"A friend of mine told me I should visit Shanghai and especially the club Shelter," said Tess Sun, AKA Hyph11E. "After going, I decided to move to Shanghai and make my own music."

Underneath Yongfu Lu, once one of Shanghai's premiere nightlife streets in the former French Concession, sits a Cold War-era nuclear bunker where modern Chinese club music was born. From 2007 through 2016 this basement was called Shelter. It was different to the glitzy, expat-oriented clubs that came before it: no plush furniture, no bottle service, no fancy lighting. It was a dingy concrete basement with worn-out walls and an emphasis on cheap drinks and throbbing music. "For better or for worse, they'd rather have an empty floor than play cheesy tunes," said one SmartShanghai article. "They are not the friendliest people, but they keep it real."

The venue changed the scene in Shanghai, introducing a new style of clubbing to China. Out of Shelter came SVBKVLT. Established in 2013, the label has become the beating heart of Shanghai's small but inspiring scene, which mixes fashion, technology and music. Along with fellow label Genome 6.66Mbp, SVBKVLT is where to go to hear cutting-edge electronic music from China.

SVBKVLT is an experimental club music label, part of a global network where producers throw together sub-genres and create loud, fast and often confrontational tracks. Its key artists include breakout star 33EMYBW, who calls her music "limb dance," and Zaliva-D, a Beijing duo who sound like a military marching band from Mars. The Shanghai-based US artist Osheyack makes Ballroom and gabber-infused tracks with a fierce finesse, while Hyph11e mashes up gqom and grime.

Last year the label released the astounding Cache 01 compilation, the HOXXXYA album from Indonesia's Gabber Modus Operandi and a joint release with Uganda's Hakuna Kulala that saw Slikback collaborate with Hyph11e on one EP, and Osheyack, 33EMYBW and Yen Tech on another.

The label was started as an offshoot of a dubstep party run by Mancunian expat Gaz Williams with his friend (and, at the time, noted Shanghai DJ) Blaise Deville. Williams was first drawn to China because of his love for Wu-Tang Clan and kung fu movies—he even visited the Wudang Mountains, which gave the rap group their name—but his goofy obsession soon became serious. After teaching English in Qingdao and traveling around China, he learned Mandarin and enrolled at Shanghai University, where he was introduced to the local dance music scene, which at the time still revolved around outsiders and Western expats.

Williams started a dub and reggae night at C's, one of the most hallowed venues in Shanghai nightlife history, before forming a collective, PAUSE, with Michael Ohlsson and Jane Siesta (a local drum & bass DJ and promoter). They threw an event at a divey bar called Blue Ice before Williams finished university and headed back to the UK. Before long, he was back in Shanghai and had taken over Blue Ice, turning it into Shelter with Gary Wang. The club's dark confines, and Williams' raucous, bass-heavy Subculture night, left an impression on almost everyone who went or played.

Williams saw the club not just as an events space, but as a place to foster a scene—a community oriented around world-class dance music instead of bottles of cognac and champagne. The Subculture night made Shelter a hotspot for genres like dubstep, drum & bass and hip-hop, though the club hosted all kinds of events. For many young Chinese, it was where they first discovered nightlife.

SVBKVLT started as a low-key operation. Williams released a few old-school beat tapes from some of his friends: Hong Kong's Floyd Cheung, local artist Faded Ghost (who also goes by ChaCha, and previously collaborated with Kode9), and Manila pair Cali[h8 and Red-I, along with the duo SLV, who also gave the label its first vinyl release.

"Hyph11E moved to Shanghai from Beijing, Osheyack started playing at Shelter, Tzusing's releases on L.I.E.S. were getting a lot of attention and in the midst of all of that, Genome started putting on nights—suddenly Shelter was filling up with hundreds of Chinese teenagers and 20-somethings," SVBKVLT artist Swimful told me over email. "It felt like there was a demand for Shanghai-made club music. Around that time you could drop '叶子' by Hyph11E, my 'Shanghai Remake,' or Zean, Dirty K or Osheyack tunes, and the crowd would recognize it. That's when I felt the scene really galvanized and SVBKVLT became really important for us."

In late 2016, Shelter was forced to close after failing to renew its lease. A few months later, Williams opened a new club, ALL, on Xiangyang North Lu in the neighbouring Changning district. ALL wasn't meant to be Shelter's successor, but it was where Shelter’s crowd flocked after its closing, along with Elevator, known for its techno and house booking policy. In addition to club nights, the venue hosts screenings, relaxed get-togethers and concerts. It's a new hub for the Shanghai scene, with a bustling schedule of local and international guests.

