Drawing on the musical traditions of ancient China, Central Asia, and contemporary rock, Song Yuzhe’s compositions are a heady mix of the wild and the spiritual. In his ten years playing Beijing’s independent music scene Song has dipped into folk, religious music, and the experimental, forging a highly-charged style of his own.

With his band, Song Yuzhe plays as Dawanggang, and has just released an album that I am featuring as this week’s post (click ‘more’ below to see how you can listen to this). The album is called Selections, its songs taken from a broader ongoing project called Huang Qian Zou Ban, or, Wild Tune, Stray Rhythm, which does a good job of describing its loose but virtuosic tracks.

These recordings feature instruments such as the Uyghur ghejek, a horse-head fiddle, a shaman drum, the organ, saxophone, and some instruments that Song Yuzhe created himself. Dawanggang often play these songs live in front of audio-visual projections of traditional Himalayan, Xinjiang, and Mongolian musicians, the band essentially jamming with the musicians playing on the big screen behind them, engaging them in the live performance. This is something to see. These recordings are just a taster …

Zhu Xiaolong is best known for his role as guitarist in the band, Shetou, a pioneering Chinese rock band that played the underground scene from 1998 – 2004.

In 2002 Zhu Xiaolong formed a second band, Iz, with his Kazak friend Mamer and a group of other Beijing-based musicians. Both Zhu Xiaolong and Mamer had grown up in the Western province of Xinjiang, and Iz drew on the Kazakh, Uyghur and Kyrgyz musical traditions of this desert region to create an energetic contemporary sound. Their music had a big impact on other musicians and inspired a movement of Central Asian influenced Chinese rock and folk music.

Xiaolong left Iz in 2004 when he left Beijing. In 2010 he was living in Sydney where I recorded him play the 2-stringed Kazak instrument, the dongbala.