Xu Shaoyang makes music about the fragmented beauty of everyday life. Over the years, he has sustained a fresh spirit of amateurism by travelling and performing in many different parts of the world, occasionally as a member of the avant-pop group Maher Shalal Hash Baz. His songs are made of simple tunes, sometimes silly sometimes smart, sometimes delivered with a “backing band” of improvising musicians who he met and collected along the way. Sometimes the karaoke worked out musically, sometimes not.In spring 2019, Xu Shaoyang took a trip to East Asia. He performed two gigs in Beijing and Taipei with two small ensembles of local musicians, both taking place in a pedestrian underpass. For this journey, Xu Shaoyang prepared a songbook of 30 tunes he conjured while putting his newborn child to sleep. “When you are putting a baby to sleep, you find yourself having no time to sleep, and that’s when the familiar tunes deep in your heart flow out naturally”, as he explained to the crowd in Taipei.In both gigs, Xu Shaoyang sang these 30 songs with his microphone attached to a FM transmitter. Very different dynamics played out in the North and the South. In Beijing, Zhu Wenbo and Liu Lu smuggled their own composition game into the group jam: the two prepared 30 slips of paper with simple musical themes and instructions, randomly picking one each before a song was played, while a third musician, Ake, joined them with freeform improvisation. The Taipei backing band, consisting of Jyun-Ao Caesar and La-La Reich, improvised along simple principles provided by Xu, to explore the themes of expectations and failures.This cassette provides a documentation of a rare musical journey connecting the two Chinese capitals. Performed live, Xu Shaoyang’s lullabies turned into childish plays of bouncy melodic chaos, unrefined, unsettled, and cheerfully unconcerned. These recordings smell of the sincere joy of collective music making, the joy of connection and communication as well as miscommunication.

Noising Sheng documents Zhang Meng’s attempt to reinvent the Chinese sheng into a noise instrument. Since ancient time, the sheng has been associated with the virtue of “he” central to Confucian ethics, denoting peace, harmony, and conciliation. In the family of Chinese wind instruments, the sheng is a rare member who is able to fix to a certain tune unaffected by playing, and to play multiple notes at the same time. In an ensemble setting, it often functions on the one hand as a standard-pitch instrument for tuning, and on the other hand as a basic accompaniment instrument holding the collective sound together. The sheng was never a solo instrument in its traditional role. It is supposed to sound steady, modest, and eminently decorous. Zhang Meng inherits a devotion to the instrument from his father, a professional sheng artist. For over two decades, Zhang Meng has performed his sheng in Chinese folk orchestras, contemporary classical ensembles, and rock bands, his regular collaborators ranging from avant-garde composer/conductor Tan Dun to beloved folk rock group Wu Tiao Ren. Yet, as his relationship with the sheng deepens, he feels increasingly uneasy with the stereotypical roles assigned to the instrument. On February 3, 2024, Zhang Meng performed a solo concert at Trigger, a new underground space co-managed by Shanghai noise artist Torturing Nurse. For the concert, Zhang Meng wrote the following: “Nowadays, this implication of ‘harmony’ of the sheng inevitably strikes me as ironic… as a sound-producing medium, the sheng can sound dirty and raw, it should be able to 'curse'. Although there are quite a few modernist pieces for the sheng that explore its unconventional aspects, they are mostly written by composers who aren’t skilled at playing it. Sentiment aside, I think they lack a genuine understanding of the sheng as an instrument. This is why I try to approach the sheng with an experimentalist spirit, to ‘noise’ the sheng as much as possible. I choose not to use any effects pedals so that all moods are expressed only through the sheng’s original tone, and they are not all supposed to be ‘noisy’... At the concert, I played a track of the typically lyrical sound of the sheng on a pre-recorded cassette, and I played my sheng alongside. If you insist on asking why, take it as a struggle between the real and the hypocritical.” Noising Sheng documents the whole concert throughout. The performance was half-improvised upon a written script, showcasing Zhang Meng’s virtuoso performing techniques and sharp theatrical sensibilities as a composer. Yet it is carefully staged in a way that the protagonist is not the performer, but the instrument itself. In a crescively charged space of revolving tensions, the sheng mutters, splutters, and bawls, setting free its eerie expressive potential from under a long historical shadow. Noising Sheng is a self-conducted piece of post-irony delivered with gentle earnestness. In a time when “noise” is becoming more and more performative, still it gives it a try to take noise seriously.

