It’s been a long, strong year for mind-bending music videos from greater China’s underground cultural matrix. A few 2018 highlights off the top of my head: Alpine Decline’s browser-smashing clickstorm “Dispatch From the Guesthouse”, Bohan Phoenix’s piano-burning epic “OVERSEAS”, Guzz’s temple-hopping adventure “Fleeting Whispers”, Shao’s museum-crashing techno thriller “Reflection Pt.2”, 33EMYBW’s acid-neon post-kawaii fever dream “Golem”, Meuko! Meuko!’s VR seance “希卡公主Princess Sika”, and the just-released pan-Asian pop-cultural mashup Dukkha.
Wow, that’s a lot. Well here’s one more for the stack: “明日不可待 Tomorrow Can Not Be Waited” by Howie Lee and Taipei “simulation artist” Teom Chen.
Howie and Teom began collaborating in 2017, first appearing on stage together at Beijing’s one-off Wetware Festival last May (pictured up top, along with fellow Do Hits collaborator Veeeeky). With Howie splitting his time between his hometown of Beijing and second home of Taipei, the duo has had plenty of time to refine a creative collaboration that skirts the line between music, video, and game design; simulation and performance; reality and virtuality.
The result for now is this somewhat metaphysically overloaded visual feat, which feeds old ideas about reincarnation and the afterlife into a new framework befitting an age of impending Singularity (or total technological meltdown).
Enjoy the video above, and if you’d like to download the music to soundtrack your own takeaway post-human VR phantasmagoria, you can grip that MP3 via Bandcamp.
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