Was looking for something offbeat and you best believe I found it. Nanjing outfit White Elephant, founded by Ka Liening and Li Wen (both key members of the now defunct avant garde outfit 8 Eye Spy), is unlike anything else I’ve seen. With the addition of a violin, guitar, and synthesizer, the band has transformed into a strange hybrid of spoken word beatnik poetry and frenzied punk prog jazz that’s cool, jagged, off-putting, and alluring all at once. It’s unclassifiable – the band themselves don’t even now what genre they fall under, instead happily referring to themselves as ‘Adult Music’.
Whatever you want to chalk it up as, I’m in. Need some more weirdness and my life, and White Elephant hit the spot. Expect to see an album drop from these cats in 2018. Support came from Zhang Shouwang and Yan Yulong who gave an intoxicating keyboard based performance of Phillip Glass-esque looping themes and melodies that felt in some ways like white +’s rowdier cousin.
Be the first to comment