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. Read more