Export Quality: Chunqiu Heads to the World's Largest Heavy Metal Festival

While the music buzz this summer has been about international musical acts coming to China, such as Metallica and Aerosmith to Shanghai, Pet Shop Boys, Pitbull, Justin Bieber, The Killers and Suede to our fair city, Beijing is also exporting the heavy stuff. Hanggai heads to Morocco later this year, and today (Wednesday), Kaiser's band Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn) will take the stage at Wacken Open Air, the world's largest heavy metal festival.

In the clip above, China heavy metal trailblazer (and former columnist at the Beijinger) Kaiser Kuo discusses that genre's history in the documentary Global Metal (click here for the clip outside of China). We also spoke to Kaiser just as he was getting on the plane for Germany.

TBJ: What does it mean for Chunqiu to be playing Wacken Open Air?

Kaiser: Wacken Open Air has a kind of mythic stature among metal festivals, and so naturally, it's a huge honor for Chunqiu to be playing – even if our set's preposterously short and we're one of the very first bands to play on the first day of the festival. We were considered for last year, but various things conspired to prevent that from happening. The organizers were apparently very keen on having a metal band from China that "sounded Chinese," and we fit the bill better than most, what with the heavily pentatonic melodies in our compositions.

For three of my bandmates, this will be their first time in Europe. Kou Zhengyu, one of our guitarists, actually played Wacken last year with his band Suffocated, so he knows his way around the festival. I was at the Fortarock XL festival in Nijmegen, the Netherlands in early June this year, and I'm very impressed with how orderly European Metal festivals are, given the prodigious amount of beer and the almost palpable testosterone in the atmosphere.

TBJ: How do you feel playing such a big gig after a long layoff with Chunqiu, especially with a new singer?

Kaiser: Since word came down that we had been picked to play, we've been working really hard to get back in shape, with very regular and rigorous rehearsals. Yang Meng, who moved back to Kunming at the end of 2012, unfortunately couldn't make it back to Beijing to rehearse and wasn't able to shell out his share of airfare for the trip, but we managed to find a very good substitute in Liu Bin, who fronts the band Die From Sorrow. He actually sounds a lot like Yang Meng, and was able to learn all his guitar parts with impressive speed. Just in the last month we've played four full shows, each about 90 minutes long, and with each show we've sounded better and worked out lots of the inevitable kinks. Liu Bin's someone we've all known for years, and he's a great fit with us.

TBJ: What do you hope this will mean for the band?

Kaiser: It's always great to spend time together as a band even when we're not actually playing. We can talk through song ideas, make each other watch the bands we particularly dig and soak in some of the things that they're doing, and of course create a good store of inside jokes, which are vital to sustaining a band. So my hopes are mainly for increased cohesion and maybe some good ideation.

We don't have particularly high hopes for being "discovered" and following this up with other European performances. There are, after all, hundreds of bands from all over the world converging on Wacken.

TBJ: Is this the biggest show you personally have played, including with (former band) Tang Dynasty?

Kaiser: It's certainly the biggest festival – all 75,000 tickets to Wacken have been sold – but I'm still not sure how big the crowd will actually be at our stage on that day. A lot of people may still be arriving and pitching tents. I doubt it'll top some of the crowds that I've played in front of in China: Snow Mountain back in 2002 with Chunqiu or stadium shows with Tang Dynasty. But daylight festival shows are actually scarier because you can see the crowd so clearly.

TBJ: What's next after Wacken for Chunqiu? A new album?

Kaiser: Getting ready for this show has reignited a bit of the passion for this band and its music and gotten us back into the swing of things. We realize that we still sound good and tight, and there's just no good reason not to start working up some new material. We figure, at the very least, we'll be playing around Beijing again in the coming months. We've already been booked for the MIDI Festival in Zhenjiang over the October National Day holiday. I hope to have some new material to play for that show. And yeah, eventually a new record. It's definitely on my bucket list.