Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly RADII feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning hip-hop to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion.
Well, we made it! Happy Record Store Day! I know that spare change is just burning a hole in your pocket. If you can’t join the record shopping in China spree we’ve been on all week in person, you’re in luck today, as one Record Store Day release from China is now up and streaming (and physically purchasable) online: Bird to Otherside.
This is a special, cassette-only release of B-sides and outtakes from two of Beijing’s finest noise/rock/psych bands, Birdstriking and Gate to Otherside. Each released an album last year on indie label Maybe Mars — Birdstriking their second, which I wrote up for RADII at the time, and Gate to Otherside their freewheeling debut. Both albums were produced by Ricky Maymi, an American musician who’s become enthralled with this particular corner of the Beijing rock scene, and was actually just in town jamming with a few of the members of these bands in a new project called White Tiger (白虎).
Ricky Maymi in the UK tour van with Birdstriking’s Wang Xinjiu (photo via Kiwese)
Anyway, Bird to Otherside catches these two bands fidgeting around with their late-20s ennui in interesting ways, and almost got left as scraps on the studio editing desk, but luckily for us fans of music on physical media, they’re now put down on magnetic tape for as long as that’ll last. If you like Beat Happening, psych rock, or bad trips, mainline this digitally (and find ordering instructions) here:
If that’s not quite your speed, Maybe Mars actually has a pretty impressive roster of Spring 2018 releases, so do also check the new or soon-to-drop albums from Demerit (punk/hardcore), Lonely Leary (cold post-punk), Hiperson (warm post-punk), and Dream Can (kinda hard to describe… Shanghai college rock but really good?), depending on your taste.
We love dockless bike share, don’t get us wrong. We’ve been covering the takeover since day one and we’ll continue to do so. But for you upperclass aristocrat types, whose dainty legs just aren’t made for pedaling, we have good news: Mobike’s new shared car is here, also sans docking station.
The purely electric car is called DEV1, developed by one-year-old Guizhou car company SITECH. There’s a commercial version and a Mobike version, but it seems like the only major difference is the radical color choice. Users will be able to access the car from the Mobike app. In a departure from the quality reputation of shared bicycles, this thing is actually looking pretty luxurious. 7-inch LCD panel, 10-inch floating LCD touchscreen, AI voice recognition, hella nice all-leather interior. What else is there?
Hella nice.
The car can communicate with charging stations nearby to see if there’s open space to recharge. In fast charge mode, you can get 200 minutes of driving on a 40 minute charge. That means that each hundred kilometers of travel in the DEV1 will cost you 5RMB in charge-up money. That’s less than a dollar.
Shared cars, coming soon to a street near you (maybe, depending on where you live). We’ll take it for a spin and let you know.
In celebration of International Record Store Day, which falls on April 21 this year, our photo theme this week is Record Shopping in China. Though vinyl culture never quite caught on China in quite the same way as it did in other parts of the world, it’s on the rise. This week we’ll put the spotlight on some of the best shops in China to pick up new tunes.
Like most cities in China, Xi’an doesn’t have a huge vinyl-loving community, but it is growing — and Margin Records is very much at its center.
Margin Records was founded by long-time vinyl hoarder Feng Fan, who first had the idea back in 2014. “The original aim was just to be able to share my records with more diggers, I certainly didn’t plan to open a physical shop. After all, in an era when physical record shops have become almost extinct, opening such a store seems like an expensive form of nostalgia — not to mention doing so in a second-tier city like Xi’an.”
Record Store Day 2017 at Margin Records
In 2016, Feng started cooperating with Xiangwang Bookstore, taking over a section of the shop to sell records. “Although the space here is limited, we try and ensure it’s ‘small but good quality,’” he says. “Every record has been carefully chosen.”
The collection reflects the interests of its owner genre-wise. Feng is also an experimental producer, and therefore Margin’s shelves are stacked mostly with jazz, experimental music, and psychedelic and avant-garde rock.
Margin Records founder Feng Fan (right)
This year, Margin Records are teaming up with promoters/DJ and producer collective The Boring Room for a Record Store Day event at Hound Dog, a hotdog vendor-cum-mini record store in the city, with Gunknown and Benny set to deliver all-vinyl DJ sets.
In celebration of International Record Store Day, which falls on April 21 this year, our photo theme this week is Record Shopping in China. Though vinyl culture never quite caught on China in quite the same way as it did in other parts of the world, it’s on the rise. This week we’ll put the spotlight on some of the best shops in China to pick up new tunes.
Beijingers are spoiled for choice when it comes to spots to pick up vinyl. Those in the market can head to YUE Space for a large and random assortment of second-hand records, Indie Music for fresh-in-plastic overseas imports, or 666 Rock Shop to scratch the metal itch. But the best record shop catering to the local scene is fRUITYSPACE, a cozy noise basement located just east of the National Art Museum of China.
Zhai Ruixin
fRUITYSPACE opened in early 2016, spun off from fRUITYSHOP, a larger and more diversified vinyl shop that founder Zhai Ruixin previously ran in a nearby hutong (he’s since passed the keys to a friend). fRUITYSPACE is a narrow, windowless basement, featuring a small stage area in the back with some amps and drums, a scattering of chairs and vintage school desks in front of that for the audience, and two fridges stuffed with beer in the back.
But today we’re most interested in the side room, which is arguably the most complete collection of vinyl, CDs, cassettes, zines, and art books being pumped out of the Chinese DIY scene today.
Over the last seven years or so, a groundswell of upstart DIY music labels has cropped up around China. fRUITYSPACE slings pretty much all of their wares, from the experimental musings of Zoomin’ Night, to the genre-agnostic splits of Nasty Wizard Recordings, to the latest pressings of vinyl labels Genjing and Groove Bunny, to the handcrafted output of self-releasing bands like 工工工.
