- A live set from one of the most innovative artists in the Chinese underground.
- It's no exaggeration to call 33EMYBW one of the most original club music producers we've heard in recent years. In addition to being a talented visual artist and a bass player in the experimental band Duck Fight Goose, her solo productions are a highlight of Shanghai's bustling underground scene—home to forward-thinking artists like Tzusing, Osheyack, Swimful and Hyph11E. She has a lexicon of drum sounds borrowed from all over the world, including tablas, bongos and mallets. As 33EMYBW, she puts together strange, multi-limbed rhythms that bring to mind images of dancing spiders and insects, something she addressed directly on 2019's showstopping Arthropods, released on the influential SVBKVLT label. As she says in the interview below, you basically need more than two legs to dance to her music. Maybe even eight.
33EMYBW's music deals with creatures that vary from the mythical to the everyday (her first album was called Golem). On her latest record, Holes of Sinian, also out on SVBKVLT, she imagines the mostly unknown organisms from the recently discovered Ediacaran period. It's more esoteric, atmospheric and arguably funkier than her previous work. Marina Herlop features on one hair-raising track that you can hear as a demo version on her RA Podcast. This mix is actually a version of 33EMYBW's live set—a favourite at influential festivals like Unsound and CTM—featuring plenty of productions from across her career in mutated and improvisational forms. It's creepy, crawly and undeniably danceable. If you can keep up with it.
What have you been up to recently?
I just finished the European tour for my new album Holes of Sinian, and I'm currently touring in China.
How and where was the mix recorded? And can you tell us the idea behind it?
I created this mix in Shanghai after my performances at Unsound, London Asymmetry and Cologne. These materials mainly come from my recent live set and the new album. They infinitely grow and transform like fractals. I selected some parts to edit and reorganised them into new rhythms and melodies. For example, in the ending part from "Fractal 2," I imagined the extinct Edicarian creatures swinging through the holes, happily arriving onto another planet and becoming a new life form. The middle section also features the first demo of my collaboration with Marina Herlop, "Edicarian Ghost."
What's one club or party that had a major impact on you as an artist?
The club that has had the greatest impact on me is Shelter—as we all know, this is the predecessor of All Club—which is also where 33EMYBW was born.
Your new album is inspired by the evolutionary "failure" of the lifeforms of the Ediacaran period. How do you go about translating these ideas—and these lifeforms, like insects on previous records—into dance music?
Last week, my musician friend Dawei Sun sent me two photos of Neolithic pottery. On the pottery, there are masks, fish and people holding hands in a ritualistic manner, along with parallel lines representing the heavens and earth. He said this is what he felt when listening to my new album: a certain innocence with unbridled imagination. I am very happy to receive such feedback.
A few [organisms] from the Ediacaran biota later evolved into the ancestors of arthropods, which became the entry point for new exploration for me after the first two albums. Before having this concept, I had already made some demos. As I began to conceptualise Holes Of Sinian, I also tried to break some boundaries, hoping this album would not just be good for the dance floor but would take people into greater spaces.
I left more blank spaces, and created a more winding structure (symbolising the entanglement of these creatures in nonlinear temporality), utilising voice samples from different regions around the world and processing them to sound both unfamiliar and familiar to carry primitive traces and uncertainty. The creative process is like constructing a model of an ecosystem.
Regarding arthropods and dance music, when I was creating Golem, I found that the rhythms and sections resembled the body segments of arthropods, and the mechanical-like repetition contained biological changes and rhythms. Since then, this synesthesia of visual and auditory senses has become one of the paths in my creation. I've also heard people say that my music is indeed music for arthropods—two legs can't keep up with it.
Can you tell us about your live setup?
Ableton and controller (Push or Akai Mini).
What are you looking forward to in the near future?
The audiovisual show that I collaborated on with Joey Holder will be performed in more places next year. In this performance, we created a creature together. I am looking forward to seeing its growth and transformations in subsequent shows. I also hope to try more forms of collaboration such as film scores, theatre, etc.!