Come On Feel the Noise

Amid the relentlessly changing cityscapes of Beijing and Shanghai, a new kind of music is being made. In terms of its discordance and abstraction, it compares to Dada, or the New York City and Berlin avant-garde movements of the 1970s. Yet something about it — a certain urgency and iconoclasm — could only have been spawned amid the wild experiment that is modern China itself. The country's punk and alternative-rock scenes have been gushed over by excited commentators, eager to cite them as evidence of China's changing mores. But they are staid in comparison to that created by a new breed of artists, who eschew conventional guitar-based music in favor of baffling electronica, extreme noise and found sound.

"Many experimental musicians started with rock, before slowly abandoning it for the freedom and creative space that is experimental music," says Lao Yang, the owner of Sugar Jar, a tiny record shop in Beijing that serves as the epicenter of this burgeoning avant-garde. Michael Ohlsson, a Shanghai-based music promoter, speculates that musicians are being drawn to the experimental scene because the music being produced is a purist's form and often has no lyrics. As such, it is far less likely to offend officialdom than, say, punk, which tends to be much more verbose, socially engaged and populist.

There is not even the slightest pretense that the music being made by the avant-garde is commercially viable in its present form. The work is difficult at the best of times. But perhaps that is its point. "I guess the reason noise art is so poignant in China," says Ohlsson, "is that it's dramatically anticommercial in a place where everything is very commercial."

Here are five artists to check out.

Sulumi
A musician, promoter and label boss, the tireless Sulumi is the Beijing underground's man to know

Considered a linchpin of the avant-garde, Sulumi — the working name of 26-year-old Sun Dawei — cites Yellow Magic Orchestra and Aphex Twin as his influences, and his music correspondingly moves between the genres of 8-bit (electronic music that mimics the sounds of outdated computers and gaming consoles) and IDM ("intelligent dance music"). Live shows can be geeky affairs, with Sulumi hunched over a laptop, a hooded sweatshirt obscuring his chiseled cheekbones.

He is also a promoter and the founder of Beijing electronica label Shanshui Records. "The great thing about the experimental scene in Beijing," he says, "is that it's easy for musicians to get a foot in the door." But it's not that easy to make a living — in fact, Sulumi is one of the few to pull it off. "I do commercial performances sometimes, which is where I get my income," he shrugs. "But making music is my life — I don't need any other motivation."

Cosmic Shenggy
She's winning international plaudits for music she describes as "cosmic industrial"

An ambassador for the chinese avant-garde, Cosmic Shenggy tours around Europe when not studying philosophy and sound engineering at university in London. She counts among her performance highlights a 2007 appearance at Barcelona's music and multimedia festival, Sonar, as well as a tour with German ensemble Einstürzende Neubauten, demigods of the sonic-art world.

The 26-year-old Beijing native, whose real name is Shen Jing, fashions music from the seemingly random meldings of traditional Chinese instruments, bleeps and bloops worthy of a sci-fi B movie, and an ethereal, at times unnerving, operatic voice. "I have a strong interest in the cosmos, so a lot of my music tends to describe those feelings," she says.

Shenggy also performs in an electronica duo, White, alongside vocalist Zhang Shouwang from Beijing alternative rockers Carsick Cars. It was with White that she caught the ear of Einstürzende Neubauten's singer-writer-multi-instrumentalist Blixa Bargeld. The duo plans to release a debut album later this year, under Bargeld's aegis. "Everything is coming very fast, young people are very open-minded and, in some ways, the scene lacks direction," she says. "Avant-garde music here needs time, but in a couple of years, things are going to be good."