A born-and-raised Beijinger, Zhai Ruixin is also an old hand in the city’s music scene, making his own guitar-based ambient electronica under the name ME:MO since 2002 and peppering the Beijing underground with other contributions, including event series and a web radio show. A year or so ago, Zhai launched his own vinyl label, Spacefruity, just to put a vintage psychedelic sheen on a few bands he especially prefers. If you find yourself in the store, the two 7″ EPs that Spacefruity has released so far (for Boiled Hippo and The Molds) are highly recommended.
This past Sunday, April 15th, was National Security Education and Awareness Day in China. It has become an annual day of whimsy for those of us living in Beijing.
Last year, the government encouraged local residents to be on the look out for anyone dressed as V from the film V for Vendetta, because, you know, spies often go around disguised as Guy Fawkes.
This year featured the usual hilariously bad animated shorts which would be funny if the people making these cartoons weren’t also very, very serious about crushing unwanted foreign influence in China.
Chinese police’s latest propaganda against “foreign infiltration” warns against scheming NGOs giving training to workers in “Western notions of trade unions” and workers’ rights. https://t.co/bJVu78m6Xbpic.twitter.com/HQoq3ZCLNy
After all this time, I’m at peace with the sad but inevitable reality that there will be folks, some of whom are my neighbors, others I interact with only in passing, who might view me with suspicion. I get that. It’s not good, but frankly the life of an American foreigner in Beijing is still a cushy situation. Yes, there is the occasional whack job who attacks foreigners, but institutionalized violence is non-existent and there are anti-foreign whack jobs everywhere.
But that doesn’t mean I’m cool with the way things are trending.
In 2015, a tip line was opened for Beijing residents to drop a dime on the suspicious activities of foreigners in their neighborhood. As an incentive, as if one were really needed, the government offered cash bounties ranging from 10,000RMB to 500,000RMB for quality leads.
Depressingly, but unsurprisingly, the hotline has been a huge hit. The Global Times reports that authorities have received over 5,000 tips since last April. A few of these tips even turned out to be actual foreign spies or at least people who admitted to whatever batshit fantasies their neighbors accused them of to avoid lengthy prison stays or other administrative unpleasantness.
A friend of mine – who will remain anonymous – was recounting a whimsical moment many years back when somebody (suspects include an online troll who doxed him, his shitty avaricious landlord, and/or his brother-in-law) ratted him out to the PSB as a subversive foreign agent. This led to a merry afternoon in the loving embrace of state security. He convinced them that the story was bullshit, which it was, but it serves as a reminder that we all might be just one bad encounter away from being tip #5001.
I’ve been an educator in Beijing for over a decade, mostly as a teacher of Late Imperial and Modern Chinese history. Full disclosure: I’m teaching a unit on 20th-century Chinese history this semester. This was also the first time in over ten years I felt compelled to tell my students – mostly undergraduates from US colleges and universities studying abroad in Beijing – to treat class handouts and readings with a certain degree of care and operational security.
It is, as I am constantly reminded by posters and the nightly news, a “New Era” in China and the fact that this new law extends into the classroom concerns me.
Further adding to my not-so-latent paranoia is that The Paper reported the incident above as a National Security Education success story. Interesting, in a holy fuck kind of way, is that homeboy was discussing the Cultural Revolution. That’s sensitive, but not one of the Unholy Trinity of T’s (Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen ’89) that remain sure-fire ways to piss off the ideological minders.
Perhaps it’s related in some way to this:
Qiushi article today riling against historical nihilism dedicates a paragraph to rebuffing all the ways that Mao Zedong has been unjustly smeared and ties his reputation directly to the party’s: 对毛泽东历史地位的评价，绝不只关乎他个人的名誉和声望，更关乎对党的历史和国史的评价。
There are still plenty of foreign observers of China – although not so many who still live here – who believe that China is, in its own way and on its own schedule, making progress toward a more open and inclusive society. This doesn’t mean Westernization or democratization, but a gradual shift in the direction of rational and transparent governance and a society that is culturally confident while remaining open to the world.
That’s a nice dream, and it certainly felt that way back in 2012 or maybe even 2014 but it does not feel that way right now. National Security Education Day has become a part of the calendar like Spring Festival and the day Beijing turns on the heat in November. I live here and I have to adapt, but as an educator and a writer, it’s something of which I always need to be aware.
The Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is “You yourself decide,” after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite “naturally.”
It’s 2018 and I’m trying not to look up at my chandelier.
In celebration of International Record Store Day, which falls on April 21 this year, our photo theme this week is Record Shopping in China. Though vinyl culture never quite caught on China in quite the same way as it did in other parts of the world, it’s on the rise. This week we’ll put the spotlight on some of the best shops in China to pick up new tunes.
Last year Gao Ruiting, the man who gives this Chengdu vinyl den its name, was forced to swap his store near the city’s historic Wenshu Temple for a space in the basement of a somewhat deserted shopping mall. Fortunately, Gao’s collection of records, cassette tapes, gramophones, and vintage radios had more than enough character to pull off the relocation.
And it really is his collection. The scores of Taiwanese, Korean, Cantopop, and Chinese Red Opera records found here — he focuses on accumulating “made in Asia” music — were sourced by Gao personally, originally for his own listening pleasure. He told us on a visit last year that he began selling his records when he realized it could bring other people pleasure, and though it was sometimes painful to sell off pieces of his collection he felt it was better for the world if they could be heard by more people.
Gao Ruiting Records
B52-53, Basement, Feida Plaza, No 100, Yihuan Lu North Third Section, Jinniu District, Chengdu
