Ourself Beside Me | Medicine Girl

April 14th, 2009 Stu

By way of a sequel to the recent White post, Ourself Beside Me are the second of the two tangents that emerged following the split of Beijing’s Hang On The Box. Whilst Shenggy drifted off to join White with Carsick Cars‘ Shou Wang, Box founder Yang Fang connected with two new collaborators, bassist and film student Xie Han and Japanese drummer, Emi Namihara.

Plundering Pink Floyd’s back catalogue (whilst aimlessly fingering CDs from Siouxsie, Can and Talking Heads on the side), Ourself Behind Me are barely over a year in the making, but were swift to drop their self-titled debut, produced by PK14’s Yang Haisong and released in January this year on the Maybe Mars label. By no means delivering a genre-bending incursion into new territory, Ourself Beside Me nonetheless construct a compelling extension to a road previously mapped by a number of significant others, and lend further weight to the notion that the Beijing water is currently laced with something deliriously special.

Ourself Beside Me – Medicine Girl | mp3

img | phototrope

Tags: beijing, china, ourself beside me, pk14

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White | Build A Link, Bai

April 11th, 2009 Stu

Experience has taught me that new, weird music is being made literally everywhere, on every square millimetre of this globe, and thus – forging ahead with such a theory – China should be no different. Yet, despite wrangling bastard algorithms out of Google’s cortex, trawls for new Chinese sounds are usually unfulfilling. Thankfully, The Wire pointed me in the direction of White this month – duo Shou Wang and Shenggy (aka Shen Jing).

Wang, founder of a local music movement dubbed ‘No Beijing’, comes off the back of the Carsick Cars project, whereas Shenggy tore herself away from the quick and dirty girlcore of Hang On The Box. Finding a common reference point in Einsturzende Neubatuen, it was perhaps not entirely unsurprising that Neubauten’s founder, Blixa Bargeld, was held in thrall at one of White’s early Beijing gigs. Clearly, he was suitably entranced to offer to produce and release their debut, due May 18th on his Open Note label.

Of the music already in circulation, culled from two years of work, their ‘cosmic industrial’ sound appears to reference Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Steve Reich as much as any number of raw explorers in no-wave territories. ‘Build A Link’ with its patient persistence and clanging metal suggests that a new link is actually physically being built while the track evolves (reconstructing the buildings that Blixa once collapsed?), whereas ‘Bai’ layers Shenggy vocals into a pop-krautrock staccato singing lesson that almost begs the kids in the kindergarten to squeal along for the ride.

To continue the hunt for new Chinese music, try these departure points: Sydney’s Tenzenmen imports and the Rock In China wiki.

White – Build A Link | mp3

White – Bai | mp3

White – Live in Beijin, 2006 (1:01)

img | marcelgermain

Tags: beijing, blixa bargeld, china, einsturzende neubauten, white

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