Gong Gong Gong 工工工! 向前冲!

Chinese Psywaves is a collaboration between Neocha and M-Lab by Modern Sky. Throughout the month of May, we’re going to introduce four Chinese alternative rock groups who are making waves. For them, music is a spiritual sustenance that transcends the boundaries of genre. This week, we’ve got Gong Gong Gong, a band that draws on noise, blues, and post-punk influences for a sound that’s all its own.

Gong Gong Gong is officially on a roll. The Beijing-based duo has recently been featured or reviewed on Bandcamp, Pitchfork, Aquarium Drunkard, Loud and Quiet, and even Interview magazine. Last year they played at SXSW, toured Europe and North America, and released their first LP, Phantom Rhythm. They had a lot more lined up for 2020 before the pandemic forced them to hit the pause button. Now they’re both itching to get back on tour—and back home to finish their second album.

Yet these veterans of the Beijing scene aren’t quite what they seem. For starters, their driving rhythms dispense with drums—they keep a pounding beat with only a guitar and a bass. And those angsty, howled vocals aren’t in Mandarin but Cantonese. In fact, neither member of the duo is a native of the city, or even of mainland China: Tom Ng, the guitarist and singer, hails from Hong Kong, while bassist Joshua Frank is Canadian. Together they’re redefining what it means to be a Beijing band, and their style—which draws on influences as wide-ranging as Bo Diddley and West African blues—defies easy classification.

Ng and Frank met in Beijing about a decade ago. They were both regulars in the city’s underground music scene: Ng’s band The Offset: Spectacles coincided at shows with Hot & Cold, the band Frank started with his brother. After working together on different gigs, they eventually started a label called Rose Mansion Analogue. But they didn’t form Gong Gong Gong until 2013, when Frank finally moved to the city full-time. (He’d spent part of his childhood there, and his diplomat parents moved there again around the time he went off to college, so he’d long been a frequent visitor.) Soon they were crafting songs with pounding guitar rhythms and impassioned Cantonese lyrics, and playing venues all over Beijing’s scene—they’ve even performed in a pedestrian underpass.

With around 10 self-produced singles and multiple EPs to their name, Gong Gong Gong are no strangers to the recording studio. Yet Phantom Rhythm, released last year on Wharf Cat Records, is their first full-length album, and it’s raising their profile far beyond underground bars of China’s capital.

Neocha tracked them down to chat about Beijing music, their new album, and their favorite DIY venues.

Click here to listen to select tracks by Gong Gong Gong:

Neocha: Gong Gong Gong is a Beijing band, but neither of you is exactly a Beijinger—Tom’s from Hong Kong, and Josh is a Canadian. What drew you to Beijing, and what keeps you there? How does its music scene different from other cities’?

Tom Ng: Compared to hyper-urbanized Hong Kong, Beijing feels a lot more “country,” and that’s more to my taste. Now that I’m in Beijing I can’t go back. Hong Kong has never had many music venues, and they demand bands pay a lot to rent the space to play a show. So unlike Beijing in the past, or a lot of other cities in China now, it can’t really foster a scene. Besides, there’s generally a lot of hostility among Hong Kong bands, and they often look down on each other. I feel like in Beijing, or elsewhere in China, bands are more willing to interact or collaborate. Just because you’re not into their music doesn’t mean you can’t be friends.

Now that I’ve been in Beijing for a long time, I can no longer quite remember what I like about it. But I remember when I first got there I really liked yelling in public. People on the street wouldn’t pay attention to you at all—they wouldn’t look at you like you’re crazy, the way they would in Hong Kong. It was very freeing, very funny. I like all my friends in Beijing, and I like my electric scooter. But there’s a lot I hate about the city, too, especially the lack of good food. That’s why we’re thinking of moving to Shanghai.

