This year for New Year’s Eve I decided to take my friend up on an offer to head down south with Beijing punk rock favorites SUBS, who were going to partake in the MIDI Festival in Shenzhen. To be honest, between catching the flu over Christmas and in general being sick of the cold and smog of winter, I was looking for any excuse to get out of Beijing. So I wholeheartedly agreed to join the band. Before the MIDI festival, the band was able to sneak in a New Year’s Eve festival gig in neighboring city Guangzhou. A local event, hosted by a group of kind (though not entirely organized) folks, the event, when compared to the next day’s MIDI Festival, was a much smaller scaled endeavor – just one stage and a collection of local bands, including hardcore outfit The Will On Kill and gothic metal trope Little Rain. The headliners were of course SUBS, but funny enough, just three songs into their set, complete with a pause to countdown to 2016, the band was forced to leave the stage by local authorities who figured any musical shenanigans after midnight was just too much to handle. A pretty anticlimactic way to enter the new year, but hey, that’s China. Included below are some snippets from my time in Guangzhou, which included a visit to Howie Lee of Full Label, a local label that puts out kick ass music. Also, seafood – heck tons of seafood.
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