It boggles the mind that our friends at Unexplained Sounds Group continue to scour the earth for the best ambient music around. From the label’s website: Liang YiYuan was born in Wuhan (China, 1977), and now living in Lijiang, Yunnan Province. He painted in his early years, and later turned Continue Reading
China
Liu Ying (刘英) – JUST (抓时)
If you have come across the landslide of reissues of stunningly sublime Japanese new age music composed by the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Haroumi “Harry” Hosono (of Yellow Magic Orchestra fame) or Midori Takada, I have a strong suspicion that JUST, just released today by Chinese composer and synthesizer/guitar player Continue Reading
Jan 疆 Hasker – Pastoral Song – 牧歌
Jan 疆 Hasker is a folk musician out of Xinjiang, China, but this is a bit of a twist, as he uses Altaic and other folk melodies for his musical base rather than Uyghur. From his Bandcamp website: “Jan made this album collecting, sorting and adapting musical elements from China Continue Reading
Zhang Si’an (Djang San 张思安) – Hutong Jazz – 胡同爵士
Jean-Sébastien Héry is a French ex-pat musician living in China. He has a very impressive body of work covering over 50 albums of music ranging from electro music to rock performed on traditional Chinese instruments like the zhonguran and pipa. His work is singular, as there doesn’t seem to be Continue Reading
Hualun (花伦) – Wuhan Wuhan (武汉武汉)
It’s a shame that Hualun, and electronic music artist from Wuhan, China, has only one track available to peruse on his latest CD. By the sound of it, the album is going to rival the slew of Japanese New Age reissues that have been coming out recently on various labels. It’s Continue Reading
miserable.noise.club – Frost Confinement
miserable.noise.club is a collective of incredibly talented musicians based in Jordan, China and the US + other collaborators in East Asia and the Middle East. The music they make is, by some miracle, a solid blend of experimental music, a paean to post-punk and lo-fi psychedelic rock. It’s hazy enough Continue Reading
LeiLuo Studio (磊落声音艺术) – An Ancient Tune of Shanha
LeiLuo Studio is a small record label based in my former home of Beijing, China. The track reviewed today is a fusion of musics from Zhejiang from the She ethnic group. The label/band’s Bandcamp site explains further below: This is a piece of new fusion single composed and arranged by Continue Reading
Southeast of Rain (东南有雨) – 42 Days (四十二天)
Sophia Shen and Lemon Guo work together as Southeast of Rain (东南有雨), an electroacoustic/field recording project based in the United States, with one living in New York and the other living in the San Francisco Bay area. The album is the result of 42 days of mixing avant-garde experimental music, Continue Reading
Li Yilei – 之 (Of)
Li Yilei is a London-based sound artist based whose roots are Chinese. Li’s latest album, Of (Chinese: 之) reminds me of some of the amazingly good Japanese new age ambient releases of the 1980s which seem to be gaining a lot of attention like Hiroshi Yoshimura and some of Haruomi Continue Reading
IZ Band – 廻声Jangqerek
The legendary Shenzhen-based Old Heaven Books released a powerful album from the Chinese-Kazakh band IZ Band. This is listed as folk music, yet the music is brutal, sounding like early 1980s post-punk or Industrial rock. Think of, maybe, a Kazakh Killing Joke or a Central Asian early-period Current 93.