Hello Beijing Cream readers. My name is Josh and I work at this other website called Smart Beijing, where I write tl;dr music articles on a weekly basis. The Tao is outsourcing these Friday Musical Outros to my comrade Morgan, but he’s busy preparing for his simultaneous DJ sets at Dada and Temple tomorrow night, so he passed the buck to me.
Today’s video is kind of a cheat. A teaser, you might say. Tomorrow night at Temple, live funktronic act Not There is re-emerging after seven months of dormancy. Not ones to miss out on an opportunity to employ guerrilla marketing tactics, they released this lil’ 25-second clip to promote the show. It’s soundtracked by some kind of reversed ambient drone beat, almost 100% certainly created by Not There’s resident electronics engineer, Edoardo Gagliardi. Beijing can really burn one out, especially if you give a shit about music and stuff. So it’s nice to see Not There rising from the malaise like a phoenix from the ashes (though in this video the ashes are pink carnations and the phoenix is Nick Richards).
Not There bassist Jonathan Heeter played an improv night I booked a few weeks ago and he said that Not There will pretty much only play at Temple and Hot Cat for the foreseeable future. I get this. With so many new venues springing up in Beijing year after year it’s increasingly hard to cut through the noise, but Temple really fills a niche. For spectators that’s the “bar with cheap booze, free gigs, and ridiculous burgers” niche. For musicians it’s the “bar that can pay decently for shows and get some real, flesh and blood humans in there to actually watch the fucking show” niche.
So, yeah: Not There, Temple Bar, tomorrow night (Saturday, May 4). Afterwards check out a set from “DJ Morgan.” Not to be confused with DJ Compact Dicks, who is playing the same night, next door at Dada. See what we did there? Conflict of interest averted!
Josh is the founder of Pangbianr and writes at Smart Beijing. Shout out at him at music@smartbeijing.com.
Thanks for the write-up Josh. Improv night at School was super cool. We definitely enjoy playing at Temple and Hot Cat but we will still be playing shows at different venues all over Beijing. I was using Temple and Hot Cat as an example of places where we can work with the bar to try and create the best possible experience for both the crowd and the band. Our goal is to create a great experience wherever we play. See ya tonight.