Tag Archives: zhangbei

Spiritualized and Orbital to headline 2012 InMusic Festival

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This just in from our friends at Beijing Gig Guide – playing this year at the InMusic Festival, aka Zhangbei, aka that festival that’s pretty much in Mongolia, are Spiritualized and Orbital. Other announced international headliners include Joyce Jonathan (France), Linkoban (Denmark) and Joanna Wang 王若琳 (Taiwan). On the domestic side, they’ve booked Tang Dynasty, Brain Failure, Queen Sea Big Shark, Miserable Faith and A-BOYS, with many more to be added, we’re sure.

InMusic has a history of booking good acts – see Little Dragon and Tricky in ’09, CocoRosie and Killing Joke in ’10, Tricky (again) in ’11 – and sparse attendance. We’ll be curious to see if the 1-2-3 punch of Orbital (EDM kids), Spiritualized (space rockers, Brit fetishists) and Joanna Wang (pop lovers) will finally draw the crowds out to Mongolia Hebei.

Zhangbei InMusic Festival hits its stride

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Last weekend, Zhangbei hosted the 3rd installment of their InMusic Festival. We’ve been somewhat scathing of the festival to date, citing poor artist facilities and general disorganization, but we are more than happy to be proved wrong: where we thought that the difficulties associated with getting to and from the grasslands and of course the lack of customer facing facilities would eventuate in the festival fading away, this year’s heavily Beijing-centric lineup seems to have brought the masses. We weren’t there this year unfortunately, but we’ve heard from several sources that there were between 50-100,000 people up in Hebei for the weekend, with perhaps 40,000 tickets sold.

 

If it’s a review you’re after, then James Tiscione does a great job over at the Global Times – his review veers from praise to irritation and back again, but the key for us is encapsulated in the conclusion:

Overall, Zhangbei had somewhat cleaned up it’s act – the grass was longer thanks to recent rains, organizers offered a huge food court that was mostly chuanr, 10-yuan beer, and squadrons of young volunteers trying to pick up after careless fans.  But the music, and the passion it awoke, is what distinguished this year’s Zhangbei.

It seems that the festival organizers concentrated more on marketing the event to the Hebei massive, rather than trying to get Beijingers to leave the comfort of their city and the strategy certainly seemed to work. Let’s hope for more success stories as some festivals reach a kind of maturity…

InMusic Announces

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With 3 weeks to go, InMusic Festival announces it’s lineup. Lots of biggish, popular Chinese artists (Xu Wei, Zhang Zhen-Yue, Wang Feng), but most interestingly, Tricky is returning having headlined in 2009 alongside Ill Nino, the Latin Metal group who were here last year, Mix Market and Buffalo Rome who we haven’t heard of. Check out the full lineup for yourselves HERE.

Honestly, we weren’t expecting this one back this year, but they have a 10 year arrangement with the local Zhangbei government so expect this one to keep getting better.

Inmusic Festival announce dates

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The third edition of the InMusic Festival in Zhangbei have just announced their dates, 29-31 July. The festival has certainly had teething problems in the first two years – from a lack of hotel rooms for bands, to a paucity of food and drink options.

The concept is a great one – destination festivals are a vital part in the music festival spectrum – but it remains to be seen whether Chinese festival goers are yet prepared to travel far for their fix.

You can see reviews of InMusic 2009 HERE, 2010 HERE, and you can read about one band’s travails in 2010 HERE.

We hope that 2011 will be a great festival and that the organizers can put their experience to good use. It seems that the grasslands will be well prepared….

InMusic Festival Poster, Zhangbei, China

On the road with Killing Joke

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The inMusic festival has suffered over it’s short life span from many of the teething problems that music festivals have to endure. In this article (HERE), ex-Beijinger music editor Wang Ge tells his story of tour managing veteran UK rock band Killing Joke to the Mongolian grasslands and back. It’s a bit funny and a bit tragic, quite honestly.

at about 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, the British concert veterans put on a kick-ass show in the paralyzing cold for a 500-strong die-hard Chinese crowd

It’s been seven hours on the road, during which time I’ve listened to endless complaints, … The driver got lost, we sat through a major traffic jam at a tollgate, drove forever across the grasslands, slithered through a bog where we almost had to get out and push, and heard Coleman ask “HOW MUCH LONGER?” 11 times

A rule that we learned a long time ago – don’t try touring China on older, established bands unless they REALLY want to come, and even then, it’s a risk. The best line from the article was from one of the band members:

“It’s like the Czech Republic when it first came out of Communism,” Neven said to me while we were waiting at the hotel. “Everybody wants to do everything, but nobody knows how to do it. It’s a learning process.”

When applied to Chinese music festivals, never truer words spoken…

A review of the inMusic Festival in Zhangbei

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Last year, we had a reviewer up there. This year, we failed you, good people. However, China.org.cn stepped up to the challenge. You can find the full review HERE.

The article shows the discrepancy between organizer expectations of what a music festival here in China can deliver and the actuality. Pre-festival numbers of 200,000 people attending and 3,000 security guards gave rise to an actual attendance (estimated) of around 6,000 and general understaffing and disorganization. In fact, this review is typical of the comments we have seen coming out of festivals all over China.

This sudden rash of underfunded and terribly organized music festivals is giving a bad name to the good ones. Badly treated customers and bands will increasingly think twice about going to another festival, which is a sadness for the genuine people that are working hard and risking lots to make them happen.

