A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

The won­der­ful thing about a show at Mako Live­house is that it ends in enough time to get to the venues that start late and end later — namely, Dos Kole­gas. By the time we’d snatched up a cab and got­ten to Liang­maqiao, we caught one song of Candy Monster’s set and were able to get some beers before the dou­ble head­lin­ers took the stage. Thank you, Dos Kolegas.

But let’s get right to it. Nova Heart is the name of the ever-prolific Helen Feng’s newest project. If you don’t already know her name, Helen Feng helped cre­ate Pet Con­spir­acy, and is cur­rently also involved in Free The Birds, who still haven’t decided if they’re called Ziyo or not. Some­where between her involve­ment in artist pro­mo­tions com­pany Fake Music Media, host­ing a Douban-hosted pod­cast based on her pop­u­lar radio show, and a myr­iad other respon­si­bil­i­ties, Nova Heart has burst onto the indie-electro scene with instant buzz. Being a fan of Free the Birds/Ziyo, I was excited to see Nova Heart and how it might be dif­fer­ent. Unfor­tu­nately, I couldn’t really tell the dif­fer­ence. It’s clear that Helen is the dri­ving force behind both groups, and there isn’t much of a clear dif­fer­ence in stance between the two. Nova Heart sounded to me like a more ener­getic Joy Divi­sion with female vocals, which was enter­tain­ing enough to get the crowd into it, but I would have liked to see some sort of dif­fer­ence — styl­is­tic or oth­er­wise — between this and FTB.

Finally, some time after mid­night, and after a deli­cious bowl of Ningxia noo­dles (worth every fen of the 20RMB they cost), Re-TROS took to the stage. I have doc­u­mented here my luke­warm feel­ings about Re-TROS, but to be fair I have only ever seen them at music fes­ti­vals. I say this in defence of the fact that I really enjoyed their set at Dos Kole­gas. I think the more inti­mate nature of the stage and venue made for a great per­for­mance — and one I could actu­ally see and feel involved with. This doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy their album, because I still find their music a lit­tle too monot­o­nous for con­stant lis­ten­ing, but I did enjoy them and I’ll be much more excited to see them if they keep play­ing smaller venues.