In Chinese, “big ghost” is a phrase sometimes used to convey a sense of utter out-of-placeness. If you see a big ghost, you find someone who walks the corporeal world in their own preposterous ways. A big ghost is not a ghost, it does not terrorise, but neither does it belong. It occurred to Li Weisi that this speaks to the very essence of outside music making. One of these days, he started saying “I saw a big ghost playing last night” after going to a very good gig. Ghostmass, then, are a collective of such big ghosts doing music together. Started in 2021 as an improvisation unit based in Beijing, the project gathers kindred souls who share the vision for an open musical space where ghosts feel at home. To this day, the lineup has evolved into some kind of a supergroup of the capital’s music underground: Li Weisi and Li Qing are known more widely as the retro-manic electro-acoustic duo Soviet Pop, and as two thirds of the cult alt-rock act Carsick Cars; Yan Jun has been a veteran experimenter of sounds, words, and ideas for decades across various scenes; the most recent addition to the group was Yang KuKu (YKK), a professional aquascaper who plays music in a band for the first time. While the project grows from a joint passion for drone, doom, and extreme metal, each ghost attends its own duties in building and rebuilding the collective sound of Ghostmass, which stumbles across a trackless delta of harsh noise and free improvisation. In 2023, Ghostmass recorded an improvised session for Dusty Ballz on a hot summer day. The label was told that they would do something jazz. The two tracks on Side B are titled to pay homage to the legacy of late Coltrane. Side A presents an array of ghostly references from an everyday Chinese context: a martial arts fiction masterwork of the Taiwanese “ghost school”, an ancient Taoist master heralding from the ghost valley, a French DIY-music wizard who wanders in Beijing hutongs calling himself “ghost uncle”, and the famous ghost caverns in the Wuyi Mountains where smoky dark oolong tea grows – these references have warrantably turned into ghosts themselves, paling under translation. In a time when being human gives way to humanism, perhaps being ghost promises a more real living reality. Perhaps hell is what we live in right now - who the hell knows - perhaps this is what jazz music should be.

In mid-December 2021, Mamer flew from Ürümqi to Shenzhen to play a few booked gigs. Afterwards, he decided to stay on for a marathon music residency at the Old Heaven bookstore. From Dec 13 to 27, Mamer performed 14 concerts in 15 days, unreservedly presenting his vast creative world to a small but dedicated audience, who followed him throughout this journey. These performances were announced on each day with a theme decided often last minute, free admission offered. They were intended to be intimate and spontaneous, or in Mamer’s own word, “rehearsals”. Most of these “rehearsals” were sonically challenging, to say the very least. Years had passed since Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records released the album Eagle, which Mamer is still best known for in the Western world. Yet, among the listeners who followed him through the most recent decade, even the most nostalgic ones had come to the realisation that Mamer had left his “world music” identity long behind. The performances at Old Heaven showcased Mamer’s dialogues with a wild range of eccentric musical traditions, including industrial rock, heavy psychedelia, sample-based electronics, drone, and harsh noise. The Kazakh folk tradition, which predominantly defined the early works of Mamer and his band Iz, was most of the time barely discernible. On the fifth night, however, the audience found Mamer sitting alone with a nylon string guitar, delivering what would become one of his quietest public performances of the past decade. The night started gently with a reinterpretation of “Love”, a 90s ballad by Kazakhstani rock group Roksonaki, and it went on placidly, releasing into the air melodies from both folk songs and pieces originally composed for traditional Kazakh instruments. The setlist spans across centuries. Among others, it includes a dombra kui written by Ashim Dungshiuly, early 20th century master from Ili, and an ancient piece for sıbızğı (a sideblown flute) believed to be composed by Korkut Ata, the great hero in Turkic mythology. For Mamer, this is a songbook of memories. These tunes were once heard repeatedly on the radio during his youthful days in Xinjiang, and they all came back to him on this quiet winter night. The nylon guitar calmly inhaled in his hands, breathing out cold, whirling melodic currents, trailing around and round through personal and collective histories. In Kazakh language, “awlaⱪ” is a root word that denotes the state of being “off”, signifying an existence from afar and away. The word “awlaⱪta”, which Mamer uses to title one of his original compositions performed that night, literally means “outside” or “elsewhere”. In a more subtle sense, “awlaⱪta” implies a condition of sustained liminality, a voluntary exile of being a stranger in a strange land. This condition is one that has to do with the will to departure, the longing for a different place, and an utter resistance to the ease of belonging. For Mamer, it serves duly as an artist statement, but that night, the solitary drifter re-encountered home. Still Mamer refused to go gentle into the good night. After the last song, he grabbed an unused guitar pickup from the ground, and pressed it to his throat. With intense pitch shifting on the effect pedals, he summoned a long, ghostly howl, piercing through the tranquillity in the atmosphere. Amid resounding echoes, Mamer walked off the stage, on towards the next night.

