For those of you who have been watching, The Sound Stage has been working in a "series within a series" every other episode or so since last November, featuring bands from our trip to Wuhan. AV Okubo is the last of those bands.
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?
Continuing our ongoing series in Wuhan is The One, a classic rock 'n' roll band following the likes of Chuck Berry and early Elvis Presley. They are also employees at the legendary VOX Livehouse, the only large-scale venue in a city with more than a million students.
About a month ago Douban, as part of its ongoing "Beyond the Billboard" event series, invited two bands from Chengdu to perform at Café XP in Beijing - Sound and Fury and Hiperson. I got to interview both bands for the show before the concert. The band featured here is the former, which plays shoegaze, a style that seems to have become very prominent with Chinese indie types late last year.
I've been interested in Chinese rap for a long time, not only because rap's traditional focus on social problems and dirty lyrics seem to clash with Chinese political constraints, but linguistically the Chinese language has so many homonyms and rhymes one would think rapping would have endless variety. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a rapper guest on The Sound Stage... until now.
A high-tech research lab is probably the last place you think you'd find a rock 'n' roll genius, but Fuzzy Mood is all the proof you need. Distilling mathematical theories into musical layman's terms, this band will definitely put you into a better mood - with science!
If music is an international language, French musician Jean Sebastien proves that Mandarin Chinese is becoming one, also. Although he plays in several bands, the focus of this episode is his "Djang San" persona, a folk artist playing traditional Chinese instruments, singing in the Chinese language, and mixing Western experimental and jazz influences into ancient melodies. See what Chinese music is, and can become, in the eyes of a talented outsider.
