GENRE:
Minimalist indie rock from China
MORE ABOUT:
When it comes to exported music from China most think: 1) traditional World Music 2) Horrifying girl/boy pop groups sucking lollipops and wearing a blinding blend of neon 3) Karaoke bars. Yes: Lonely China Day is from Beijing, China. No: They don’t play traditional Chinese music. They don’t suck lollipops. They never go to Karaoke bars… ever. As hard as it is to believe, there is a small yet burgeoning indie rock scene in China and Lonely China Day is in the top tier. The band’s 2007 debut long-player Sorrow is a heady blend of laptop bells and whistles, a staggering collision of minimalist guitar beauty and thunderous rock hooks with a soothing voice cooing Mandarin poetry – all mixed with traditional Chinese musical influences. In other words: it is unlike anything coming out of China. The result is a CD often compared to The Album Leaf, Mogwai and Sigur Ros.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY:
- “Sorrow” (2007)
PRESS REVIEWS:
“There was a profound serenity within the music of Lonely China Day. The lyrics, in Chinese, were ancient poems, and at the core of the songs were mantra-like guitar phrases: three or four notes that often repeated throughout a song, centering it while hinting at a meld of Chinese modes and Western harmonies. The drummer sometimes made his cymbals whoosh and crest like the sound of a Chinese gong. But this wasn’t any kind of traditionalist music. It was technologically current, with a laptop adding twitchy techno beats to the live band, and it was rock, as any fan of Sigur Ros would accept it, with ardent, straightforward melodies and inexorable crescendoes. The set rocked harder and moved towards the West as it went along, even unleashing some wah-wah guitar. Yet unlike a lot of international rock that’s all to eager to jettison the local in favor of the imported, Lonely China Day stayed grounded in something far older than the electric guitar” (New York Times)
“Halfway around the globe, a new generation of music is beginning to find its legs and as it does, those legs are bringing it all the way to North America. Lonely China Day will make its first Canadian appearance this month during Canadian Music Week. The music of modern China is as unique as the People’s Republic itself and perhaps an equally difficult nut to crack. The music is abstract and conspicuously absent of familiar western hooks, but as western influence devours the globe, China remains remarkably immune. The most notable element of western influence is in the instruments themselves: guitars, drums, electronic programming.” (Scene and Heard)
“Laptop glitches, icy arpeggios, minimalistic rhythm patterns, and precious melody through a Chinese lens.” (Transformonline)
LINKS:
www.lonelychinaday.com
www.myspace.com/lonelychinaday
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