By the time of winter 2022, musicians around the globe had stopped making lockdown albums. Telling stories of the pandemic had been out of fashion in some parts of the world, and no longer emotionally bearable in others. This was the time when Sheng Jie recorded Review in Beijing, as accumulated feelings of anxiety, frustration, and loss rose to the peak across China. A deeply personal project from start to finish, Review bears the heavy weight of these collective sentiments in its genesis, and voices them out in a sincere, unsettling way. A classically trained multi-instrumentalist and veteran in Beijing’s underground, Sheng Jie is known for making beautiful noises. Over the years, she has developed a distinctive aesthetic which combines elegantly balanced compositions with relentless walls of string drones, marking her recorded works with a signature sound blending etherealness, intensity and warmth. Review makes a radical departure, taking instead a close-up on the raw texture of the everyday in the time of crisis and social control. Using her mobile phone, Sheng Jie recorded bits and pieces of life in her estranged hometown: the mechanical whirring of an elevator at the supermarket, the sound of the night crowding into her room from an open window, voice loops from a loudspeaker instructing citizens to scan the QR code for nucleic acid test. In between, she played guitar, cello, and an analogue synthesiser. The instrumentations are casual and sparse, they convey a sense of stone-cold apathy, a state of emotional exhaustion in which one loses the ability to be either hopeful or hopeless. For Sheng Jie, this was “the ultimate emotional response” to Beijing’s new normal. Shortly after the album was made, three years of zero-COVID campaign in China came to an abrupt end. History hastily moves on. Review, in this sense, speaks of memories and feelings that are too soon left behind, it makes a stand to look back. Against a bitterly divided world, it also gestures towards resonance and reconnection. The album was first released with no paratext on March 3, 2023, we thank all our blind listeners for their precious curiosity.