Intrstng wknd

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And so, Shanghai has two big shows this coming week. Based loosely around Zhangbei InMusic Festival, Panic at the Disco and CocoRosie are both coming to Mao Live House. Both shows are pretty expensive (300RMB and 120RMB presale), but while Shanghai is used to 120RMB at the upper end of the ticketing spectrum, 300 kuai hasn’t been seen for quite some time (if you disregard the stupid prices charged for “top 1″ DJs).

It will also be interesting to see if these two bands and Killing Joke will have the pulling power necessary to drag people out of Beijing and all the way to the Zhangbei Grasslands. The InMusic festival was a brave, brave effort in 2009, but are the Chinese masses ready to travel long distances for the music they don’t always yet love?

We always thought it was going to take a biiiiiiggggg headliner to get serious numbers in 2010, and while PATD! is certainly more than just a mid level emo band (we called them that a few weeks back and were asked to check our facts – PATD! actually has 1.3m Myspace friends and does indeed have significant pulling power in the USofA), they may not be the mega headliner that the festival needs. We hope they are because Inmusic is pioneering a type of out-of-city festival that Chinese kids will learn to enjoy.

Incidentally, there will be 3 out of town festivals around Beijing in the 4 weeks from 27 August (Tanglewood) to the 24th September (Dreamvalley).

Time will tell…

What other people are writing about…

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We have a LOT of browser windows open at the moment, talking about China’s independent music scene. And so it is that we thought we should put them all together for your viewing pleasure.

1. China Daily sticks its “journalistic” oar in on music festivals

China Daily is not reputed to be the most objective of sources. In THIS article, they report on Suzhou Holisland, interview Shen Lihui of Modern Sky and Liu Hongjie of InMusic (who expects 30,000 people this year) and also the Party Secretary of Zhangbei province (where InMusic has reportedly signed a 10 year partnership to run the festival) who admits to investing RMB3m in the festival.

Oh, and they put forward this Awesome Guitarist photo:

2. An interview with Modern Sky’s Shen Lihui

New kid on the block (expat newspaper – been around for 15 months now) the Global Times profiles Shen Lihui, boss man at Modern Sky.

3. HP is sponsoring the Communist Youth League.

We just thought this was too good not to put in here.

4. A comparison of comments between a Chinese and Western festival promoter

What makes a good music festival? Yu Hui of Suzhou’s festival (good sound, good artists, good marketing, satisfy audience) vs. Rick Farman of Bonnaroo (secure approvals, production, site operations, concessions).

5. Andy Best on why Douban’s news feed has gone

Making the Douban social network a MUCH lesser place to hang out, and a Guardian article explaining why the government might have had a hand in it.

6. Andy Best again on starting and running a DIY record label

Interestingly, Andy Best of Kungfuology fame started a new blog a while back. Indie Everything looks to our untrained eyes like a kind of training manual/ testing ground for how to do music-ey things all DIY style. Man, this promises to be a great resource for Chinese kids looking to start their own band, label, print t-shirts etc. Are you the patron saint of music Mr.B?

More music festivals

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Things have been going crazy on the festival front in 2010. After our prediction at the beginning of the year that governments would take a much closer look at the possibilities of hosting their own music festivals, we have the following

Inmusic Festival is back

The festival in Mongolia’s grasslands is back. It will be over the same weekend as Fuji Rock in Japan (30/7-1/8) and although there are just Chinese bands on the bill at the moment, rumor has it that Panic at the Disco! and CocoRosie will be appearing. After the problems last year (lack of grass/ facilities/ subpar treatment of bands) plus the 4-7 hours drive to get to the festival, it will be interesting to see how people react to the festival this year. It’s definitely a cool place, so if you haven’t already, you should check it out

Suzhou’s Huli Festival

This has definitely been an up and down affair. Artists have been left in the lurch for an incredible amount of time, and so the offers must have been good (we can attest to the fact that they were). In any case, full fees have been received in advance, so we will be seeing Sinead O’Connor and Simple plan, alongside a host of Chinese stars: 张震岳(Chang chen-yue); 张悬(Deserts Chang); 黄家强(Wong Ka Keung Steve/ bass of famous HK band-Beyond); 许巍( Xu wei);  汪峰( Wang Feng); 郑钧( Zheng Jun); 张楚( Zhang Chu); 熊宝贝( Bear Babes-Tai wan Indie/folk band)  脑浊( Brain failure)  瘦人乐队( thin man/hard rock) 谢天笑( x.t.x)

Hangzhou

It seems that the Hangzhou government have earmarked Hangzhou to be China’s capital of culture. Added to the Xihu festival that happened 2 weekends ago (we are awaiting a review from a reluctant contributor), the organizers of Inmusic will be organizing a “Big Love” festival there, the day after Chinese Valentine’s day (August 15-16), plus there will be another festival during the October Golden Week.

It’s going to be another busy summer!

Festival roundabout

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Experienced employees for festival organizers are hard to come by here in China.  Festivals are relatively new in this country, and good ones relatively rare.

Two of the more experienced individuals have moved.  Shan Wei, the 2 i/c at Rock for China (organizers of the Beijing Pop Festival from 2005 – 2007) has joined the team for Midi, which should bode well for the festival.  Lua Zhou, ex-InMusic journalist and one of the key players for the inaugural InMusic festival in Zhangbei is now helping out with the Zebra Festival in Chengdu.

As an aside, Midi Festival will be back in Beijing, after a year off in Zhenjiang.  Midi is slated for May at its old home of Haidian Park, which will put it in direct competition with Modern Sky’s Strawberry.  Will be interesting to see how that one turns out.