Last month, our sister site Wooozy (purveyor of all that is interesting and indie in music in Chinese) conducted and subsequently published this interview with Josh Feola of Beijing based blog Pangbianr (which is also a purveyor of all that is interesting and indie in music in both Chinese and English). They kindly allowed us to reprint – here is part #2.
Pangbianr
Can you give us an introduction to Pangbianr and your current team?
Pangbianr started about a year ago with a group of friends who liked going to shows, drinking beer and talking about the things we were most interested: art, music, film and food. We launched the site in June 2009 with a few show reviews and recipes. At the beginning the team was pretty fluid, more or less a collective. Now that some of the original members have moved on from Beijing, our projects are a bit more centralized. At the moment the core team is about 6 people, though some of the current members are leaving Beijing this summer. We’re going to keep the core team small but at the same time figure out ways to increase community involvement.
Pangbianr is different from most music blogs in China, as it’s bilingual. Is it difficult to maintain?
I think it’s very important to publish bilingual content. One of our main goals is to have a site that is useful and interesting both for Chinese readers and an English-reading audience. It is difficult to do at times because I write or edit almost all of the content but I’m mostly self-taught in Chinese so I’m not qualified to translate myself. Luckily the pangbianr team and our friends are a mix of native Chinese and English-speakers, so we usually have several phases of translation and revision. It’s a bit complicated at times but the final result is worth the effort.
It seems that you prefer doing video interview with artists if possible? Why?
Videos give the viewer a more direct sense of an artist’s style and spirit. A video interview with a musician edited together with live performance footage gives a much better sense of what the artist is all about, as opposed to a print interview.
Pangbianr covers not only music, art and film, but also food. Why?
Well it started off as a mix of all of our interests but now it’s pretty clear that 99% of our content focuses on music. The original idea was to include food because, like with music, we wanted to increase awareness of local food culture, ie, how to find and cook with local and organic ingredients, which restaurants were in line with our food philosophy, etc. Besides a few recipes and restaurant reviews most of our food coverage has centered on Emi Uemura’s Country Fair organic farmer’s market project.
Pangbianr has done a lot offline events. What’s the actual role Pangbianr usually plays in these events?
The events we work on fall into two categories. There are “pangbianr events” where we coordinate with the venue and book the bands, sometimes adding a film screening or other visual component to the event. The other category is events where we mostly assist with promotion, advertising the event information on our site and sometimes featuring interviews with the artists. There’s a kind of hybrid category where we add music or film to an event that we co-organize with another venue or promoter.
Events are a very important component of pangbianr. Though I’m interested in bands and artists from all over China, we are Beijing-based and make it a point to have a strong local presence. By organizing events and working with other like-minded groups in the city we are contributing to a sense of local community collaboration.
what does pangbianr want to achieve? and what prevents Pangbianr from achieving this now?
Our mission is to create a platform for exploring the lived culture of making music in China and sharing this culture internationally. I would like to make the website a stronger resource for anyone, Chinese or not, to discover the incredibly prodigious output coming from China’s musical underground. In one sense this means increasing the scale of what we already do: more interviews, more videos, more compilations of music that we find interesting, more events and opportunities for the artists we work with to meet and combine in different ways.
The ultimate realization of our mission would be for us to “graduate” into a more polished production and distribution platform. We’d like to produce more original music releases and films that capture the creative energy of Beijing and China. We do distribute music now, but on a very small scale — we plan to widen our distribution networks both within China and abroad. Another major goal is to bring underground foreign artists to China for performances with local bands, fostering a personal exchange of music and experiences that will go a long way to building the kind of cross-cultural/international bridges we’re aiming for.
The main limiting factors are time and money. It takes time to establish a reputation for having integrity and a valuable point of view, to cultivate meaningful relationships and ingrain ourselves as legitimate members of the artistic community here. This is the most important thing and what we’ve focused the vast majority of our energy on to date. Money is secondary but absolutely necessary to execute the bigger projects we have in mind.
Do you know about any other websites in China which are doing similiar things? What do you think of them?
I’m not aware of anything exactly like pangbianr. There are plenty of music blogs but “blog” doesn’t quite capture our whole operation. I like NeoChaEDGE and how they function as a resource for learning about and potentially collaborating with emerging Chinese visual artists. I’d like to replicate that model for underground Chinese music. The organizations closest in spirit to what we do are Rose Mansion Analog, a DIY label/booking platform that produces high quality releases for a small subset of artists, and Zoomin Night, a weekly experimental music showcase in Beijing that also has an online community on douban, soundcloud, and via an email newsletter.