Yin: Hard Sci-Fi Glitch from Alex Wang

Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly Radii feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning classical to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion.

Today we hear the latest from Beijing’s Do Hits, who live on the edge of the city’s underground electronic music scene. Do Hits has been pushing against boundaries in the Beijing club circuit since 2011, starting off as a monthly party and in the last few years morphing into a label. A few weeks ago they put out Black Dragon, an EP for New York-based producer Alex Wang. The album writeup fits neatly with Do Hits’s overall Sinofuturist aesthetic:

Black Dragon is a self-learning AI, which has gone out of programmer’s control, so it starts surveilling every action of human beings. It keeps watch on you through your Samsung TV, locates you with CCTV everywhere in the street, spies on your social network, knowing whether you like Coca Cola better or Pepsi, your favorite color, and your bank balance…

Alex Wang studied Recording Art at China’s Central Conservatory of Music, and continued his formal training with a degree in Computer Music Composition at the Peabody Institute conservatory program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Now he lives in NYC and cranks out esoteric, conceptual cracked-glass masterpieces like Black Dragon, running his interests in electronica, hip hop, trap and jazz through a digital shredder and feeding what comes out the other end to his likeminded comrades at Do Hits HQ in Beijing.

Do Hits hits the Great Wall

If you happen to be in China, catch Alex Wang and fellow New York-based Do Hits affiliate YLLIS on their four-date Exodus tour:

8/25 Beijing, YUE Space

9/1 Shanghai, ALL

9/2 Hangzhou, Loopy

9/8 Chengdu, Nu Space