Jake Newby

When it comes to China festival rumours - and let's face, there's going to be a lot of them in the coming months - it's going to be hard to beat this one. Still, another one doing the rounds on the rumour mill at the moment is that Modern Sky will finally bring their Strawberry Festival to Shanghai this year. After the harmonised Strawberry Suzhou and the allegedly 'stolen' Strawberry Zhenjiang, Modern Sky are apparently looking at doing a festival in Century Park in April. Pure speculation at this stage however.

If you were at Duck Fight Goose's release for their brilliant new album a few weeks back, you'll have noticed a bunch of cameras in Yuyintang. Some of them were from Noisey, the music channel thing from the Vice people. This here is the resulting video. More on DFG and the album here.

Want to play in one of the best-named bands in Shanghai? Here's your chance. Rank Moist Vegetation are after a drummer and the situation is pretty critical. RMV's Julien says:

'We will break up very soon if we don't find one (not that anyone actually gives a flying fuck).'

A couple of years after Midi launched their awards up in Beijing, MAO Livehouse have announced that they are to hold their very own Shanghai music awards. It'd be easy to write a snide post at this point, so very easy, but to be fair to MAO, while a lot of the best performance nominations are slanted towards bands who appeared on their stage, they've at least kept themselves off the list of 'best venue' nominees and Crystal Butterfly's name is nowhere to be seen, so it's at least a step up from the Miserable Faith Midi Awards. 

There are two shows on at Yuyintang this weekend where you'll get paid 1RMB each if you attend them. Yes, instead of forking out 40 kuai to watch a show, the promoters will pay you. If you haven't heard already, this is the brainchild of DJ BO and Dabei's Xiao Wei. The idea is to get more foreigners to see Chinese bands and more Chinese people to see foreign bands in Shanghai. 

This is good idea. The people over at Wooozy.cn, together with a few friends, have organised a big basket of local music CDs to give away to one lucky person for free. All you have to do is tell them what you think of the current Shanghai underground music scene and the basket could be yours. Not sure when the deadline is, but think it's still running - go here for more details anyway.

The other week, Pairs put on a Sunday afternoon show at Yuyintang with a bunch of student bands to try and encourage more young acts to come through in Shanghai. Here's a video with Xiao Zhong explaining a bit more. It's mostly in Chinese, but worth a click if you understand a bit of the language. To see a clip of one of the bands performing that day, click here. 

Matthew Niederhauser (who you'll know from those famous shots of Chinese bands in D-22 and other excellent photography) and Zhang Shouwang (who you'll know for being the driving force of Carsick Cars) have put together a mixtape for Domus' city series. Naturally, it mainly focuses on bands from the capital, but there are a couple of non-Beijing acts on there too, including Duck Fight Goose. In fact, the DFG song is taken from their debut album Sports, released on Friday at Yuyintang, so if you haven't heard anything from the record yet, here's your chance to check out the track 'Golden Gate'. There's loads more great stuff on there too though, so check it out here. 

Dingma play their traditional Christmas Eve show in a couple of weeks, this year it's at MAO Livehouse. The gig will double as a celebration of the band's tenth anniversary. As part of the warm up, they've released the above this video (now after the jump as I couldn't get the autoplay to stop).

A much more worthwhile video than the one I just posted. Watch this, it's great.