Josh Frank: We’re a “Beijing band” because Tom and I started playing together in Beijing. We’re definitely in between different cultures, but I don’t think that’s incompatible with being a Beijing band. Altogether I’ve lived in Beijing longer than anywhere else, and I feel like I’m somewhere in between a local and an outsider. This unusual perspective gives me a lot of inspiration. Beijing is a really interesting contradiction. Even though it’s very familiar, it changes day by day.

Beijing doesn’t have as many places for shows as New York or Montreal, but this is also a challenge. New York’s underground scene is too big, there are too many bands, and time is limited. Everyone’s busy doing their own thing, and for me, the pace is a little too hurried. Montreal, on the other hand, feels a little too slow, so in this sense perhaps you could say that Beijing is just right. What’s sad is that in the past few years, for people who play music, most of the changes haven’t been good. It’s harder and harder for underground music and art to exist here. Food is also really a problem. Every time we go on tour and eat our first meal out in a new city, we turn to each other and ask: why is food in Beijing so bad?

Neocha: Critics describe your music with seemingly incompatible labels: punk, minimalism, blues, and noise, to name a few. Yet your tracks have a remarkably unified sound. How do you define your music?

Tom Ng: I think it’s best to remain open-minded and let listeners define our style for themselves. Gong Gong Gong’s music is a chemical reaction between Josh and me, an extension of our spiritual and physical selves. When we make music, we’re really spontaneous and impulsive—we don’t have a plan or blueprint, so there’s probably no genre there.

Josh Frank: Usually when people ask, I say we’re a two-man band with a bass and guitar, with no drums but lots of rhythm. Maybe because we imposed that limitation on ourselves, the sound that results has its own distinctive sense of unity. I think limitations are a fundamental starting point for creation. No matter how “experimental” our music is, it has to have rhythm. The power of rhythm is undeniable.

Neocha: Last year’s LP Phantom Rhythm has a sense of urgency, and even the lyrics are loaded with references to chases, charging ahead, and moving forward. Where does this focus on acceleration come from? How does the album “drive ahead” from your previous work?

Tom Ng: Phantom Rhythms is maybe a more serious production. The album was released abroad, so it shares in the industry’s conventions. That was a bit of a new experience. As for the “drive,” maybe that’s because the rhythm is really repetitive, so it sounds like horses or trains surging ahead. But for some songs, I really do have images in my mind. For example, “Gong Gong Gong Blues” makes me feel like I’m driving fast on a windy night with trails of light speeding past, so the lyrics I wrote have that some of that sense of speed. And because neither of us has our driver’s license, the closest we can get is by “driving” our guitars.

Josh Frank: Maybe it’s because when we’re playing it’s too easy to get excited, so our songs naturally sound like that. If the atmosphere can be felt by listeners, then that means the song is well-written, and that the recording’s not bad either.

Neocha: You’ve performed everywhere from live houses to underpass tunnels. Do different venues influence your performance? What’s favorite place to play?

Tom Ng: We love to perform, so we always have fun playing, no matter what the venue. Of course, an underpass tunnel in Beijing is a very different experience from a baseball stadium in Philadelphia. Personally I get more satisfaction from putting on DIY shows like we did in 2018 in Beijing’s Bentu E6. Our show last year in Copenhagen’s Mayhem was also really good. Lots of different people were involved, helping us set up everything up. We did the soundcheck by ourselves, we went to the store to buy drinks to sell, we cleaned up and swept the floor—it was the complete experience.

Josh Frank: Playing in so many different venues lets us keep things fresh—that’s really important to me. In December we played at Nanjing’s 61 Club. Mostly it’s a place for DJs—they basically never have bands play there. There was no stage, so we just played on the dance floor. We thought we’d first play a set, take a break, and then play the second set. But the atmosphere got better and better the more we played, so we didn’t stop—we played for two hours straight. Ususally I really like to interact with the audience—breaking the wall between us and them is really cool. Smallish DIY shows like that make me feel close to the people who come out to see us play.

Neocha: Why do you sing exclusively in Cantonese? And why do you make a point of posting translated lyrics online in English and—more surprisingly—Japanese?

