Miao Wong on Accupuncture and PENG

Miao Wong had been picking at her tuna salad for an hour without making any visible progress. “I don’t eat,” she said. “I don’t like food.” She’s a techno-head. She’s a fist-pumping, hip-swaying, head-tossing marathoner on the dance floor. “I should eat more,” she admitted, stabbing some greens with her fork and mixing them around in the salad bowl. “This is my only meal of the day.” With Miao Wong, I suspect that the stem cells that should have developed into her appetite took a wrong turn and ended up in the parietal musical appreciation lobe. She digs tech-house. She’s an electronica connoisseur. When she dances, her hands are balled so tight that her nails, locked into soft palms, draw blood.

By day she does marketing for a company that creates cartoony avatars for MSN’s instant messaging service. By night she parties. She manages Acupuncture Records, a crew of eight Chinese DJs locked in the underground dance scene. Her DJs play all over town, and their names should be familiar even to folks who only casually follow the good dance parties: Weng Weng, Gao Hu, Huang Weiwei, Pancake Lee, Xiao Linfeng, Elvis T, Terry Tu and Xiao Feng.

Miao Wong joined the scene as a groupie in 2003 when she left her native Changchun for the Renmin University. Back then, the local talent was huddled in the second floor of Tango, the last regular outpost of underground techno. Out of this tight-knit crew, DJ Jackson Lee, called the first DJ in China, formed PENG with Pancake Lee. The first PENG parties were at Inner Affair. The crowd was small. The scene was minuscule. The owners didn’t care if the music was too dark or too deep or too weird. PENG threw studio parties in unknown venues in the outer limits of the fifth ring road, too. Xiao Linfeng and Huang Weiwei slid under the PENG label, and Miao Wong became the manager, finding and promoting gigs. It was tough. “DJs in China are under harsh conditions,” she told me. “Music is not a big factor in the nightlife scene. No one really cares.” Beijingers go to discos to be seen, or to sit in private rooms and sing pop songs. Club managers are infamous for interrupting sets with instructions and advice (“more hip hop”). This rankles serious DJs, and the PENG DJs were really serious. “They care too much,” said Miao Wong.

Last month’s PENG first anniversary party was a bumping affair. Around that time, the DJs began rethinking their approach. Other Beijing techno jockeys wanted to band together, but they didn’t feel any ownership over PENG. “It was just a brand thing,” said Miao Wong. So last week they unveiled a new brand: Acupuncture Records.

Wen zhun hen (稳准狠) describes acupunture methods: steady, accurate, and hard. It’s also a fair description of the minimal-tech style that characterizes the Acupuncture crew. And accupuncture is a treatment, just as electro-hippies insist that music can cure the world of problems. “It took a long time for all these top local techno DJs to come together,” wrote Miao Wong in the press release introducing Acupuncture. “Before this we were basically sharing a dark underground corner of the China electronic experiment.”

Breaking dance music down to its basic elements – sound, sweat, and rhythm – the scene is as Beijing as rock-and-roll. It’s gritty. It’s real. It’s raw. Elsewhere in China, hip-hop and trance dominate. Even in Beijing, international DJs float in, spin a night at swanky clubs, and vanish without a trace. The wonder of Acupuncture is the establishment of a new scene from the ground up, with local artists that, in the words of Miao Wong, “don’t do shitty remixes; they make their own music.” This is a homegrown phenomenon and worth watching.

Acupuncture spins at China Doll every Thursday for Freak DJ night. French DJ Jeff K who recently spun at Vics with Llorca and Egyptian Lover stopped by China Doll when he was in town last week. He didn’t have much to say about Vics (“It’s nice”), but he gushed over the Freak DJ event. Acupuncture sets stretch into the morning, programmed out in hours, not minutes or tracks. So when Miao Wong left her salad half-uneaten, she was on the way to China Doll to dance the night away. Then she was going to work. “I don’t sleep,” she said. “I don’t eat. Sometimes I’m so tired. But when I hear the music, I just plug in.”

I stopped by China Doll a few hours later, just to see if she was joking. She wasn’t. She was in the crowd on the dance floor, exuberant and plugged in and jamming like it was the end of the earth, grooving on the underground.