*** After a months-long buildup, new player on the multi-site music festival scene Dong Dong is back for its second edition, starting this Wednesday. They've got 30 artists from all over the place spread across 11 gigs in 4 days in 4 separate venues. A lot of moving parts. A massive undertaking. To get the full panoramic scope of the thing, head over to their snazzy website. If you're pressed for time or lazy or just blindly trust my superlative opinions on such topics, here are my picks for the highlights of Dong Dong II: *** Let's kick things off with some hybrid island world folk vibes: Tiloun from Réunion. Tiloun plays Maloya, a Créole style I 100% had to wiki: "Maloya is one of the two major music genres of Réunion, usually sung in Réunion Créole, and traditionally accompanied by percussion and a musical bow. Maloya is actually a new form that has origins in the music of African and Malagasy slaves and Indian indentured workers on the island, as has the other folk music of Réunion, séga. World music journalists and non-specialist scholars sometimes compare maloya to the American music, the blues, though they actually have little in common. Unlike the blues, maloya was considered such a threat to the French state that in the 1970s it was banned." So like, incendiary Indian Ocean blues. I can hang. The Dong Dong heads have made a few ambassadorial trips down to Réunion Island, and Tiloun is the first artist they're sponsoring to make the trip in the other direction. Initially trained as a dancer, drummer, and singer, Tiloun came to Maloya later in life, inspired by musical reactions to the 1991 Réunion riots. I can't speak much to the specific social or musicological roots of his music, nor to its language. All I know is he has a very powerful voice: Damn. Tiloun kicks Dong Dong off, headlining on Wednesday, Nov 26 at Yugong Yishan. *** Dong Dong 2014 continues the emphasis on hotly tipped French headliners (remember last year's biggest name was ambient electro trio Télépopmusik) with a headlining appearance from Parisian post-punk / lo-fi garage hijinks trio Cheveu. Love these guys! Cheveu has been at it for the better part of a decade, making a strong initial splash with the release of their 2008 self-titled debut, and thoroughly confounding expectations with each subsequent release, most recent being 2014's BUM. They also make fantastic music videos. Here's one for "Polonia", the epic centerpiece of BUM, which entails a very slow build, a bunch of French being sampled, creepy floating baby headball choruses, and much more: Gonna get to the bottom of Cheveu's whole thing with an interview later in the week. Stay tuned for that — these dudes give a good interview. They're at Yugong Yishan on Thursday, November 27. *** Now, let's pivot around to local talent, something that Dong Dong is very good at doing. Opening for Cheveu is new-for-2014 Beijing psych rock trio Gate to Otherside, who are pretty fantastic. Covered them a while back. Also on the bill is Changsha's Colourhunter, who were in this year's crop of bands to record with P.K.14 frontman` / Midas touch producer Yang Haisong as part of Modern Sky's "House Party" incubator sub-label. These guys might have played Beijing before, but if so it totally flew beneath my radar. They also don't have anything I can embed here as a preview; just a few Douban streamers. Their album — which wrapped production six moths ago or so — is nowhere to be seen, because Modern Sky has serious follow-through issues with stuff that isn't just printing them fistfuls of money at warp speed. So, there's your reason to go. Check out some fresh blood pumping in new sounds from an underrepresented part of the Mainland scene, breaking up the Beijing / Shanghai oligarchy. Colourhunter opens up for Cheveu on Thursday 11/27 @ Yugong *** More fine foreign + Chinese music pairings later that night, at the Dong Dong Dada afterparty. Riding in under the Luxembourgish (Google: "luxembourg adjective") flag is Victor Ferreira, who churns out "glitchy, summer obsessed" electro as Sun Glitters. This caps a long year of glitchy, field-recording-based, pitch-shifted vocal ambient music that's come through Dada (Blue Hawaii, Yosi Horikawa, Lone being a few very recent examples off the top of my head). It's a thing, and it's pleasant to experience on Dada's superior system. Here's a sample of Sun Glitters: Local live sets supporting this one as well. White+ returns for their third drum-less appearance at Dada, having worked out the kinks a bit at that Yosi Horikawa gig last month. And Beijing's FAR/∞ plays his last live set of the year, following up on the successful launch of his debut album, Dark Bridges, at BEME 2014. "Automated, randomized, clinically precise beats with an aggressively digital edge only sporadically buffed by warm, electro-acoustic accents," I say, in the press release I wrote for it. "Sleek, icy, detached work that sounds like the work of Skynet if they started DJing about town during the machine uprising" says Live Beijing Music. But don't take our word for it! Sun Glitters, White+, and FAR/∞ play on Thursday, November 27 at Dada. *** Also on the electro tip, blurring the line between "Chinese" and "foreign": Fifi Rong, from Beijing via London. Fifi was pulled into the Dong Dong fold by Syndicate DJ Alex Taggart, and is one of the marquee acts of this year's Dong Dong, straddling dance and rock contexts (she's at Dada on Friday, Nov 28 and at Yugong on Nov 29). As you might expect, we're looking at another mixed stylistic bag here: jazz, ambient electronica, grime, dub (both reggae and -step), trip hop. She recently collaborated with trip hop legend Tricky, lending vocal talents on two tracks from last year's False Idols. Pretty big waves for a Beijing artist working the far more competitive London music grind. Fifi's gone on to release her debut album on Tricky's label, and is now readying a follow-up EP, quite literally titled Next Pursuit. Here's a live sample of that: Catch Fifi Rong on FRI Nov 28 @ Dada with Howie Lee and Télépopmusik's Antipop, then again on SAT Nov 29 @ Yugong with Shanghai's AM444 and CALLmeKAT from Denmark. *** One more for you, a personal favorite within this year's fairly deep Dong Dong lineup: Caliph8 from Manila. I saw Caliph8 play a few years back at XP. He was in town with Danish duo Crash & Compute under the aegis of Antidote, the decade-deep progressive electronic booking label of Shanghai producer B6 and Dada impresario Michael Ohlsson. At XP Caliph8 did an improvised, experimental beat set on MPC and vinyl, delivering a crushing dancefloor pleaser the following night at Dada. These two performances underscore his dual interest as an artist. Here's a Caliph8 beat tape released last year by Shanghai's finest purveyors of pan-Asian electronic boundary burning, SVBKVLT: Caliph8 returns to Beijing on Saturday, November 29, a Dong Dong x Antidote collaboration. Highly recommended. *** That's a lot, but there's plenty more Dong Dong for you to consider. Find the full Dong Dong 2014 festival program here, and individual artist bios here.