Tom Ng: I’m a bit more confident in my native Cantonese, compared to English and Mandarin. There are a lot of bands with better Mandarin than us, so we can just leave it to them. But we haven’t ruled out the possibility of using other languages. Every song is a little different: in there’s a subject I’m writing about, in others a scene or story and influences the lyrics, and in others I don’t know what I’m saying until I’ve finished and cleaned them up. “Wei Wei Wei” is a song I wrote while I was in Tokyo about an episode that occurred one New Year’s Eve after visiting a shrine with Honda Koshiyoshi. To show him I specially wrote this song about it, I asked Ms. Okumoto to translate the lyrics.

Josh Frank:  The translation process is unbelievably tiring. Most of the lyrics are pretty abstract, and they’re written in Cantonese, so I basically have to go sentence by sentence asking Tom what he’s trying to say. Translating lyrics is especially important because when listeners see the words they’ll experience our music on a deeper level.

Neocha: Who’s the audience in your head—the people you’re making music for? 

Tom: We make music first of all for ourselves, and we’ve never thought much about our audience. We have some fans in China, and in the US and Europe. But when we plan our next tours, I really think we owe it to the Cantonese-speaking audiences in the Pearl River Delta to put on some shows. I’ve also noticed that in the US, some second- or third-generation Asian Americans think that we can sort of represent them, as a group with one Asian and one white member.

Josh Frank: If anyone thought we represented them in any way, that’d be something to be happy about. And if we can get more people in Europe and America interested in music from other places, or get more Chinese musicians interacting more with musicians abroad, then that would be really good outcome. I think most of the people who listen to Chinese bands outside of China do so for the novelty and don’t think too much about their musical value. If we keep on touring and meeting new audiences, maybe we can slowly change their thinking and their understanding of China.

Neocha: Who would you say are your influences, and who are some of the newer musicians you like now?

Tom: The Monks and Bo Diddley have had a pretty strong influence on us. Personally I really like the music of T.O.W., with Yang Fan. They have an album coming out this year that I’m really looking forward to. Recently I’ve also really been liking Hiperson’s EP Four Seasons. For a post-punk band to suddenly come out with new songs like that is really cool. I also really admire Fazi—I’m impressed by how they put so much work into being a band. Other Chinese groups could learn a thing or two from them.

Josh Frank: Lately I’ve been listening non-stop to stuff by Sahel Sounds, a label in Portland that puts out music by contemporary Sahelian musicians, like Les Filles de Illighadad, or the guitarist Mdou Moctar, or the synth composer Hama. In electronic music, I like Buttechno’s release from last year, Minimal Cuts, and Yves Tumor’s new LP. And Jonathan Schenke, who recorded and co-produced Phantom Rhythms, has a new group called P.E., whose first album is also really good. And finally, since I’m stuck at home, I often listen to my dad play the synthesizer, and he’s really pretty good.

Neocha: What’s next for Gong Gong Gong?

Tom Ng: Right now there’s too much up in the air. Our UK tour in May got canceled, and our China tour in June is also pretty iffy. Hopefully this year we’ll finish our second album, but right now we can’t even get together—I’m in Hong Kong, and Josh is in Montreal. I really miss Beijing.

Josh Frank:  We’d scheduled nearly 40 concerts in Western Europe and Scandinavia, as well as China and Japan. Now it looks like we’ll have to wait and see. I just want to get back to Beijing, eat a meal at Guizhou Mansion, and really rehearse. We’ve got to get on tour again as soon as we can, and get our second album done!

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Weibo: ~/bjgonggonggong
Bandcamp: gonggonggong.bandcamp.com
Soundcloud: ~/gonggonggong

Contributor: Allen Young
Photographers: Liu Zhejun, Kevin W. Condon, Tyler Gamble, Richard Perez
Chinese Translation: Pete Zhang
Images Courtesy of Gong Gong Gong