Click-through: Beijing/LA Duo Alpine Decline’s Startling New Browser Video

It’s been quite the week for non-traditional, browser-based videos in the China music sphere. A few days ago rapper Bohan Phoenix put out an interactive music video for his latest single, “OVERSEAS,” and now we have “Dispatch from the Guesthouse”: a thoroughly psychedelic browser video just released by Beijing/LA rock unit Alpine Decline.

This is one of three singles off of the band’s latest release, Return to Desolation Lake, which they recorded with PK14 frontman Yang Haisong last Spring in the Chinese capital. The band’s core is guitarist Jonathan Zeitlin and drummer Pauline Mu, who returned to LA in 2016 after seven years in Beijing, but have just landed back in China to peddle their latest album to their substantial local fanbase on a fourteen-city tour.

Return is being billed as a “high-altitude long player of overexposed psych/indie beatitudes” and “the band’s most tuneful and rueful collection yet.” You can get a sample of it by clicking through to the “video” for “Dispatch from the Guesthouse,” which is really more of an amorphous internet cartoon named Jimmy gesticulating wildly while a barrage of Chinese characters flies toward your face (desktop only!). The band describes this as:

a portal where you can check in on Jimmy throughout the day as he shuffles and mutates through a storm of Mandarin (which turn out to be the translated lyrics to the song, which itself describes being “shot through the prism” and “changed beyond all recognition”)

If that’s not something you want to expose your retinas to at the moment, you can also enjoy this majorly sun-drenched music video for another single off the album, “Diamond Cutter,” directed by LA-based filmmaker Maya Rudolph:

And stream/buy the album in full here.