’t reunited or anything — Xu Bo is, of course, plenty busy with Chinese Football and his other projects — but their 2006 album Never Ending Story, previously only available on CD, is now up on Bandcamp in full.

One of the great things about China’s emo scene is its DIY feel and strong sense of community. Both of these aspects are on display via the most recent release from Shenzhen label Small Animals Records. As Bolin of (the brilliant) the three mice — who’s credited with “backing vocals / screams” on a couple of tracks — explains, “this EP came together from a fan within the emo community. every instrument, scream, engineering and recording was self-taught, she ultimately found her own voice.” And how. Mixed and mastered by Luo Oumeng, another key figure on the emo scene, mrg32k3a’s window of vulnerability is an impressive debut.

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It’s not just the emo revival, China’s shoegaze resurgence also continues apace, with the new album from Nanjing band MilkGuard one of its latest exhibits. Disappearing Into the Water is their debut full-length and takes inspiration, in part, from Jorge Luis Borges. Slowdive and Sweet Trip are among the more obvious influences on the record.

Been struggling to find space the past couple of months to mention the new album from Sparrow, a Beijing band who’ve been around since 2008, but that’s not really a reflection on the album, promise. The outfit’s new LP attempts to build “a cross-dimensional dialogue”, something which it does through some very listenable post-rock.

Su Zixu found fame as a contestant on China’s Sing My Song TV show back in 2015, but hasn’t really troubled the mainstream since, instead releasing a series of bluesy rock records with his band The Paramecia. That doesn’t mean his work has been entirely without recognition — he scooped a Golden Melody Award (aka ‘Taiwan’s Grammys’) last year — or without merit: in 2023, he made a notably more experimental-leaning album with percussionist Liu Pi. His latest LP occupies much safer territory, it’s even a little syrupy in places, but with its warm strings, twinkling guzheng and soulful harmonies it’s also highly listenable — a good Sunday or Monday morning record to ease you into things.

Jinsfake, the Beijing-based producer behind the capital’s fRUITYSHOP clothing and record store, released his latest mixtape at the beginning of June and it works nicely as a summer soundtrack. While it’s winkingly titled Myth Tape, it unfortunately isn’t a myths and legends-themed collection of beats, but its samples and rhythms have an old-school feel, echoing tracks long enshrined in the hip hop Parthenon.

Dilla-influenced Shanxi producer Illasoul is also back with another beattape, this time accompanied by some specific listening notes:

“Step into the streets and play this record in any order you wish. If your headphones have a Transparency Mode, consider turning it on. For a moment, let go of your focus on the music, and of whatever thoughts may occupy your mind. Bring your attention back to yourself. You may begin to notice the sounds around you […] As this happens, the distinction between music and environment, between one sound and another, may gradually dissolve. What remains, and whatever may arise from it, is yours to discover.”

If, like me, you don’t have a pair of fancy headphones, rest assured there’s still plenty to enjoy here.

Labelled a “genre-defying album” rather than a mixtape / beattape, Sancebai’s Zhuo Ying Collection nonetheless ticks a lot of the same boxes. The Guangzhou-based producer has previously appeared in this newsletter via a Three-Body Problem-inspired alternative rap album and a nostalgia-mining record of instrumental hip hop, but here he attempts something a little different. He remains rooted in hip hop, but also — as his frequent collaborator Tian Fu notes — weaves in “vintage synthesizers, vocoders, 1980s Chinese disco, 1960s American minimalism, AI-generated vocals from the 2020s, ambient drones, video game music, automatic piano, and countless other references.”

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Having opened with some abstract, challenging sounds, it feels only right to leave you with… Wham!

The BBC has made a new documentary about George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s ten day trip to China in 1985. The gambit was to make Wham! “the first Western pop group to play in communist China”, with an eye on using the inevitable publicity to crack the US market. Per the Beeb:

“Drawing on meticulously restored, newly digitised and never-before-seen archive footage, alongside interviews with those who experienced the tour firsthand, the film revisits this historic moment through the eyes of the band, their team and Chinese audiences encountering Western pop culture for the first time.”

(It also partly tells the story of the documentary that almost wasn’t: If You Were There by Lindsay Anderson, using plenty of the footage Anderson shot while accompanying the group.)

The film is out in cinemas now and is due to make it to iPlayer later this year. You can watch the trailer below, but be warned you may get ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ stuck in your head for the rest of the day: