A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

Frozen is a 1997 film about a young, depressed per­for­mance artist who decides to com­mit sui­cide dur­ing one of his per­for­mances deal­ing with death — an “ice bur­ial” dur­ing which he sat on blocks of ice over the course of a day. It was shot in 1994 and had to be smug­gled out of the coun­try, never to be shown in China. Until some­one got it on a hard drive and decided to play it on a pro­jec­tor at Dos Kolegas.

This isn’t a movie blog, so I won’t go into the movie much. I’m sure you can imag­ine what it was like. The actor in the movie, Jia Hong­sheng, was heav­ily into drugs at the time of film­ing, and was taken to a men­tal insti­tu­tion in 1996. In 2001, a movie was made about his life and strug­gles with drugs, and the sound­track heav­ily fea­tured some of the god­fa­thers of Chi­nese rock and roll — Cui Jian, Tang Dynasty, Dou Wei. Ear­lier this year, he com­mit­ted suicide.

While I didn’t know any of this back­story at the time I went to the gig, it was clear that it was a memo­r­ial show. I’m still not sure of the cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of Jia Hong­sheng and the story of his life — what sort of impact it has on today’s youth, or had on his con­tem­po­raries — but it’s clear that this movie and he was impor­tant to the orga­niz­ers of this event.

After the movie (which had our teeth chat­ter­ing, hav­ing to watch some­one sit on blocks of ice), and a slideshow of pho­tographs of Jia Hong­sheng, the bands started and the mood changed entirely. The first act, Two-Faced Coun­try, were quite a moody band. I enjoyed their set, which seemed mostly instru­men­tal at times, and the deep, rich sound kept a bit of the somber mood sur­round­ing the event. They don’t have a large web pres­ence, but check out the video below to get a bet­ter idea of their sound.

The next band up was Sur­prise. They were a com­plete depar­ture from Two-Faced Coun­try: while TFC was a quiet, reflec­tive sort of group who were still a lit­tle afraid of the audi­ence (they often played to each other more than us), Sur­prise faced for­ward and chat­ted at length about their songs, them­selves, and any­thing else that hap­pened to come across their alcohol-fueled minds. Unfor­tu­nately, they came off as brash and over­con­fi­dent, which made their brand of emo pop-punk arro­gant and unbe­liev­able. Thank­fully, their emo pop-punk was being played acousti­cally, which cut a lot of the annoy­ance fac­tor out of that par­tic­u­lar genre for me. Still, their drunken ram­blings were fun to lis­ten to.

Then, the main act was up. I’ve seen the name Today is Autumn (First Day of Autumn? I’ve never been sure how to trans­late 今日立秋 prop­erly) float­ing around the scene for a long time, but I’d never seen them live or both­ered seek­ing out their music. More fool me, because they were amaz­ing. Head over to their Douban to lis­ten to their songs. Their music is upbeat and incred­i­ble dance­able (or at least, bounce-around-able, and def­i­nitely mosh-worthy, even if there were only a few peo­ple shov­ing each other around), and they def­i­nitely have a great per­for­ma­tive side to them. They came onto stage dressed in doctor’s coats, with red and white stick­ers with their band name pasted on as name tags. I’m not entirely sure why, but look­ing at pho­tos it seems to be their thing. They were loads of fun and I am def­i­nitely going to try to see them again soon.

Check out a video of them per­form­ing their most singable song, 张杨的新生活 (Zhang Yang’s New Life; Zhang Yang is their drummer’s name), at Mod­ern Sky Fes­ti­val 2010: