What was the first Chinese metal band?
Photo by Deng Zhang
Though outside music was mostly banned from the People’s Republic of China until the 1980s, metal gained an early foothold among rock musicians and fans in the country. Genre forerunners like the glam-leaning Black Panther, formed in 1987, and epically named Tang Dynasty were packing stadiums and moving units in the early years of the genre’s appearance in the country.
As other Western genres like punk and hip-hop made their way to China over the next few decades, metal’s following began to wane; the genre’s fans are now mostly found in scattered pockets of the country. Fortunately, those fans are super-served by a legion of bands operating in myriad subgenres: black metal (Hellward, Deep Mountains, Frozen Moon, Ritual Day, Holyarrow, Evocation, Martyrdom), death metal (R.N.V., Holokastrial, ULULATE), thrash (Ancestor, Tumourboy, Punisher, The Metaphor), stoner metal (Never Before), metalcore/crossover (Return the Truth, Unregenerate Blood, Demerit), post-metal (Bliss-Illusion), and many others.
Though the tribe of Chinese metal fans may be small and fragmented, it’s backstopped by a diehard DIY network. Dedicated metal venues like Beijing’s 13 Club and Nanchang’s Black Iron provide the stages, indie publications like Painkiller spill the ink, stores like 666 Rock Shop sell the goods, and labor-of-love labels like Dying Art, Pest, Stress Hormones, and WV Sorcerer do their part to give Chinese metal bands a proper platform.
One of Chinese metal’s most ardent and prolific protagonists is Zhang Deng, who founded Pest Productions in 2006 in Nanchang, and has since issued more than 200 releases on the label. “I’m not modest,” Zhang says with a sense of self-awareness: “Pest is decisive in the promotion of Chinese metal—most Western fans’ perceptions of China’s extreme metal come from Pest.” The sheer scale of the label’s back catalog represents but one line of attack; Pest was also one of the first indie labels from China to launch a bilingual website, an online store supporting PayPal (which is barely used in China), and a regularly updated page on Facebook (inaccessible in China without a VPN).
Shen Ruotan, founder of the WV Sorcerer label, got into metal while in grade school in China. He now lives in France, and uses his bicultural experiences to strengthen ties between Chinese metal, industrial, and noise artists and the rest of the world. “In the last five to 10 years, even with the internet ban [on Facebook and Gmail], communication and exchanges between China and places overseas are getting much more active,” he says. “Young people can listen to the newest releases and get information much easier than before.”
Likewise, bands within China are increasingly able to use Western music streaming platforms to get their music heard internationally at a scale unimaginable when metal first took root in the country. Here’s a quick primer on some currently active Chinese metal bands to be found on Bandcamp, from seasoned veterans to new blood.
While megapolises like Beijing and Shanghai have the biggest metal scenes, the smaller city of Nanchang boasts an impressively deep bench of bands and supporters. One of the most important groups is Be Persecuted, which formed in 2005 and remains one of China’s best-known metal bands, despite having put out only a few demos and two LPs in 14 years. To that end, 2006’s eponymous demo acted as a catalyst for the formation of Pest Productions, marking its first release. Be Persecuted’s drummer, who goes by the stage name Autism, also runs the label Stress Hormones, which puts out releases for bands in the region as well as reissues for ‘90s Chinese extreme metal pioneers like Tomahawk and The Crown.
Despite being “somewhat backward”—in the words of Pest Productions founder Zhang—Nanchang has also produced one of China’s greatest thrash metal bands: Explosicum. They play vintage finger-blistering thrash in the vein of Slayer and early Metallica, a sound perfectly crystallized on Explosicum’s 2017 full-length Living’s Deal. The band tours widely around Asia, connecting with fanatics in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. At home in Nanchang, Explosicum’s bassist runs the venue Black Iron, a crucial home base for metalheads from around southern China and a must-stop on most Chinese rock bands’ national tour circuits. Black Iron is also the current office and warehouse of Pest Productions, housing its deep catalog of CDs and related merch.
The Jinan-based black metal band Zuriaake might sound like subgenre traditionalists on record, but onstage they’re the exact opposite: the live equivalent of a classical Chinese ink painting, obscured by waves of rolling fog and conical bamboo hats. “They’re a very good example of how to let Western people know how a Chinese-culture-influenced band should be,” notes WV Sorcerer founder Shen Ruotan. “Not only adding a traditional instrument to seek novelty—they are more than that,” Shen adds, alluding to the band’s penchant for incorporating ancient poetry into their lyrics. While Zhang of Pest is hesitant to pick a favorite among his label’s 200+ releases, he also admits to a special place in his heart for Zuriaake. Both Shen and Zhang have supported Zuriaake’s appearances at international festivals like Roadburn and Wacken—keep an eye out for them on tour in Europe later this year.
Among the metal styles distinct to China is its unique take on folk metal, which incorporates instrumentation and melodies from Central Asian traditional music. One of the first bands to take this approach was the Beijing-formed, New York-based group Tengger Cavalry, whose founder Nature Ganganbaigal recently released a compilation to support other bands working in the same vein. “It’s important to show the world that Chinese metal is diverse, and nomadic culture is what I am doing for now, so I want to support it—they blend well with metal for sure,” Ganganbaigal says. “We need the world to see the diversity and creativity of Asian communities.”
The most successful Mongolian folk metal band in China today is Nine Treasures, who feature on Ganganbaigal’s Sound of the Raging Steppe comp alongside groups like Inner Mongolian metalcore band Liberation. Another band blending Central Asian folk and metal worth looking into is Nan, an ethnically Kazakh band from Xinjiang province, on China’s sparsely populated northwestern frontier.
While Nanchang has the highest per capita concentration of metal bands and labels, Beijing has long been China’s metal capital, from the time of genre forebears Tang Dynasty on. Today, the city hosts a fiercely dedicated metal scene that is largely clustered around 13 Club, a long-running metal bar in Beijing’s university district. One band that calls Beijing home is the Nordic-style black metal duo Ibex Moon, longtime mainstays of China’s black metal scene. Ibex Moon are currently preparing a new album for Pest Productions. Zhang says that black metal in particular has attracted a cohesive scene in a way other metal subgenres have not: “Strictly speaking, a Chinese metal scene doesn’t exist—there’s not much direct exchange between different styles. But as far as the black metal scene is concerned, there are a lot of young and great new bands in recent years.”
While metal purists in Beijing tend to gather most often at 13 Club, Never Before’s molten medley of sludge, doom, and stoner metal slots in snugly at inner-city dive bars like School and Temple, which regularly host mixed punk, hardcore, and indie bills. Case in point: January’s Wild Dog Festival, where Never Before shared the stage with Liaoning thrash metallers Punisher and Beijing hardcore band Struggle Session for a genre-straddling, one-day festival at central Beijing venue YUE Space. Never Before’s lineup has seen some flux over the band’s six years of existence, but this recording features the bassist and drummer of the (also great) Beijing prog-metal band Nakoma.
Punisher is one of the best thrash bands doing it in China today, despite their remote location in China’s northeastern periphery (the band hail from the coastal city of Jinzhou in Liaoning province, roughly a four-hour drive from the North Korean border). Recent releases include 2017’s Lost in the Maze of a Nightmare and 2016’s Battle of Grace, whose surrealist cover art depicts deteriorating statues of Mao and Marx on a freight train barreling deep into a smog-yellow industrial hellscape. For more excellent Chinese thrash metal, see also Beijing’s Ancestor, who cite early Kreator as their key influence, and Tumourboy, who place themselves in a lineage with Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, and Sepultura.
Chinese heavy metal (中国重金属, pinyin: Zhōngguó Zhòngjīnshǔ; also 中国重金属音乐, Zhōngguó zhòngjīnshǔ yīnyuè, literally "Chinese heavy metal music") is commonly used to describe a wide variety of forms of heavy metal music, in connection with the rock bands and solo artists from the People's Republic of China (Native Chinese-speaking regions such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau are considered separate scenes). Typically, Chinese heavy metal bands adhere to one subgenre of heavy metal such as death metal, thrash metal, or power metal, but usually having Chinese lyrical content rather than English.
History
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Tang Dynasty (1988–1990)
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Chinese heavy metal had its origins in hard rock (硬摇滚音乐, Yìng yáogǔn yīnyuè) and Heavy Metal (重金属, Zhòngjīnshǔ) music genres, which had emerged and gained popularity around the 1980s in the western world. The genre of Chinese Heavy Metal music emerged with the formation of the Chinese band, Tang Dynasty as they were the first band to emerge in China with Heavy Metal oriented music. Following their formation in 1988 Tang Dynasty utilized both elements introduced in the new wave of British heavy metal as well as elements of classical Chinese music in the music they wrote. In 1990 Tang dynasty was hired to play at the, 'Festival of modern music / 90's Modern Music Concert', where they were met with extremely positive responses from the crowd of nearly 18,000 spectators.[1]
The success gained from their performance eventually led to them obtaining a record contract with the Taiwanese record label, Magic Stone. In December 1992 Tang Dynasty released their debut album, titled A Dream Return to Tang Dynasty, marking the first release of a heavy metal album in China by a Chinese band.[2]
Development (1991–1999)
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In the time following the initial success of 'Tang Dynasty' a number of other Chinese heavy metal bands began to emerge throughout China. The bands emerging during this time period gradually began to adopt a 'heavier' style of music utilizing more western elements in to their music, shown by the band Overload's thrash metal debut record in 1996,[3] but retaining the Chinese lyrical content.
1997–1999 saw a massive rise in the amount of metal bands in China as the amount of new metal bands being formed every year increased from roughly 1-2 to 15 by 1999. The new bands being formed also began to diversify in terms of musical subgenre of heavy metal as many bands began to explore a more Extreme Metal sound rather than the traditional '80's metal sound'.[4] In 1999, the first metal magazine "极端音乐(Extreme Music)" was founded in Nanjing. [Xmusick 1] Extreme Music Magazine articles feature metal bands and metal culture especially underground metal bands. Extreme Music moved to Beijing in 2006.
Public Recognition (2000–2012)
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核聚变 (Nuclear Fusion)In September 2000, the first heavy-metal-oriented magazine, Painkiller, was founded in Beijing.[5] The magazine quickly became popular within the heavy metal subculture in China on account of both its local coverage of metal related subjects as well as due to the inclusion of interview and articles written by foreign correspondents.
During June 2001, the record label "Mort Productions" is founded by some of the members involved in the production and release of the Painkiller.[6] On November 4 Mort productions released the first compilation CD of Chinese heavy metal, "Resurrection Of The Gods"[7] Mort Productions would go on to release a variety of records by Chinese metal bands as well as several metal compilation albums.
From the year 2005 and onward, China began to have several high-profile metal concerts with foreign bands headlining, along with local Chinese bands supporting. The band Labyrinth's performance in Beijing marked the first official metal concert in China by a foreign band.[8]
In the following years several foreign bands such as: Edguy, Lacrimosa, Testament, Exodus, In Flames, Nightwish, Dark Tranquility, Dream Theater, Stratovarius, Helloween, Opeth, Lamb Of God, Soulfly, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden have all performed in both Beijing and Shanghai.[9][10]
2012 marked to be a major statement of recognition for the Chinese metal scene, with several metal bands such as Suffocated being filmed by CCTV 5 and broadcast along the European Championship in Soccer 2012 coverage.[11] Furthermore, the website Rock in China released the compilation record CORE IN CHINA that attracted global attention online and is regarded as a milestone for Chinese metal.[12][13] In August, three Chinese metal bands (Suffocated, Yaksa and The Falling) performed on the Wacken Open Air 2012.
Artists
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See also
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References
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