Beijing Seasoned Music Insiders Hold Out Hope and Dish on a More Promising Future
Any musician looking to pen a heart-wrenching ballad would have no shortage of inspiration in Beijing these days. All one must do is take a look toward the city’s most beloved venues; Gulou’s Mao Live underwent a fits-and-starts shuttering that finally killed it in in 2017, while peer Yugong Yishan had a temporary hiatus in early 2018. Nightclub patrons have been subject to urine tests during spates of drug raids. Festivals in Beijing’s central neighborhoods have largely been deemed forbidden and suffer last-minute crackdowns, such as with Sound of the Xity this past spring.
Despite those dramatic shifts, some of the city’s most seasoned music insiders remain hopeful, albeit for different reasons. Among them: Djang San, a French alt-folk musician famed for wielding traditional Chinese instruments like the zhongruan and father to 40 albums. Having been active in Beijing’s underground music scene for nearly 20 years, he’s seen no shortage of seismic change first-hand.
The same goes for Helen Feng, charismatic frontwoman for the beloved, long-running indie pop band Nova Heart. And finally, Pei Pei Sun, renowned DJ and founder of the now decade-old ByeByeDisco music label. The trio inhabits disparate corners of Beijing’s music world, to be sure, but nevertheless share a fairly positive outlook. “There have been rumors that bars won’t be allowed within the Second Ring Road in the future. But I’ve heard that kind of talk ever since I came here,” says Djang San, adding the recent opening of a new Mao Livehouse in Wukesong signifies “the reality of the situation, which is: some places have closed, some have opened. But the musicians are still here, and they will always create new spaces for people to go to.”
This sentiment leads Feng and Djang San to fondly recall one of their earliest run-ins at 2 Kolegas, before mourning the closure of that once vibrant Liangmaqiao dive in 2014, of which Feng says: “I think we don’t have a lot of cradle venues [like 2 Kolegas] anymore. Beijing used to have so many punky places where you could be a shit musician, but if your energy was good and you had ideas, you could explore.”
While Feng believes the dearth of such novice livehouses, along with Beijing’s unwieldy cost of living, have left little room for up and comers to get a toehold, she takes heart in a whole new frontier. “I think 2018 will be the blow-up year of the bedroom producer,” Feng states, adding that rising stars who are affluent enough to afford decent equipment will secure their own audiences by “getting away from the traditional music industry because online outlets are becoming stronger.”
Pei Pei Sun agrees that that trend looks likely across the city’s myriad of genres, noting that she’s already seen it take place in the electronica scene. “For DJs and producers this has been a common practice,” she explains, describing numerous streaming platforms, before adding: “Now it’s very normal for some producers to play all over the world from just one or two successful releases, no matter if the promoters know what their live performances will be like.”
Sun also sees the demand for DJs in Beijing as being at “an all-time high,” so much so that after about a decade of building ByeByeDisco, she was finally been able to quit her day job 18 months ago and simply live off being a DJ and promoter. Sun jokes, “Ten years ago, we would say ‘If you meet 10 people in Gulou, nine of them will be in a band.’ But three years ago, we began saying: ‘If you meet 10 people in Gulou, nine of them will be DJs.’”
Feng says a wide range of musicians abroad are already following that bedroom producer model, and it’s only a matter of time before the same becomes more common in Beijing beyond the capital’s electronica scene. “The traditional music industry is dying, and bedroom producers are the future,” Feng explains. That shift is mainly because that newer, lower-key process is faster and the artists have greater control over their own output and production compared to those musicians entangled in China’s notoriously arduous development deals.
Feng describes how it can even “happen on [Chinese short video app] Douyin, when someone releases something and it goes viral. Then the requests for them to play live will drive the next level of the music industry.” That means many musicians won’t work their way up through the venue system anymore. Instead, Feng says: “You’ll work your way down from an explosion online.”
Despite all that potential, Djang San says newcomers shouldn’t let bedroom production become too dominant. He hopes that venues and the emerging online frontier can feed off of each other. After all, one of the main things that has kept the veteran folk rocker in Beijing for all these years is the openness of its music scene, compared to the more aloof musicians he’s encountered in his home country. He concludes: “The best thing about Beijing is how easy it is to meet people and play any day with anybody, thus easily creating something new.”
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Photos: Uni You