Hugjiltu plays the guitar with five strings. Not used to the standard chord-forms of Western guitar, he invented his own system of tuning, combining the three-string Mongolian lute and the two-string horsehead fiddle, both of which he started playing as a child. These five strings epitomise his relationship with the music from within the Mongolian ethnic tradition and with the music beyond, a state of artistic composure few in his generation have achieved. Hailing from a musical family in Jarud Banner, Inner Mongolia, Hugjiltu came to be known as one of China’s most prolific world music veterans in the first fifteen years of his career. He toured extensively around the globe, first as a member of Hanggai and then as a leader of his own group, Ajinai. This success came with a growing bitterness towards the specific type of “Mongolian sound” his bands are habituated to playing, a sound constrained by the imagination of otherness from within the centre. Tired of performing an idealised, distant “world”, Hugjiltu opted to use his musical mother-tone to speak to the real world he lives in. After Ajinai disbanded, he shifted to a predominantly solo improvisational approach, questioning what it means to be of Mongolian descendant here and now. Cycle was recorded in early 2020, all tracks are fully improvised except for “Reservoir”, which is based on a traditional Kazakh melody. Besides his specially tuned guitars, Hugjiltu employs a selection of traditional instruments: the Tsuur (Mongolian end-blown flute), the Morin Khuur (horsehead fiddle), and Khoomei (throat singing), backgrounding them with airy synth effects and field recordings. The album’s scene is set in a day in life, navigating through a series of urban and suburban spaces, which also guide the listener along Hugjiltu’s regular commute. The journey starts from Mount Elephant, a name playfully given by inhabitants of the “painters village” in the suburb of north Beiing, where Hugjiltu also lives, and heads towards the heart of the city, crossing the Deshengmen tower gate on the vibrant 2nd Ring Road; and yet the album does not give only a one-way ticket. The two sides of the tape are designed to play recurrently as the traveller shifts between the metropolis and the mountainside, and between a meditative subject who gazes internally and an unreserved spirit who reaches out to the wide social world. This is the everyday story of an expatriate and wanderer, but also a person who finds peace in the rotating cycle that is life. For but one moment in time, the old tradition lays its burden down and breathes calmly. Listen.

Ya Cha Ban is a hill to the north of Lijia Village, a village in South China, where Li Jianhong grew up. On one side of the hill lies a woodland graveyard where the village ancestors are buried, the other hillside, facing the sun, used to be local kids’ secret playground, it also buries Li Jianghong’s own sweet childhood memories. Li Jianhong left the village in 1994 for Hangzhou, the capital city of the province, he would move on to establish a career as a versatile guitarist and free improviser, before returning to Ya Cha Ban in 2010, by which time the hill had long been abandoned by the village kids. And so was the village itself, withering away in China’s decades-long project of radical urbanisation. At Ya Cha Ban, Li Jianhong and Wei Wei, who performs improvised sounds and processed signals under the moniker VAVABOND, made their first recording as Mind Fiber. Previously unreleased, the pieces in this cassette document a charming moment in the early phase of the duo’s still ongoing exploration of what they call “environment improvisation”. Wei Wei was raised in a Northern Chinese city. Untuned to her partner’s bittersweet homecoming, she was a complete outlander to Ya Cha Ban. Feeling initially at sea, Wei Wei soon opened up her senses to the woods, which in return embraced her with a vibrating calmness. Sitting on the grass, the duo improvised with Ya Cha Ban’s spontaneous soundscape: the whistling of mountain wind, the hiss of grass and bamboo leaves, the chirps of frogs, birds, and insects, and the distant murmur of suburban traffic. A symphony of tiny, subtle resonances entangled with whirling emotions and fragments of scattered memories. They played from noon until daylight faded. In her recording notes, Wei Wei writes to the listeners: “the coexistence of every individual and her environment, her fellow humans, and her own emotions creates and constitutes her own world, her own memories, and her own lived experience. And you will create and harvest your own through this record.” We do sincerely hope so.

Simultaneously casual and sincere, Deng Boyu’s latest output on cassette, Tractor Academy, is both a tongue-in-cheek teaser and a wildly romantic postscript to his upcoming solo LP. The eight songs here unveil the instinctual id beneath the electronic alter ego of Deng Boyu, known primarily as the ever-present drummer in China’s young and vibrant scene of free jazz and improvisation. This is one of a kind Northern Chinese IDM lit up by a whimsical touch of nostalgia. The sound textures – created by a toolkit comprised of a vibrator, a gong, and various metal objects – are distinctively dumb and dusty; the compositions are freewheeling in form, but heavily loaded with noise and personal history. It is a misfunctioning time capsule, what you'll get travelling back to a Disco dancehall of early ‘90s Inner Mongolia – where Deng Boyu first felt the thrill of the groove in his troubled adolescence – and doing a lavish Autechre dakou DJ set in it. So please sit back and relax, now that IDM has long lost its association with human intelligence, let’s hear Deng Boyu tell that old joke again. *You will find the first half of “Transmission Pt. 2” (Track 1) in Deng Boyu’s upcoming LP, Chimney Complex, to be released by Chinese label Badhead later this year. --- Dusty Ballz is a London-based label that releases Chinese underground music on cassette tapes. The term originates in an old Soviet joke, which somehow still speaks to the situation today. --- All music by Deng Boyu Woodcut by Tiemei Calligraphy by Zhao Sancai

