Festivals. Want some? Here's a run-down of essential information you need for the season's first crop of music festivals happening in and around Beijing in the near future. Strictly the facts. Bing, bang, boom.

Friday, August 29-Sunday, August 31 Location/Transport: Changyang Binhe Park, a sprawling, 260,000 sq.-meter grassland deal, as per usual. Changyang Park is in the Fangshan District of southwestern Beijing, about 25 kilometers out from the city center. On public transport you're looking at an hour or so on the subway to get out there, riding Line 9 (never even heard of it) all the way down til it dead-ends into the Fangshan Line (never heard of it), then riding that out to either the Changyang (长阳) or Libafang (篱笆房) stops. From each there will be ferries to the festival site, or you can walk it in 10-20 minutes. Presumably will be ample signage. Tickets: Modern Sky hasn't announced how much tickets will be at the door. They just announced the lineup today, a week and a half before the damn thing, so obviously they're a bit behind the 8-ball with it. At least for now, you can buy your tickets online according to the following price scheme: 3-day pass = 460rmb; one-dayer for Friday, August 29 = 150rmb; individual tickets for August 30 and 31 are 180rmb a piece. Run-down/Line-up: Well, like I said, Modern Sky just released the lineup today, but any child born post-Y2K could have whipped up an algorithm crunching every Modern Sky / Strawberry lineup from the last five years and come up with a 90% accurate prediction. You've got your marquee Modern Sky indie rock & pop, of course (Peng Tan, Re-TROS, Lure, Hedgehog, Supermarket), plus a grip of more recent signees and participants in Modern Sky's House Party series of new band debuts (Da Bang, Streets Kill Strange Animals, Glow Curve, The Fallacy, Low Wormwood). That alone is packing a lot of kids in, the bread and butter of the Modern Sky festos. In addition… in addition, there's a whole lot of other shit. There are six stages and a few smaller tents, all crammed from roughly 2-9pm with bands, singer/songwriters, rappers, DJs — basically anyone who can stand on a stage and somehow produce sound for ~30 minutes. Skim the entire 3-day lineup and schedule here. As far as big-ticket international headliners go: there really aren't any. Modern Sky eschewed bringing out any grenades this year for a smaller, scattershot approach to international bookings. The most surprising to me is Pharmakon, who's this intense death industrial solo act that has somehow become Pitchfork-big. Her vibe is pretty contingent on getting up in people's shit and making them very uncomfortable so I'm not sure how it'll work on a huge stage surrounded by a barrier and guards, but hey, good for her. Then there's that Finnish band HIM, who were supposed to play Strawberry earlier this year but had visa issues or something; a couple of bands you might have been into in 2003 if you hung out at the mall a lot and were just too cool for Hot Topic (Xiu Xiu, Liars); Brooklyn Stereotype Garage; and this German singer-songwriter Jim Kroft, who seems pretty cool. One more note on the line-up: there are two electronic music stages at this year's Modern Sky Festival. Guess they really smell which way the wind's blowin' and the money's flowin' on that tip. One of them is called RELEASE, which not coincidentally is also the name of Modern Sky's spinoff label / club night thing featuring electronic dance music producers / DJs they consider potentially lucrative. The other stage is the Lantern Stage and it features DJs that play at Lantern every weekend. Literally every weekend. Release is also throwing the official Modern Sky afterparty (duh) at LIV on August 31. The writeup for that one is such a hilariously on-point EDM corporate press release jargon vomit ball that I'm just gonna reprint it verbatim: "After massive parties at UCCA and Tango, Modern Sky's RELEASE event hits up LIV, transforming the venue with video shows, entertainment on stage every 30 mins, and party lifting elements like CO2 jets, state of the art lasers." Why you should go: I don't know. See above. It is what it is. Modern Sky has pretty much muscled out all the competition and they own the festival game in China. They do it fairly well too, I guess. Not my shit but if you want three days of sensory overload and massive crowds, this is your jam. Could be fun if you have the right drugs don't do drugs! *

Two weeks, September 5 to September 14. September 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, to be specific. There's workshop, discussion, and screening events during the evening starting at 4pm and club events that run from 9 or 10pm until infinity. Location: The entirety of Beijing Sonic is going down at The Post Mountain Space in the north section of Dangdai MOMA. Basically, that involves getting yourself into the right section of MOMA (the bit north of the highway there) and then walking around and following people who look like they know where they're going. Post Mountain has been split into two spaces for the series of events -- the Bamboo Space and the Ming Space -- with the former for the talking, talking and the later for the dancing, dancing, pretty much. They're about 10 seconds from each other. Tickets: Tickets are a bit complicated. There's a lot of ins and outs to this thing. Okay, so, you can buy a ticket that will get you into the whole thing for 480rmb. Then you can buy a ticket for the first section of the thing -- September 5 to September 7 -- for 260rmb. You can buy a ticket for the second section of the thing -- September 11 to September 14 -- for 260rmb. THEN you can also buy a single day ticket for 100rmb. All of these categories are available through SmartTicket right here. So, that's the pre-sale. Door charge if you didn't manage to plan ahead to get pre-sales is 150rmb per day. Run-down/Line-Up: The first go out of the gate for this event, Beijing Sonic is a partnership between local DJ/promoter ZhiQi of local platform Shadowplay, local producer Dead J of Waveform, and Beijing label Tree Music. The event and artist run-down is ambitious to say the least, with six club events, five workshops, three ongoing art exhibitions, four documentary screenings, and 60 Beijing and international artists scheduled. They whole thing feels like a Shadowplay event writ large -- music is that steely and cool tech-house that plays well in Beijing, but the event as a whole makes overtures towards visual and performance art communities, presenting itself as a real hip thing to do. And they found a bunch of money to make some real deep cuts into the up-and-coming Continental techno community. Generally speaking, the majority of visiting artists have been imported from French and Berlin techno scenes, and reflect the current state of affairs in those locales towards deeper, darker, and more cerebral conceptions of techno, mixed in with a respect for that classicist house music. Getting right into it with the central international bookings, here's the key players you might be interested in: Berlin house music crate-digger Prosumer, resident DJ of Panorama in that city. For a taste, here's his Boiler Room set: French live techno technician Antigone. And deep-space French techno duo Polar Inertia. Of course, those are just three among a purported 60 artists involved. For the full line-up, click here. Why you should go: If you're interested in the current state of a particular techno in Europe, as it's influencing a crop of local Beijing artists and DJs, this is a pretty interesting opportunity. You got to respect the balls of it. I don't think there's a Wikipedia page between the 60 artists scheduled, and so it represents someone's obscure idea of where electronic music is going, and the belief that this music can say something to Beijing. (Hello Dead J?) Of course, there's all kind of other stuff involved -- workshops, screenings -- so it's worth looking deeper into. But, also, you should go because we're selling tickets for it and you should buy them so we can pay the rent, yo. *

