19 May 2025

Remote underground / Readers’ choice

Brian Hioe on the distant music scene in China; POLL results!

Screenshot: YouTube

Today: Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, co-founder of New Bloom, and author of Taipei at Daybreak.

Issue No. 321

Listening from Afar
Brian Hioe

POLL Results!
The Editors

Listening from Afar

by Brian Hioe

My latest thing to listen to while working has been online Chinese underground electronic music streaming programs. I’ve always liked streaming programs, in which you can see the DJ playing live and sometimes a live crowd in the background. The most famous of them, I believe, is Boiler Room, now canceled by much of the underground electronic community after it was acquired by a company with links to Israeli arms manufacturers. That’s a very high-profile example, but there are all manner of smaller platforms, such as various local community radio stations—some of which broadcast live, while others are more focused on radio programs.

It’s somewhat voyeuristic, but what I’ve always liked is the ability to have a glimpse into another scene, somewhere I’ve never been and perhaps may never go. On YouTube these days there’s a rash of channels of people just walking around cityscapes without any commentary. Or travel YouTubers who mostly just document content for their viewers with little or no commentary, such as coffee shops or even airlines.

Much of it is quite mundane. But I’ve always been sort of in love with the spontaneity of music events—the thought that this unique combination of people has never gathered in a room before, and never will again. Or the way underground music events bring out a diverse array of people who would normally never come together in their daytime lives.

Still, there’s something special about watching programs from China or Hong Kong—namely, that I can’t go there. For a political journalist and activist, there’s too much risk; I am connected with people in jail on political charges in both places. Most likely I would be forbidden to enter in the first place, but obviously what I don’t want is to enter, be taken into custody by Chinese authorities, and then not be able to get out again, an unfortunate fate that has befallen people I know.

I used to be the managing editor for a Hong Kong–based electronic music publication some years back. Though that paid some of the bills it was more of a passion project than anything; I’ve always been mainly a political journalist. Yet my inability to travel to Hong Kong meant I was never able to meet any of my colleagues there. Similarly, when I interviewed Chinese artists or profiled the spaces they ran, I was never able to visit these places. I suspect I may never be able to—though I have hopes of traveling again to China in my lifetime, I doubt it’ll occur in the next decade.

Hmm, I guess I’ll be an old-school raver by then. Perhaps it would be best for me not to name any of the Chinese artists I like or listen to, so as to avoid getting them in trouble; though it’s highly doubtful the Chinese government would care what a random journalist-activist’s music tastes are, better safe than sorry. But I will say, it makes me happy sometimes seeing the careers develop of people I might have spoken to once on a video call.

The underground electronic scene in China is filled with people with tattoos, piercings, and the like, and there’s a lot of drug use. That further surprises me; there hasn’t been any crackdown on the underground in China, as far as I’m aware. Maybe the scene is simply too marginal.

Though electronic music can be political at times, even in authoritarian countries, it’s safer to depict oneself as apolitical. There’s nothing wrong with that. The spaces that come into being through underground electronic music culture can be liberatory in their own right—it’s no surprise that they often attract outsiders who may not have places of safety elsewhere.

A lot of the regulars at a bar I like to go to are Hongkongers who came to Taiwan after the 2019 protests—effectively, people in exile. There are always videos of simply strolling around Hong Kong playing on a projector in this bar, offering patrons a way to experience places now forbidden to them, a way of experiencing this nostalgia. Maybe it’s not so dissimilar for me, even if these are places I’ve never experienced; a way to connect with a place where one has never been and may never be.

I think there is in fact a way to get to know a space without ever having been there.

A space in Hong Kong I saw as a kindred project to the one I help run in Taipei recently closed, and because of all the virtual documentation, plus social media connections I had to those who ran it, I felt like I did know that space in a way.

I’m often surprised when people seem to know quite a lot about the space I run in Taipei without ever having been there, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The matter of knowledge encompasses more than the physical.

YAKKIN’ ABOUT DAD ROCK

Luke O’Neil in conversation with Niko Stratis, author of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, at Welcome to Hell World.

An excerpt from the book:

In high school, one afternoon when the sun was too hot and the air was too dry, my friends and I craved respite from the brief months of endless sun in the Yukon summer. We drove up the road that trailed off through the cliffs behind my house, up another winding road darting around the cliffs and walking trails, then down to the clearings by the river where day camps and picnic tables were set up. I pulled my 1988 Datsun Maxima into a day camp site, opened the doors, and let punk rock mixtapes drown out bird songs and the sound of the river. We drank cheap beers and wine coolers stolen from older siblings’ and parents’ hiding places and found a world in which to survive.

Niko Stratis and Luke O’Neil seated before colorful bookshelves at the Harvard Book Store ('Since 1932') — Niko Stratis and Luke O’Neil

POLL Results!!

by The Editors

Here are the TOP FIVE Hydra stories that you, our readers, picked in the poll to be made freely available to all, emissaries sent out from behind the paywall so the wider public may enjoy a sample of the work you support.

Please share them with your own friends, followers, and admirers!