I’ve played two gigs here, made some friends, bought a whole mess of CD’s, and am beginning to get a bit of a feel for what’s going on here. Tuesday night I played at Yan Jun’s Waterland Kwanlin night at the 2 Kolegas bar. 2 Kolegas is incongruously nestled amongst a bunch of drive in movie theaters. Our cab driver was a bit confused, but, in the exceedingly cooperative and helpful spirit we’ve found in most cab drivers here, he persevered, drove us down the woodsy lane past posters advertising the latest Chinese flicks, and and to our destination

2 Kolegas is a great, secret clubhouse type venue. It’s cosy, homey, very comfortable. Yan Jun, who runs the tuesday night series, is a great guy. Somehow both mellow and intense. He does some great music too. Also playing tuesday were a British duo, Patel Pratel, who did some very dreamy and pretty contact mic on larynx fairy/elf music stuff. The crowd was about 50/50 Chinese/Western. We’re trying to make Chinese friends, but it’s so easy to get chatty with expert English speakers, so it’s hard not to gravitate toward clumping with other western folks.

Friday night we headed to Sugar Jar, Beijing’s #1 underground/experimental CD store. The healthy local scene seems decidedly of the noise/rock/experimental bent here. There may be a techno scene, but I’m not seeing too much evidence of it in Beijing (though I picked up a CD by a guy named Dead J which seems like it might be pretty good.) Friday night’s attraction was a performance piece/game/fun group activity organized by Feng Hao involving dice, shared telephone numbers, and ring tones. The photo above shows us all in the middle of it. Feng Hao, a funny and super nice guy, is bald and crouched, in dice-rolling pose in the photo. We bought a huge stack of CD’s, including about 15 wonderfully hand-packaged CDR’s of field recordings of various Chinese minority groups. There’s some pretty cool stuff in there. Along with that, we went on a bit of a mad buying spree of anything anyone in the store said was good. Haven’t given everything a proper listen yet, but so far, the improv stuff that Yan Jun is involved in stands out, as does the band of one of the field recordists. The name on the CD is “Wei Tong Zhi”.

As the night wore on, people who had better things to do filtered out of the Sugar Jar, and a handful of us stayed, talking, comparing travel experiences, comparing the music scenes in our various native lands. Here’s Crissy at the Sugar Jar. We’re trying to figure out if she looks Chinese, or Chines-American, or if you can even tell

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