Three days, September 6, 7, 8. There's a bunch of festival-organized buses leaving from Beijing starting from 1pm on September 6. They bring you back September 8, between 5am and noon. Location: It's a Great Wall festival but it's not that Great Wall festival. This one's at Huang Ya Guan Great Wall, Tianjin City, which is, allegedly, an hour and a half from Beijing or Tianjin by bus. Here's the location viewed from orbit: Here's the festival organizers' mock-up on what this is going to look like. Tickets: Tickets. Dirt cheap and really easy to comprehend. Hey, good for them. For this one, it's a three-day camping festival out at this section of the Great Wall, with entry costing 250rmb. Transport to the festival site is by bus, and it's 80rmb for the round trip. For accommodations, you're either camping on site or staying in a hostel. Here is all the information you need for ordering tickets and your accommodation options. Rundown: YinYang Festival is an electronic music festival hosted by a Shanghai-based party-hub called The Mansion. "The Mansion" is, as I gather it, an actual mansion out in a suburb in Shanghai, which transforms itself into a nightclub for the youth of that city to get up to shenanigans. Ostensibly, it's also a "creative space" for artists, musicians, DJs, to meet like-minded… blah, blah, blah… it really is a giant, fucking mansion out in a suburb in Shanghai and the kids like to get blotto in it. And some of them live there. I think. Read this article for more. I don't really get it. Looks nutty. Anyways, the Mansion family also plans the electronic portion of Shanghai's Midi Festival. This YinYang festival is them taking their big-tent bohemianism up north to a section of the Great Wall for a three-day camping plus baaangerrrzz music festival. The line-up is almost entirely China-based DJs from Beijing, Shanghai, and beyond, save for this guy, Dr. Lectroluv… Yeah. And these dudes, Kamara. Yeah. Here's the rest of the line-up. Shouted right at your face. Beijingren, some of those names should be familiar to you. DR. LEKTROLUV (VISUAL SET) / KAMARA (LIVE) / BELOW SURFACE / BEN HUANG / BOBBY /BODY/ CATCHOUMI / CHALLOP / DEXTER / EDEN / ELECTRONAIL / EL-MAR / F / FLORIAN BO / HARRY HO / HEATWOLVES / IVAN BARBERO / JASMINE LI & THEM WAITS / JULIANA LIMA / K.O.O.S. / LINA K/ METRO TOKYO / NASTY NATE / OUYANG / PUNX / Q-KRAFT / QQ / RAINBOW HIGH / ROO / SILICONE NOISE / T-DENIS / TIME STREET (BAND) / T-MEUM / WENGWENG Why you should go: Well, it's cheap, it's outdoors, it's something a bit different to do. Ever been to the Great Wall before? Do you like camping? Do you like the kids? Do you like to party-all-the-time-party-all-the-time? Of course you do. *

Saturday, Aug 23-Sunday, Aug 24 & Saturday, Aug 30-Sunday, Aug 31 Location/Transport: Yanqing Tanglewood Music Valley, which is way out by the Great Wall. Hence the name of the festival. Their website only has driving directions because presumably the normal clientele for this spot is people with enough money to own a car, but our buddy Will at Live Beijing Music says you can take the 919 bus from Deshengmen all the way to the last stop (Jingzhang Lukou Bei) and easily snag a cab from there. Will be a long commute any way you slice it, budget over an hour for the trip in either direction. Tickets: Pre-sale tickets are 120rmb for one day or 260rmb for a two-day pass, including camping privileges. Buy online here. Regular admission will be slightly higher if you sleep on it: 180rmb for one day / 300rmb for an overnighter. Run-down/Line-up: Well, I guess eclectic would be one way to describe the lineup for this "music festival." A euphemistic way. Each of the four nights has its theme, but that bears no relation to the lineup. "Rock Night", for example, features predominately rappers and DJs. "Rhythm Night" features a 30-minute trap set in the afternoon, followed by a School-brand indie band, followed by a musical standup comedian, followed by a 40-minute BMW showcase. Actually, each day features that BMW showcase. Hmm. There's really nothing exceptional about the "music" part of this festival but you can browse each day's lineup right here. Why you should go: The camping. The music is whatever but I've heard the venue is quite beautiful. Verdant hills and forests and all that. And it's also right next to the Great Wall of China. Have you ever been to that thing? It's awesome. If you're gonna go, go for the overnight to give your lungs a breather and to give your ears a reprieve from the inner city noise. *