There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. (H. P. Lovecraft) September 2019, during a residency exchange programme curated by the Lijiang Studio, Chunyang Yao set foot in Shiraoi, a town in Hokkaido historically populated by Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu. A peculiar sense of inversion struck her. Being a Naxi artist emerging from the southwestern city of Lijiang, Yao had become accustomed to performing under a certain exotic gaze in China. Yet, dipping into the arcane, almost bygone lifeworld of the Ainu, for the first time she found herself to be the curious spectator upon another ethnic group, in whom she saw, with profound ambivalence, the shadow of her own people. This moment of entanglement reverberates on, slowly translating into a delicate resonance between two ethnic minority traditions, both struggling for the right to remembrance on the margins of modernity. If memory is audible, does forgetting make a sound? This question drove the making of Post-Oblivion. Unlike what the title suggests, listening to Post-Oblivion demands emotion. Side A of the cassette contains a composition in five movements, which is based on field recordings collected during Yao’s stay in Hokkaido; Side B presents a long-form improvisation of voice, noise samples, and synthesisers. The track gets its title “AyuDabuya” from the babbling of Yao’s daughter after she heard the recording. Respectively, the two sides showcase Yao’s unique artistic sensibility as a composer and as a vocal/electronics improviser. Together they also present an intricate landscape of sound, cut across by her multiple, overlapping identities: as a contemporary artist, a mother, a Naxi descendent, and a traveller in a foreign land. The Ainu and the Naxi share a pantheistic vision of nature, through which religion and culture are embedded in their environmental surroundings. In the Naxi Dongba script, to say “without a sound” takes four glyphs: a lead stone, a pair of horns, a waning moon, and quark. Likewise, instead of recording directly with the Ainu community, Yao gathered musical cues from Hokkaido’s natural soundscape — onshore breezes, a raging geyser, cries of the seagulls, and crows hovering above the seaside town of Tomakomai. She stitched them with a fragmented chant of the ancient Naxi proverb: “All food and clothing arise from the soil”, which weaves in and out just like her own wandering presence on the island. Post-Oblivion, as such, sings about loss but also perpetuity. Through nature’s own rhythm and harmony, it channels a roaring silence confronting colonial pasts and the politics of cultural memories.

"A classically trained Chinese bamboo flutist, Lao Dan picked up the saxophone again around 2013 as he went wildly astray in the world of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation. While demonstrating an ever-growing ability to deliver explosive force and intensity in his free playing, Lao Dan keeps a brutal honesty in his approach to the instrument. He plays ‘jazz’ as what it is, not what it’s supposed to be. Navigating constantly between the East and the West, Lao Dan embraces a unique aesthetics which fuses all his past influences into a voice of glorious mayhem and sheer zaniness.Recorded in June 2019, this is a solo set in which two instruments – tenor saxophone and Zheng, also known as the Chinese zither – were played successively and simultaneously by hands and feet. The recording was made in one go with no overdub or effect added. Lao Dan never learned to play the Zheng properly before this very first attempt. As a result, he didn’t struggle at all to play it in an awkward way, while with the saxophone he did, as always, try very hard to do that.The cover art, created by Shenzhen-based artist Tiemei, is a portrait of Shennong, the Deity of medicine and agriculture in ancient Chinese mythology. The three tracks in Chinese Medicine are named after three species of herb each believed to have unique medicinal properties. It is our responsibility to remind you to take them with extra caution. In Chinese medicine, after all, every drug is a thirty-percent poison."