China's veteran music critic, label runner, and internationally renowned experimental musician digs into his vintage collection of smuggled cassettes for a new radio show
I’ve written a few times about dakou, surplus cassettes and CDs from Western labels marked for destruction and sent to be melted down into their composite materials in Asia, but which snaked their way across Chinese ports for a second life in gray market stalls across the country in the late ’80s and ’90s. An entire generation of Chinese artists came up on a random diet of these smuggled tapes, as did Yan Jun, who began his career in his hometown of Lanzhou as a prominent rock critic before moving to Beijing in 1999 and, over the next few decades, growing into one of China’s best known experimental musicians and music writers.
But before all that, Yan Jun was a music nerd like the rest of us, hungry for new sonic experiences and eager to share them with others via a stint as a radio DJ in Lanzhou in the late ’90s. Actually my first encounter with dakou was at Yan Jun’s house, where the photo below was taken. In an interview I did with him back in 2010, he laid out the importance of dakou to his generation of musicians and fans:
In the mid-90s, the first generation of experimental musicians, without exception, everyone was rocker. So I wanted more rock, more hard or extreme or loud. I needed a more extreme direction, so just discover from dakou. For example, the label Earache, that was a death metal label but they released some really extreme things like John Zorn’s Painkiller and Kevin Sharp’s solo project, and Justin Broadrick from Godflesh, something from the underground scene but a little bit avant garde or experimental. This feeling was very experimental for the rockers. I think they were hungry, looking for everything different, looking for everything extreme.........
