*** And now, post-solstice, the days get shorter, the night creeps closer. We continue to slip out after hours, avoiding the heat and the light shining on our collective faults. Here are some orchestral maneuvers in the shadows happening this week in Beijing, electronic signals passing from circuit to circuit, body to body, with an unseen buzz to make you jump back into the void. Dark moves: *** First up, tomorrow night: newly re-invigorated minimalist electronic pop duo Jia Huizhen + Yao Sichen returns to XP, the first venue to regularly book them gigs, for one last performance before it closes. Jia Huizhen had gone dark for a while there. Last I heard about them, Helen Feng was talking about representing them on her label, FAKE. In the end, that amounted to them fizzling into oblivion for over a year. Luckily for us, Jia Huizhen has just started making noise again, this month launching a new one-single-per-month campaign aiming to get their sounds back into the hearts & ears of Beijing's more discerning electronic music aficionados. Here's the first effort on that front, June's "逐流 (slice of you)": Joining them on Wednesday at XP is Djang San, one of the busiest men tilling the hard soil of the Beijing Underground. Djang, coming off a headlining slot at this past Sunday's Fête de la Musique, will tomorrow give a rare solo performance, tinged with more electronic synth experimentation and less zhongruan-shredding crossover rock. See his excellent 2013 studio freakout Electronic Music for Chinese Restaurants for reference: Rounding out the bill is the maximalist dance-noise onslaught of Noise Arcade, another longtime XP regular bidding his final farewell. In anticipation of tomorrow's show, Mr. Arcade has this to say: "I've decided to go out with a bang. There will be two performance artists from the best band in Beijing and Jeff Yiu will VJ too. Fucked if I know what exactly is going to happen but it sure beats the shit out of pub quiz." AMEN. 30rmb (includes a free drink), 9pm start. More *** And it gets darker. On Thursday night, Dada hosts the hard-edged industrial noise/techno of Pan Daijing. Pan recently moved to Shanghai after an extended stay in Berlin, where she soaked up the darker elements of that city's famed electronic music underground. Since relocating, she's become a fixture at nefarious noise den The Shelter, being dubbed in some corners as "the first lady of aggro-techno in Shanghai." Check it: Pan has also done one-off artistic and musical collaborations, such as a pretty fuckin' dark-looking, S&M-themed performance she gave over the weekend at Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum. She's getting ready to release a cassette for Shanghai bad vibes peddlers Huashan Records, as well as a six-song EP + zine for Berlin label Noisekölln featuring a live score of dark ambient compositions she made for a collaborative performance she gave last year with a performance artist from London. Heavy moves. Last night it was also announced that Pan will be representing China in the Red Bull Music Academy Class of 2015. Here's their effusive description: "Perched on the cutting edge where Shanghai’s music and art scenes blur into one another, Pan Daijing’s music is steeped in dark noise, cinematic atmospherics and sexual charge, drifting into eerie Morphosis-esque drone and giddy, twisted beats. A sound director at a Shanghai art gallery, she’s crafted sonic installations for exhibitions and live scored art performances and dance shows... Influenced equally by 1980s industrial music, philosophy and Chinese minority and Tibetan music, field recordings in temples and sound collaborations with shamans are all in day’s work for this bladerunner." Sure, why not! Pan will give a live set on Thursday, June 25 at Dada. Expect hard dance industrial with a gothic twist, curiously compelling electronic noise, and future bass murk. Support in the same dark vein from J Chan and Bloodzboi. And you can catch a less structured encore on Friday at XP, when Pan will join Horacio Pollard, Ryan Jordan, and SoundSpade for a speaker-melting electronic noise showcase. *** Deeper into the dark: on Friday at DDC, Shanghai-Amsterdam duo AM444 Beijing-releases their heavily hyped new EP, Dark Show. They say to expect "a more electronic sound that is equal parts futuristic and retro – full of warped 808 drums, floating arpeggiated synths and addictive analog basslines," complemented by dark lyrical reflections from vocalist ChaCha (also an RBMA alum, incidentally). Here's the paint-by-numbers "dark dangerous shit" music video for the title track: This is very much in the Nova Heart school of appropriating S&M imagery to make an otherwise prosaic idiom of female-vocal electronic pop music seem more avant and challenging than it actually is. Feels a bit flat compared with Pan Daijing, whose music actually sounds dangerous and whose day job actually involves designing stainless-steel bondage gear. But that's just my two cents! ChaCha is an amazing vocalist and her partner in crime Jay Soul is a competent producer. On Friday at DDC they'll be joined by local heads J-Fever and Soulspeak, who by all accounts killed it at last Saturday's Do Hits! anniversary rager. 80rmb, 9pm start. More info *** Last one before the screen goes dark: on Saturday at XP, long-quiet Beijing label Sinotronics presents an evening of progressive electronic music in collaboration with Beixinqiao art residency I: Project Space and their current exhibit, wangwangwang. The theme is offline digital sights+sounds. There will be live visuals from interactive design firm Moujiti's Lulu Li and other artists included in the I: Project exhibit, plus live music from Hong Qile, Menghan, Shanghai-based new music composer Cole Ingraham performing solo as 55hz, and multi-media artist FAR/∞, performing a collaborative set with contemporary dancer Wang Yuanqing. Here's FAR/∞'s 2014 album Dark Bridges, because he hasn't performed in like six months, and because it squarely fits today's theme: 40rmb (includes one free drink), 8pm start. BONUS ROUND: super-dark afterparty for that one takes place at Dada, where Shanghai-based producer and plotter SoundSpade will throw his latest Black Eyeliner night, along with Cavia, Penguin:D and more. *** RECAP: Jia Huizhen, Djang San, Noise Arcade = WED June 24 @ XP Pan Daijing = THU June 25 @ Dada + FRI June 26 @ XP AM444 = FRI June 26 @ DDC FAR/∞, Hong Qile, Menghan, 55hz = SAT June 27 @ XP Black Eyeliner = SAT June 27 @ Dada