I grew up in a small Midwest town where no one worried about the difference between “minimal electro,” “house,” and “progressive trance.” Sure, the cool kids knew Aphex Twin, but we mostly labeled anything composed of blips and beeps as “techno,” the e-tard soundtrack. Kind of like how Asia mostly gets awful, commercial hip hop like Akon and Black Eyed Peas, I was exposed to a similar breed of techno. Well, Shanghai’s a big city full of French people and others who care about more diversity in their electronic music, and I’ve come to really like some of it. DJ Sasha (maybe just Sasha), apparently “the world’s number one progressive trance” DJ will come on Saturday, so that aforementioned Europeans and wealthy Chinese can pay an absurd cover charge to [possibly] dance, drink scotch and green tea, and perhaps even toss a glow stick around.
Fuck that.
Fortunately, my friends VOID, two DJs who strive to bring quality underground electronic music to Shanghai convinced DJ Bone to fly here from Detroit and play a show the same night at The Shelter that will likely go until the sun comes up.
Here’s a taste of what’s in store. I stole these from Smart Shanghai.
DJ Bone - Formations
DJ Bone - The Move
“What the fuck is a Jungle Brother? If I wanna hear some hip hop shit, I’ll go back to San Francisco, fuck that shit. Zuo ba.” Heard outside Shelter before the show by this Shanghainese kid I mistook for an ABC. Though I originally thought “blasphemy,” twenty minutes into the set I realized his accidental wisdom. Although the Jungle Brothers helped produce classics by De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest with Prince Paul, they let me down at Shelter last night. For someone who runs a music blog in Shanghai, I amazingly didn’t catch word of this until thirty minutes before the show and I rushed to get there with hopes of a House Party Two vibe sans Kid and Play. Instead I found two old school cats rockin’ together since 1986 basically faltering through a set full of mediocre live MCing and a mixed bag of breakbeats and house music. Repeatedly yelling “make money money, make money money money!” doesn’t cut it in 2008. However, I can’t put all the blame on them for the following reasons:
1) I’m pretty sure they just got into Shanghai last night from New York. No one’s trying to rock the house after a sixteen hour transpacific flight.
2) The unbearable heat in Shanghai. Almost one-hundred degrees plus eighty percent humidity.
3) Repeated problems with the sound system.
4) A mostly stationary crowd, probably due to the heat again
However, I did see a sixty-five year old man chasing two prostitutes through the crowd and it really reminded me of the Hamburglar.
The floor at Yuyintang strikes terror in my heart. Anytime a band plays fiercely enough to move the crowd, a combination of floor-sweat, people-sweat, and beer turn the linoleum into an pain machine. Dance for more than three minutes, and one cannot escape plummeting, potentially into broken glass. So though I hopped in the pit for a moment, I mostly stayed posted up on the sideline and avoided the barrage of falling bodies and foreign fists (I find Shanghainese haven’t caught onto the moshing phenomenon yet) while I watched Qingdao’s Demerit tear through the release show for their “Bastards of The Nation” album.
Their set started out in darkness, building anticipation for five minutes with some epic, end-of-the-world slow drumming before bursting into the set in true punk form - foot-high pink mohawks, cigarettes blazing, and pounding beer continuously throughout the set, asking the audience to share more upon running out.
I don’t usually listen to bands like this, but they sound kind of like Anti-Flag with more metal influence. Still, their style oozes classic anti-establishment punk. While normally this doesn’t impress me much, this is China, and there’s a ton of nationalism here right now. Song titles like “Beijing is Not My Home and “Bye Bye My Country,” will certainly discomfort all those handholding couples rocking the matching “I Love China” t-shirts. Plus they played with the energy of an amphetamine-charged Burmese trucker.
Their set lasted over an hour and at the end they stormed through a quick blast of riffs from Metallica (pre-Black Album), some other bands I recognized but couldn’t name, and even Iron Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name.” Solid, intense show.
They’re playing again tonight, 10 pm at Logo on Xingfu Lu with The Rogue Transmission - FOR FREE!
Cut Chemist, ex-Jurassic 5 DJ, absolutely killed it at Shelter tonight. Like Viewtiful Joe blitzing through an electronics junkyard while flipping eight-hundred switches and pulling records out of a bottomless bag. Not only did he rock with four turntables, dude brought some other equipment I couldn’t even recognize. Dropping cuts from LA, Jakarta, India, Africa, and uncountable other spots, he laced a international beat fabric, all while dicing it up and recycling it on the fly and blending that stew with live samples from the crowd. Right before the set he said he’d “play some shit for about two hours that you’ve probably never heard and probably won’t ever hear again.” Fact.