Yin: Symbiz Brings Cantonese Bass Music from Germany to Uganda in “Faai Di” Music Video

Zhi MC (left) and Buddysym (right) make up Berlin’s Symbiz

The video features Zhi locked in position in the center of the screen, energetically performing the track across 26 different locations. The visual is completed by the characters and scenery of Uganda, where the two were working at the time. Dancing children, colorful market scenes, and backflipping locals, all pinned to the center of the shot, gave Symbiz the flavor and action-cam feel they were looking for.

“The reason we chose Uganda for the video was simple: We could. We had the chance to go there for two weeks to do some music, workshops and meetings with cultural activists. And we thought that it would make perfect sense to shoot a music video for a song with Cantonese lyrics by a band from Germany — in Uganda. Sometimes it’s good to go for the most obvious ideas.”

Symbiz as a duo has been international from the start, with their unique brand of bass-heavy music pulling them around the world, across Europe, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe, from India to Palestine. Generally speaking, Buddysym will mainly produce, with Zhi mainly on vocals. But really, the two will do both jobs, with Zhi hopping on the boards for their live shows and Buddysym frequently picking up a mic for backup vocals. They speak enthusiastically about traveling and drawing from a global array of sounds, ideally going abroad to collect their inspirations firsthand:

That hunger for new things was also how we had the idea to make bass music with Cantonese lyrics. Zhi’s parents speak Cantonese so even though he grew up in Berlin, it is literally his mother tongue. When we looked into it, we found that there is surprisingly little to no music of our style in Chinese. So why in the world would we not give it a try? We had it in our hands to do something hardly anyone, or maybe even no-one had done before.

You can listen to Faai Di and the rest of the duo’s Broken Chinese EP here on the Symbiz SoundCloud.

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: [email protected].