Noise and midweek madness

This blog is not exactly an academic exercise or full representation of the scene here in Shanghai. It revolves a little around the fact that I live near certain venues and my own taste. I'm going to try to right that a bit this week. To be fair, when bands are gigging in Shanghai, they usualy play all the venues and I rarely miss out on anyone by sticking with the West Side.

So, first I want to talk about the noise scene. Shanghai has a whole bunch of acts who do experimental and noise music. What's more, they are very good at organising and promoting themselves. You could start on their net trail with the NoiShanghai home page - here. The most famous noise act in Shanghai is Torturing Nurse and you can listen to their stuff at their Myspace page. It's a diverse scene: Nurse describe themselves as Harsh Noise while you also have acts like Xu Cheng (sound art) and also Ben Hogue who moonlights from his job as a sound engineer for Ubisoft.

I'm busy this week with two mid-week shows at Yuyintang. And I just want to say that I'm going purely for my blog. Tuesday is Wang Wen who describe themselves as post-rock. I'm just listening to their page now and it seems they do 7 minute long ambient instrumentals. Also, a surprise gig just popped up in the listings tonight for Wednesday. The night is called Hotter than Teppenyaki and the only info is that it's an impromptu metal night put on by ex-pats. Any band that plays a gig with original material is part of the scene - but I won't write up utter piss takes or cover bands. Also, the first show of the weekend at YYT is called "Watch, Bag, DVD" - a famous joke among ex-pats (it's what you hear when you are foreign looking and enter a market). So I think I'm off to Window's Underground to watch Hard Queen instead.