Yin: Warped Electronics from Shanghai Label play rec

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.

New year, new music: Shanghai label play rec has just released its first dispatch from some weird vision of the future circa January 2018. The label was founded last year by two veterans of China’s experimental music scene: laptop composer Wang Changcun and Torturing Nurse co-founder Xu Cheng. Wrote a bit about play rec in one of my 2017 year-end articles:

After launching with some compilations and solo releases from each of the founders, last month play rec put out the debut release for RMBit, a collective of multimedia artists and producers that grew out of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. In fact, this crew came from the same department/orbit that has produced some of China’s most interesting and innovative young visual artists, such as Lu Yang, but RMBit is one of the only outfits producing interesting work on the audio end of that spectrum.

play rec has been busy since the November release of RMBit’s debut, putting out a collaboration between Xu Cheng and Chengdu-based sound artist Sun Wei in December, and then this untitled release by an artist listed as DROPDOWN last week. That’s what we’re listening to today. The only info we have to go by on play rec’s Bandcamp is:

ᗦ↞◃ ʅ(•̀ī•́)
┌(.□ .(►˛◄’!)
ᖗ( ᐛ )ᖘ
( ͒•·̫|三(۶ᐛ )۶
(´-ι_-｀)┌(┌ ､ﾝ､)┐

Alright then. Musically this sounds like what the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack would sound like on a lot of anti-anxiety pills, I think. Feeling it. Enjoy:

Read more about play rec in this Bandcamp Daily article