A few months ago (when it was still cold), Douban put on a small show at Café XP as part of their ongoing “Beyond the Billboard” series of concerts, this one featuring two bands from Chengdu – Sound and Fury (featured here, previously) and Hiperson. We’d never had a chance to interview a band from Chengdu before, let alone two, so naturally we were all over this like… like… like a Chinese nationalist on a contested floating rock?
Hiperson has been building tremendous buzz lately. They opened for P.K.14 for the Chengdu leg of their tour, to a great reception. It doesn’t get much better than that when it comes to indie street cred.
Their music is similar to P.K.14′s in that it’s dark, post-punk with threading guitar parts and cathartic, yelping vocals, but since Hiperson’s members are younger and more raw, they sound, well, younger and more raw. Also, the singer is female, which, no matter how good of a singer Yang Haisong is, is a height he’ll never be able to reach. He also did the sound engineering, incidentally, as he was recording the performance for a live release. If you notice the sound quality’s better than usual, that’s why.
Oh, and for all you haters, I get punched in the face in this video. Yeah.
