In 1996, a love song from the Sichuan mountains got the Jamaican dub treatment in a Hong Kong studio, one year before the handover.

This was the same decade Deep Forest and Enigma topped charts by sampling "the East" as pan-Asian ambient texture. A collective called Celestial (天上) was running the experiment in reverse, building world-electronic from inside an Asian city, with Asian musicians as collaborators rather than samples. Pre-handover Hong Kong, a city literally negotiating its East-West identity, was the only place this record could have been made. It`s an early blueprint for what we`d now call Asia-core or sinowave, three decades ahead of the algorithm.

#radii #radiimedia #asiandub #hongkongmusic #90smusic ...