Over the last year in Chengdu there have been a handful of Tailor Made events in the city, organized by an American expat named Michael. Trying and failing to get a suit made in Chengdu of high quality and reasonable price, he coaxed a group of Beijing-based tailors to visit Chengdu for a weekend, taking orders for custom shirts and suits from dozens of expat customers. Tailor Made was born.
I visited for the first time yesterday and ordered a pair of custom cotton shirts which I should receive in about two weeks. The selection process was a little overwhelming – hundreds of different fabric types, in addition to shirt styles. I took about 10 minutes to finalize everything, choosing a pale blue and patterned white shirt, totalling about $80 US. They offered cheaper synthetic shirts but I’m willing to pay more for cotton.
A few months ago a Dutch friend of mine who’s the co-proprietor of one of Chengdu’s longest running bars (called Machu Picchu) approached me with an offer. He had a large house on the outskirts of Chengdu that he had tried to run a bar at, but couldn’t make it happen for personal reasons.
Having many of my own projects to attend to, my approach was to assemble a cast of collaborators to cultivate a venue to host events throughout the summer. After weeks of trying to pull together all the pieces, it looked like it was going to fall apart. But at the last moment, it came together and we signed a contract on the house.
Now that house is called Dojo, and last weekend we hosted our second event there, which we have been calling Mega House Party. In a nutshell, it emulates the American house party experience in Western China, usually with stunning accuracy.
Some Dojo Highlights
There are three areas of music, and 8+ DJs who perform at each event. Chengdu’s best, of course.
A VJ on a projector casts a large image upon a white sheet on one side of the house
Barbecue and live graffiti outside
A monster sound system in the main room, with two 15″ subwoofers
We prepare and sell food, include homemade pizza and deep fried Oreos
So far each event has drawn 300+ people
The May Party Flyer
I’ve been designing and printing event flyers for years, mostly for Disco Death events. When everyone was making A4 size posters, I begun making one meter-tall feature film size posters, which were 300dpi Photoshop files that were multiple gigabytes in size. In 2013, big posters are pretty common in Chengdu. So once again, I’m taking the next step and doing something new, that’s never been done before in Chengdu: digital-only, animated flyers. This will be the first of many.
It will be interesting to see how many people will be doing this by summertime 2014 – I expect it will be a lot. However, since there are few flyer designers in Chengdu, the technical hurdles of creating this kind of flyer are a bit higher. This month’s flyer is around 70 frames, which demands a new workflow that I haven’t yet mastered.
At the May Event
At this event, we cooperated with the Natooke fixed gear bicycle shop in Chengdu to host the after party for their Kill the Hill event on Longquan Mountain. In layman terms, Natooke hosted a fixed gear and single speed bicycle race up a mountain (meaning no mountain bikes allowed) and held the award ceremony at the house.
Around 6pm a mass of 60+ rainbow-colored fixed gear bicyclists swarmed to Dojo like bees to the hive. Everyone had a blast. The next event is in two weeks on Saturday, June 15th.
Photos from the Night
Fortunately I had my camera with me at this months event and had the opportunity to capture a lot of photos. As it got later into the night and I started playing music and drinking more, I stopped messing with my camera. With any luck, next time I’ll get photos that span the entire night instead of the first few hours. Still, I look at these photos with great satisfaction. The two Dojo events that we’ve hosted so far have been the best parties that I’ve seen in Chengdu in my seven years here. I’m proud to be a part of it and share American house party culture with an international audience.
Here are a handful of photos, with more at the link below:
For the last few months I’ve been working on a new project for the summer: renting a country house on the outskirts of Chengdu, in a rural area affectionately called Flower Town in English. The house had been rented for over a year by my friend Hise, the Dutch owner of the Machu Picchu bar in Yulin, who expanded to Flower Town but decided to back out when business wasn’t booming. We assembled a group of friends to pitch in and rent the house for the summer, and we hosted out first house party there on Monday, the first day of the 3-day national holiday in China.
