A few weeks back, we featured a mix from Osaka’s Le Makeup, highlighting the Eternal Dragonz crew’s mission to forge a broad, cross-disciplinary identity contextualizing the work of Asian diasporic artists. Today, our focus turns to Shanghai’s SVBKVLT, another emerging outlet that embraces a far more specific, not to mention intense, approach to curation. Largely drawing from Chinese and China-based artists, SVBKVLT has made links between several traditions, namely noise, hardcore and rap, skewing towards a latex-clad, confrontational attitude and an innate performative spirit.
Alongside artists like Hyph11e, Swimful and Yen Tech, Shanghai-based, American interdisciplinary artist Osheyack has become one of the label’s stars over the past few years, conjoining an explicit hardcore ethos with the theatrical potency of proto-noise acts like Cabaret Voltaire and Coil. Early work, like 2015’s Fake/Fiction/Fraud, also set out an affection for various regional club musics with ballroom finding a particularly prominent space, while the five part “Clown” mix series showed off Osheyack’s voracious consumption of everything noisy and full frontal.
2018 was the year that Osheyack’s sound truly crystalized though, first on Empty Hell for SVBKVLT and later on his debut Sadomodernism LP for Bedouin Records. Initially premised on a 2015 remix for Pan Daijing and 2017’s “Pyre”, with frequent collaborators Milky He and Jordan Tierney, ripping rhythms, guttural moans and terrifying screams quickly became signature sounds across the two releases with tracks like “Parataxon” and “With Us” functioning simultaneously as rave anthems and body horror exhortations. The latter, a nod to New York’s ballroom culture as noted in an interview with The Ransom Note, also featured Nahash, a fellow Shanghai-based artist and affiliate of noise outlet Huashan Records. Featuring on three consecutive Sadomodernism tracks, the duo connect on a deeply intrinsic level, crafting a sound that comes off as both comprised of age old organic materials and hyper-modern methods.
For Astral Plane Mix 190, the duo have continued their prowess by linking elastic, backlit pop with a range of front foot hardcore contortions. At 26 songs in just 30 minutes, the blends come fast and potent here, always on the verge of careening out of control, but never quite leaving the roadway. Artists like Uganda’s Slikback, who recently spent time in Shanghai, Italy’s Nahshi, and Oakland’s Russell E.L. Butler make key appearances in the intricately layered patchwork, which seems to extends forward at an almost exponential rate. Hit the jump for a full track list and download Astral Plane Mix 190 here.
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The Astral Plane 