Outdustry | 格外音乐 » Re-TROS

Hedgehog + Re-TROS + Sterling Sound

Outdustry — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:27:27 +0000

Client: Modern Sky
Project: Hedgehog (Blue Daydreaming) + Re-TROS (Watch Out! Climate Has Changed, Fat Mum Rises)
Engineer: Tom Coyne

Outdustry clients Sterling Sound have just mastered a couple of cracking Beijing indie albums. Hedgehog went so far as to say that they “could die happy” after hearing the results:

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Diamonds In The Rough

Ed Peto — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 05:14:01 +0000

Almost exactly a year ago I posted on the hype surrounding the Chinese music scene. I boiled my feelings down to a kind of cautious optimism ie. way too early to start billing Beijing as one of the best music cities in the world (as some over-zealous mainstream western media would have you think) but a genuinely exciting place to be nonetheless.

Now, despite an incredibly tough year for music in China (due to Government clampdowns surrounding the Olympics as well as the horribly misguided soap-boxing of a certain elfin Icelander), exactly a year later and the Beijing sound has come along leaps and bounds.

I thought it was about time I follow up on that year-old post, using the medium of budget video, to bring you up to speed a little:

The Old-Guard: The older bands are still getting better (See SUBS, Re-TROS and Miserable Faith in the videos).
Strength In Depth: The younger bands have come on from being self-conscious mimic-artists into snarling, full-blooded outfits of their own (See Snapline and Carsick Cars in the videos).
Public Demand: A number of festival organisers still went ahead in seemingly impossible conditions with defiantly impressive results.

While 2007 will be the year the paper-trail leads back to in terms of the new Chinese bands really starting to find their own voices, 2008 is the year they perfected them. This video of Maybe Mars‘ artists Carsick Cars (taken last weekend) shows an increasingly confident band belting out their bona-fide indie anthem, ‘Zhong Nan Hai’. I really thought very little of them when I arrived in 2006 and it has been a pleasure having my initial assessment slowly being proven wrong:

Against all the odds both the Midi and Modern Sky Festivals went ahead in some form or other. Modern Sky resorted to a strange, half indoor, half outdoor, all-concrete affair just next to last year’s Haidian Park venue. There is no doubt that it lacked the grassy festival atmosphere but there was a pleasingly rough-around-the-edges industrial feel, made all the more so by the abysmal pollution which can be seen in the opening shots of this crudely put together festival video:

The daddy of Chinese music events, the Midi Festival, moved around it’s date and venue so many times that most news sources gave up reporting on it. For better or worse at the last minute they decided to host it back at the Midi School campus. This meant a huge scaling down and a number of sound issues. Combine this with some filthy weather and you would have thought it was a washout, but outstanding Saturday headliners and Midi School alumni Miserable Faith gaily skipped through the genres – ska, rap-metal, reggae, rock-ballads – to make my one trip up there totally worthwhile, as you can see from this next video. Their set closer, Life’s Most Perfect Day, is a hard-men-go-soft ballad that would play well anywhere. Also worth noting is the bemused crowd reaction to sugary Danish pop-mongers Summerhill: Two worlds collide with indifferent results:

So all things considered this place is shaping up nicely. If the post-Olympic landscape allows for more and more live music opportunities, then the crowds and the confidence will grow. The bands are certainly getting there. The night I filmed the Carsick Cars video also featured current buzz-band Ourselves Beside Me and The Gar, making a night of Chinese newcomers who would do themselves proud in any venue in the world.

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Don’t Begin The Hype…Yet

Ed Peto — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:24:23 +0000

There’s nothing worse than hyping things up too early. While Billboard magazine saw fit to call Beijing one of the top 5 cities to watch for music in 2007, regular gig-goers here are slightly less sanguine on the subject. This place has a long, long way to go before it can be compared to even the second tier cities in most other developed countries in terms of originality and depth of talent. As a rule, most bands are highly derivative as well as technically suspect, making the three chord mock-anger and incompetence-drowning feedback of punk music the weapons of choice. That’s not to say that there isn’t a certain buzz in the air though. While there has never been a shortage of fan favourites like Brain Failure, New Pants and the now defunct Hang On The Box, there seems to be a certain knowing assurance in the current rising stars where there was only amateurish exuberance before. Bands like Rebuilding The Rights Of Statues (Re-TROS) and Lonely China Day, both of whom toured the States recently to glowing reviews, are just…well…believable, and that is a very rare quality in this town. Here are the Re-TROS playing ‘If The Monkey Becomes (To Be) The King’ at Beijing’s 2 Kolegas club last night:

There’s no doubt as to who the hot new prospects are though. I put Hedgehog on for a show here in June after being impressed with a few D-22 gigs and they were outstanding.

They describe themselves as being ‘Noise Pop’ which actually isn’t far off the mark: The scuzzy side of guitar pop; catchy as hell without being disposable, with Cure basslines, plenty of invention and the best drummer in the world bar none. ‘Atom’, as she is called, may measure in at well under five foot and have the face of a cherub but she can’t half smack the crap out of a drum kit, in time, while singing backing vocals. In the words of so many tv talent searches, she has ‘the x-factor’. Here they are blowing away a mid-afternoon crowd at last week’s inaugural Modern Sky Festival. Atom broke a drum stick one minute into the first song and two more through the rest of the set:

International scrutiny might be wildly premature but while the rest of Beijing gears up for the Olympics in 2008 with all it’s obscene construction and flag waving, the indie rock scene is quietly developing into something pretty special. Don’t begin the hype yet as this scene is simply too fragile to deliver. With bands like these on the up though, there is an unquestionable optimism about town. For the moment, however, please take Beijing off your ‘cities to watch’ lists, talk about Sheffield for a while longer and come back in 2009.

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