Few bands embody their hometown as completely as Duck Fight Goose. If Top Floor Circus was the quintessential Shanghai band of the early 2000s with their rowdy antics and stubborn commitment to singing solely in Shanghainese, the electronic quartet now hold that mantle – capturing the city’s fixation with advancement.
“Shanghai is running in a unique way in a very special context,” says the group’s frontman Han Han. “It’s the new cyberpunk capital. We describe it as ‘future fusion.’”
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It’s a term that perfectly describes the quartet’s sound. Their acclaimed 2012 debut Sports won wide acclaim for its mix of cold electronics and indie. But on their long-awaited follow-up, Club Zvkvnft, they’ve largely put away the guitars for an electronics-heavy, sci-fi inspired conceptual disc.
“We wanted to create a new soundscape,” Han explains. “Apart from the drums and bass guitar, all the other sounds on this album are completely different from those on Sports.”
He admits the group ditched 30 new songs “because they just didn’t feel right,” before landing on Club Zvkvnft’s concept a year ago.
Inspired by classic films (Alien, Blade Runner, Dark Star), comic books (GANTZ, Ghost in the Shell, All You Need is Kill) and video games (Fallout, Rage), Han describes the disc as a “product of all our inspirations and our own imaginations.”
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Taking place in the futuristic “glittering techno-financial hub of Shanghai,” Club Zvkvnft follows “a highly advanced cyborg looking for humanity and the ability to groove.”
“Personally, I believe the more advanced technology becomes, the more people will realize how precious humanity is, which is good” Han explains.
“Technology is just a word and a catalyst that pushes things forward like ‘fire’ in the primitive world or ‘religions’ several thousand years ago. It’s just what people believe now.”
The disc takes its name from the Zurich bar Club Zukunft (German for ‘club of the future’) that the band played at two years ago. “We just loved the name and the retro design of the bar," Han raves. “It looks like a bar from the 80s, but at the same it has very modern features. They mainly play European electronic music. It’s a fantastic hybrid of coolness.”
Furthering that aesthetic, physical copies of Club Zvkvnft mirror video game packages for X-Box, Playstation and PC computer games complete with a ‘game manual’ detailing the disc’s larger world.
For the album release show, Duck Fight Goose will link with D Force Records labelmates DOC in Shanghai (Aug 12 @ MAO Livehouse) and Beijing (Aug 20 @ Tango) for the Limbic Man show – one that Han promises will be a true audio-visual show.
“I really hate those random geometric shapes and lines that a lot of VJs use now, so I hooked up with the visual artist Neng Huo to make customized videos for the songs on both our and DOC’s album,” Han explains.
“Limbic Man is going to be an experience. I actually wrote a short story for each song and together they form a more rounded world. We’ve made some exciting visuals based on the album concept.”
Shanghai: Aug 12, 9-11pm, RMB120-150. MAO Livehouse, tickets.
Beijing: Aug 20, 9-11pm, RMB120-150. Tango, tickets.
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