The Chinese noise city · a scene built from scratch in a place with no underground tradition to inherit · Torturing Nurse (from 2004) as the founding act, the NoiShanghai live series as the scene's anchor, and the nearby Hangzhou 2Pi Festival as the event the whole network connected through
Shanghai organised around three things rather than the usual studio-and-label pairing. The act: Torturing Nurse. Junky's project is the scene's centre of gravity, the most documented Chinese experimental band, with a catalogue running past two hundred releases and live work across the world. For most of its life it was the duo of Junky and Xu Cheng; since Xu Cheng left in 2015 it has been largely a solo act.
The series: NoiShanghai. From around 2005 the scene's real backbone was a monthly live series Junky organised, held for years at the 696 Live Bar on Kunming Road and other small venues. The tenth instalment, NoiShanghai X, fell in August 2007; the series gave the city a regular place for noise to happen, which mattered more than any single record in a place with no distribution network to speak of.
The festival: 2Pi, in nearby Hangzhou. The scene did not have a festival of its own; it connected through the 2Pi Festival that the guitarist Li Jianhong ran in Hangzhou from 2003 on his 2Pi Records. 2Pi was the gathering point where the Shanghai players met musicians from across the mainland, Taiwan and abroad, and it is where the Torturing Nurse line-up settled in 2004.
The Shanghai case is different in kind from the other cities the Bureau files. Sheffield, Düsseldorf, West Berlin, London, Chicago, the two Japanese capitals and Los Angeles all grew from a tradition already in the ground, whether post-punk, krautrock, free improvisation or the avant-garde substratum. Shanghai had none of that. China's non-academic experimental music began, in one account, from point-blank scratch in the 1980s and 1990s, as a delayed consequence of the market economy and the opening of youth culture; the breakthrough festival events only arrive in 2003.
What the absence of a lineage produced was a scene defined by acts of will rather than inheritance. There was no local canon to react against and no infrastructure to use, so the founders built the infrastructure as they went: a monthly series, a string of short-run releases, a set of connections to Hangzhou and Beijing and to the Japanese and Western noise networks that had inspired them. The Shanghai scene has long been described as rougher and less intellectual than Beijing's cooler, more minimal counterpart, more physical and more directly indebted to harsh noise.
The Bureau's position is that Shanghai is the archive's clearest case of a noise scene assembled without a tradition to draw on, and that Torturing Nurse and the NoiShanghai series are the proof that a scene can be willed into being by a very small number of people.
Junky (Junjun Cao). The founder of Torturing Nurse and organiser of the NoiShanghai series; the scene's engine. His performances are marked by violent physical movement, a blue mask, and an instrument of broken pedals and scrap metal.
Xu Cheng. Born in Shanghai in 1980, a photographer and sound artist who had been making sound art since 1999 and appeared on China: The Sonic Avant-Garde, the first compilation of Chinese sound art, in 2003. He was the most constant Torturing Nurse member from 2004 until he left in 2015, and in 2017 co-founded the play rec label with Wang Changcun, partly to address how few Chinese experimental labels were left.
Wang Changcun. A veteran of the Chinese scene, long active in Hangzhou before relocating to Shanghai; co-founder of play rec and a maker of jittery computer music. The label gave the Shanghai-and-Hangzhou axis a documented outlet in the late 2010s.
The network outward. The scene never had many people. It drew strength instead from its links outward, to Li Jianhong's Hangzhou circle, to Beijing figures such as Yan Jun, and to the visiting Western and Japanese musicians who passed through 2Pi and NoiShanghai.
Artists. Torturing Nurse is the city's founding and central act and the anchor of this file.
Forms. The Shanghai catalogue is filed at harsh noise, with the free-improvisation adjacency that runs through Junky's and Xu Cheng's work.
Lineage. The scene is downstream of Japanese and American noise rather than of any European tradition, which connects it to the Japanoise file and, through naming, to John Zorn.
Scenes. Filed in the Scenes department as S·009, the archive's first and so far only Chinese-scene entry.
Torturing Nurse · NanaNanaNanaNanaNanaNana (2005). A widely-circulated early release from the most active four-piece period, and a clear document of the contact-mic-and-scrap method that defined the scene's sound.
Various · An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music 1992–2008 (Sub Rosa). Not a Shanghai record as such, but the best single map of the context the scene grew inside, with a history of the Chinese noise explosion co-written by Zbigniew Karkowski and Yan Jun. It is the way to hear how isolated and how willed the early scene was.
Before (pre-2003). Almost nothing in the way of a local underground; China's non-academic experimental music begins, in effect, from scratch in the post-reform decades, with rock and punk arriving before any noise tradition.
Around (2003–2008). The breakthrough window: Sounding Beijing and the first 2Pi Festival in 2003, Torturing Nurse from 2004, the NoiShanghai series from around 2005, and the Sub Rosa anthology closing the period in 2008. The scene runs in parallel with Beijing's cooler, more minimal counterpart.
After (2008 onward). The small DIY-label economy thinned out, but the core held: Torturing Nurse continued, Xu Cheng and Wang Changcun founded play rec in 2017, and the NoiShanghai series carried on as the scene's steady centre.
Shanghai is the youngest scene the Bureau files, and the one built with the least to build on. It had no inherited tradition, no infrastructure and almost no audience, and it produced, all the same, the best-known experimental act in the country and a live series that has outlasted nearly every label around it.
The Bureau's view is that the Shanghai case proves a scene does not need a lineage to exist; it needs a small number of people willing to make the place where it can happen. Torturing Nurse and NoiShanghai are that place. Filed at S·009, the file is held open against the scene's continuation.
Shanghai vein · S·009 · return to Scenes department · Torturing Nurse · John Zorn · Japanoise
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