New Hope: Residence A Dreams Big

Nowadays in Beijing, a lot of young rockers are eager to dive into the flow of the market, hoping to catch a big wave. Then you have the boys from Residence A, who for two years have simply been making the music that their heart tells them to – and the result is a seriously promising young band.

To meet them, I went beyond the end of Batong Line, and walked down dirt roads past overgrown grass and a deserted factory, into a school for handicapped children. Through the broken glass windows I heard a few crumbling echoes of modern British punk in a hysterical loop, which brought me to Residence A’s ragged practice chamber. (Ten steps away is where Re-Tros practices.)

Why haven’t you signed to a label yet?
Maybe Mars wanted to sign us last year. But we want to try doing something ourselves first and see if we can do any better. We will release our first album very soon. We’ve already finished recording, but haven’t been able to come up with a suitable design for it.

What concept are you aiming for?
Please use your body to break free from desire and escape.

How big do you want to be?
Which band do you think is the best band in the world? Tell us a name – we want to be better than them. Every band wants to be big, no matter how underground they claim to be.

How has it been playing with bands from other countries?
Once we played at D-22 and a band from France was scheduled to play after us, but most of the audience left after we finished. That made us kind of happy.

How do you feel about studio recordings? I think you sound better live.
We feel the same. We’re quite crazy and loud live, but the recordings we’ve done have a completely different feeling. When we listen to the recordings, they’re so peaceful that you can almost fall asleep to it, which is also nice.

If you could perform anywhere in the world, where would you want to play?
Chen Shao (the bassist) wants to play at big international music festivals and have all the foreigners singing along with us in Chinese. Zhaozhao (vocals) wants to play in Mexico. He wants to play at a hot place that makes him excited and sweat a lot.

Check out Residence A at D-22 on Nov 11 and Yugong Yishan on Nov 16.

Click here to see the November issue of the Beijinger in full.

Photos courtesy of the organizers