And what a house party it was. At the party we had:
8 DJ’s inside, outside, and upstairs
3 rappers, including Kafe Hu, Fat Shady, and Eli Sweet
Live graffiti, created by Gas, one of China’s best
A VJ creating live visuals inside the house, with a projector
5 kegs of Belgian craft beer, brewed in Chengdu
Fireworks at midnight
Homemade pizzas and barbecue
400+ people
The only other time in my life I’ve seen a house party on that scale was the house that we called “Triangle”, in Quantico, Virginia. A group of ravers had rented out this enormous house in the middle of nowhere, and assembled the largest house parties I had ever seen. Tons of DJ’s, 500+ people, and just total mayhem. There would be hundreds of cars parked near the house. This was on that level, but in China. Absolutely insane. Miraculously, no one was injured and nothing in the house was broken.
After the party concluded, we stayed at the house for the following 2 days and it was beautiful. The sun shone, the birds chirped, and we didn’t hear a single car horn. It’s a wonderful departure and much needed break from Chengdu.
The name that we’re calling the house is The Dojo. I look forward to spending more time there this summer. And, of course, for the next big event which is on Saturday, May 25th.
This show was actually on the 23rd of March (last month), but I want to put this photo here in remembrance of what was surely one of the best Chinese rock bands I have ever seen. Nova Heart, a Beijing band that has toured the US and Europe but remains little known inside mainland China, their home turf.
What I find as a generalization with Chinese pop musicians in general is that they borrow heavily from a single source. It’s usually another band or DJ that might be relatively unknown in China (like Sublime or DJ AM), but it doesn’t work with international audiences who can spot their source from a mile away. Nova Heart breaks the trend and has a sound all their own.
In their music I heard Zero 7 in the lead singers beautiful voice. I heard David Gilmour and Pink Floyd in the lead guitarists airy riffs. I heard Brad Wilk and Rage Against the Machine in the drummers sparse and heady rhythms, peppered with cowbell. It sounded totally new.
Some more information on Nova Heart is available here, and they have an EP on Spotify here: Nova Heart on Spotify
Last year while on an 8,000 mile road trip I was lucky enough to attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. If you haven’t heard of Coachella, it’s a 3-day music festival that gathers hundreds of thousands of people in the California desert to see hundreds of bands and DJs, including headliners like Radiohead and Jay-Z.
As expected, it turned out to rank among the most profound musical experiences of my life.
The lineup for the 2013 edition of Coachella has just been released and the headliners are The Stone Roses, Blur, Phoenix, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. As usual, it’s the performers beneath the surface that make the lineup truly remarkable. Although there are over a hundred, here are the ones that catch my eye in particular:
Fingers crossed that I’m lucky enough to go to Coachella this year, too.
Just for fun, here’s the program that I created for Coachella last year. Of the hundreds of artists on the lineup, these are the ones that I selected each day and did my best to attend.
I DJ’d at the “Sheng Qi” (生气) event last night, which was a milestone for Chengdu’s growing hip hop subculture. This event was months in the making and was the meeting of two crews: the Jingqi Shen crew which has members from all around the country (Guangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu, Kunming) and the “CDC” (ChengDu City) rap crew. In total, over 10+ rappers and two DJs.
The Shengqi Event Flyer – Saturday 11-24-2012
What Rap in Chengdu Looks Like:
Big Ty. Every time I see this guys name I think of my cousin, whose legal name is Ty.
“Fat Shady” sounds kind of silly, but he is perhaps the most skilled and popular in CDC
“Sleepycat” – a local Sichuanese rapper who has improved a lot
Ansr-J, aka AJ, is a young and popular local rapper who is influenced by Far East Movement and dance-y hip hop in general
Kafei on the mic (the only member of both Jingqi Shen and CDC) and David in the foreground
We got equipment from Beat Base nearby. A “ReLoop” mixer and turntable.
Kafei crowd-surfed for his first time as the crowd was going nuts. After the show he was surrounded by 17-21 year old girls.
The flyer, front and back. Made to look like a CD, a symbol of the 90′s
The 90′s party on Friday was a ton of fun. Although I had a hand-culled playlist with over 180 tracks, I made it through half of them (over 90 songs!) in a few hours. A few people requested the tracklist so here it is:
I’ve been designing and printing event flyers for years, mostly for Disco Death events. When everyone was making A4 size posters, I begun making one meter-tall feature film size posters, which were 300dpi Photoshop files that were multiple gigabytes in size. In 2013, big posters are pretty common in Chengdu. So once again, I’m taking the next step and doing something new, that’s never been done before in Chengdu: digital-only, animated flyers. This will be the first of many.
And what a house party it was. At the party we had:
