New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ OpenNote) - WHITE is the self-titled debut album from one of the most talked about bands to emerge from the Beijing underground in recent years. Produced by Blixa Bargeld at Einst?^(o)rzende Neubauten studios in Berlin, White is the starting point for a more widespread recognition of new music from China, and sets the benchmark for all others who follow. White is being released on the OpenNote label, distributed in the U.S. by Ryko. I'm attaching an MP3 of "Build A Link" which I'm hoping you'll post for free download and/or track review.
Together, Shenggy (KORG MS-20, drums, percussion, sampler, vocals) and Shou Wang (guitar, organ, pedals, dome theremin, vocals) have conjured a sound - part electronic shimmer, part cosmic industrialism - that arrives like a nocturnal transmission, complete with advertisements and radio static, through a neon rain.
The heartbeat of the band, beneath Shou Wang's delicately bowed loops and slashing atonal freak-outs, is Shenggy's KORG MS-20, generating everything from a seismic, murky techno pulse to Throbbing Gristle-esque waves of distortion, making for an album of contour and contrast, one moment gripped by suffocating paranoia, the next carefree and gloriously ebullient: witness the giddying theremin assault that opens that album, the warm washes of kosmiche organ and, crucially, Shenggy's rich, bright vocals that unify and personalise these trips into the Asian ether. This is the sound of Beijing in 2009 - hypermodern, Chinese yet defiantly aware of the world beyond, operating within a twilight space that finds its rhythms in the silent accumulations of CCTV cameras and the jangle of omnipresent consumerism.
