Ourself Beside Me

Photos by Madi Ju

Sweet Factory is a tiny recording studio unexpectedly tucked into a nondescript apartment complex outside Beijing’s 3rd Ring Road.

Inside, three girls in jeans and vintage shirts—known as Ourself Beside Me—are lounging on the couch and shag carpet, one idly toying with a tambourine as the engineer and producer set up to record their debut album. It hardly looks like Beijing rock history in the making, but sometimes evolution is a pretty subtle thing.

The retro trio has quickly become one of Beijing’s buzziest acts. Guitarist and singer Yang Fan is hardly new to hype—while still a teenager she founded Hang On The Box, the iconic all-girl punk band that helped define the Chinese underground in the nineties. After HOTB disbanded last year, Yang (now 27) turned in her studded collar and formed Ourself Beside Me with friends Xie Han (21, bass, film student) and Emi Namihira (27, drums, a Japanese student who studied Chinese for a year and never went back). Befitting a new, more expansive era of Beijing music, they began forging an electrifying new sound—that is, an older one.

But what kind of sound are they looking for, Xie Han considers. “Hmm…More like ourself.”

“Syd Barrett!” Yang Fan and Xie Han both exclaim, when asked about influences; Yang Fan discovered rock’n’roll in middle school via Pink Floyd’s The Wall—it was cheaper than the other cassettes and had better cover art. This psychedelic affinity permeates their songs, but filtered through tight, mannered melody lines and a rhythmic, garage-y thump, all underlying Yang Fan’s trademark whisper/shout of oblique English lyrics. The interweaving of guitar and bass bears traces of Talking Heads, The Fall, Television, and the Velvet Underground, with an insistent twist.

Producer Yang Haisong (founder of veteran rock band PK 14) has his work cut out for him trying to get OBM’s debut disc right; the band’s paradoxically meandering but tight live presence isn’t easy to capture. But what kind of sound are they looking for, Xie Han considers. “Hmm…More like ourself.” She shouldn’t worry too much. Smack in the midst of Beijing’s ever-mutating scene, there’s no one else who sounds quite like Ourself anyhow.