@tombo#18515 I love GMO! Their debut LP just got repressed on nice colourful vinyl, can't wait for my copy to arrive.
One of my favourite labels in the world right now is SVBKVLT, a cutting edge electronic label based in Shanghai. (They released GMO's second album just last year!) I'll just drop a couple of representative tracks here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQSVPe208fI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y0VKTKPjXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TiEcirAww8
I have been following some other parts of the Shanghai arts scene from a distance ever since visiting there a couple of years ago and it's been really cool to see the svbkvlt influence seep through, to the point that there is now some really cool warped jpoppy stuff coming out of there that... well, check it out!
NOTE: Turn on CC for English subs - NSFW language warning!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SdCT_PMaqo
Anyway Shanghai owns and I dearly want to go back some day.
and just incase you're worried about it being an insult to the original artists or whatnot, one of the members of the duet commented:
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/qeOYaIm.png]
@yeso was about to post this one but had to check the whole thread just in case, I love that album
Anyway here's another favorite of mine from an excellent punk band from beijing
Beijing had a very interesting underground music scene in the last 20 years and someone is making a comic book about it, it looks really good! I haven't seen any updates on it for a while though
Also this korean band kicks so much ass, i haven't listened to them very much but their performance for kexp is awesome, after two years of no concerts I would kill to see something like this live
@穴 that comic looks very cool! i know very little about the 2000s Beijing music scene, but i frequently hear people talk about it with nostalgia. one of the dumb game/anime/general-nerd-stuff podcasts i listen to is hosted by members of this band, who talk about “the old days” with some frequency:
(the title of this video is “Basement Mystery Performance”)
a song about cartoons:
and here is them more recently singing about our one true love, video games:
i‘ll have to search sometime for some long-form writings/videos/novels/comics/etc about that whole scene (or rather, conglomeration of many scenes), because i feel like there must be a lot. it’s definitely an era a lot of people remember fondly, since 2020s Beijing is apparently completely different from even the mid-2010s Beijing that I had the fortune to spend some time in, which in turn was completely different from pre-2008 Beijing.
@穴 I need to read through the rest of this thread, but thank you for the reminder to check out Drinking Boys and Girls Choir! I think I heard a track of theirs at some point and forgot to look more into them later–I'm a handful of tracks into their debut LP and this is the stuff right here
For a while I was really obsessed with the album Dengue Fever presents Electric Cambodia. Every song on there is a gem, but some personal favorites are Flowers in the Pond:
CHEEZE was brought to my attention with this song:
https://youtu.be/y1eCVwfJI1s
And I had a mild fixation on this one a year or two later from them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frs7j21R4Cc
I got linked to this Japanese-language database of Chinese rock music when I was trying to look up info on a band. It had never occurred to me that there would be such an all encompassing and comprehensive site (that unfortunately hasn‘t been updated since 2012), so I then Googled “中国摇滚数据库“ (”Chinese rock database"), hoping to find a more up-to-date Chinese language equivalent, but it turned out all of the results are people lamenting that the largest Chinese rock website is in Japanese. Here is this article from 2 years ago (9 years after the website was no longer updated) marveling over the amount of information here, pointing out areas where it’s more accurate than Baidu Encyclopedia, and describing a bunch of features I hadn't noticed myself.
Here is the list of artists and bands from Shanghai. Most of these don‘t have anything more than a picture and brief biography or list of members (presumably because they didn’t release any albums), though it's still neat to see the shear number of bands listed.
Edit: I feel like this whole thread has been a slow record of me going from zero knowledge of Chinese rock in 2020 to now having some tiny superficial understanding of it. Let's see how far I end up getting!
Glad this thread got bumped up, I didn't know it was here! My knowledge of East Asian music is limited but the ones I like, I really like. Also definitely want to learn of more!
If you want some great shoegaze, highly recommend checking out Parannoul. This video is of one of their live performances, and finishes off with Into the Endless Night, which is a 45 minute sonic odyssey.