Williams is a friendly, open-minded guy who respects and admires the culture around him. He seems more interested in supporting local artists than promoting himself. Both Shelter and SVBKVLT have become incubators of sorts for artists in China, giving them a platform when few other labels would.

"Shelter and ALL have played an indispensable role in promoting and developing electronic music scene in China," 33EMYBW said. "Not just music, but also expanding to other cultural and art forms."

After ALL opened, releases from artists like Swimful started to earn traction abroad. The style of the label—confrontational, fast, hybridized—began to form in 2016 with releases from Osheyack and Prettybwoy, culminating in Hyph11e's "Black Pepper," a SVBKVLT anthem that Williams signed immediately after hearing her play it at Elevator. (Two years later, Williams signed Gabber Modus Operandi in the toilets at Berghain after watching them play live at CTM Festival.)

SVBKVLT has become the source of the most exciting club music in the world right now. In this Label Of The Month article, we profile six of its key acts.

Hyph11e

Tess Sun scored SVBKLVT's biggest club hit with 2017's "Black Pepper," a hybrid of gqom, grime and trap with nightmarish samples: harsh grunts, what sounds like guns being cocked and a bird noise that makes you feel like you're deep in the jungle.

"Around this time Swimful was telling Gaz that he needed to release something from me, but at that time I'd only really made '叶子' (released on a Genome compilation) and a couple of other things and they weren’t really 100 percent finished," Sun said. "Then at the end of 2016, me and Zean were playing after Murlo and I played the 'Black Pepper' demo to see how it would sound in the club. Gaz ran to the DJ booth and asked Zean who made the track. I had about two to three months to finish the whole Vanishing Cinema EP so that we could release it."

In addition to the incredible Vanishing Cinema EP, Sun co-produced one of the label's most brain-scrambling releases, Slip B, made with Slikback during the Kampala-Shanghai exchange last year. The two artists' individual approaches to percussion—sharp, ecstatic, punishing—merge into a strong but flexible alloy, with drums meted out in choppy, volatile patterns.

Swimful

Formerly known as Swimful Butterfly, the Shanghai-based Brit Jamie Charlton was one of the first artists to break out internationally. His early music was a melange of downtempo styles vaguely connected to the Los Angeles beat scene, though there was always a lilting quality to his work that set it apart. He said he was especially inspired by Lil B's Rain In England and other cloud rap of the time.

"On the first day I moved to Shanghai, I met up with Damacha, an American producer who I'd started talking to on Twitter," said Charlton. "We started making music together and alongside another friend, Denzxl, started playing a regular Tuesday night at C's, a dive bar that you can trace a lot of Shanghai electronic music's roots back to. One night, Gaz and Cammy (AKA Shanghai Ultra, founder of techno night VOID) dropped in for a drink by chance. I was playing 'Xingfu Lu' by Kode9 and Gaz came up to the booth, said he liked what I was playing and that 'Xingfu Lu' was made in his flat during one of Kode9's trips to Shanghai."

"Back when SVBKVLT started, and even when I joined the label around 2015, our scene was remarkably small," he added. "We were really just a group of friends who liked producing music and hung out by the booth at Shelter on the weekends. I don't think there were even enough producers in the scene at the time to have a label that could consistently release music."

Charlton's music is the prettiest on SVBKVLT. Even with the rougher exterior of his Pm2.5 album, which was inspired by the dangerous air quality of China's biggest cities, the expressive qualities remain, incorporating the wheedling melodies of Chinese opera. He often employs references to Chinese music, and pentatonic scales, which lends his music a Chinese influence without being clumsy. An EP like Pearls, with its occasional bursts of woodwind, sounds like the kind of instrumental hip-hop you might make if you were surrounded by Chinese music for long enough.

Charlton's best music is his most recent, particularly last year's '80s-inflected Folding Knives and its opener "Plain," or 2018's "Dove" with Palmistry, a featherweight plastic-and-neon flip on dancehall.

Osheyack

Though Eli Osheyack has only put out two EPs on SVBKVLT, it's hard to imagine the label without him—he embodies the SVBKVLT ethos so well, a middle ground between all the weird stuff going on around him. The American artist first visited Shanghai in 2012 and never left. Like so many in the Shanghai scene, he owes at least part of his success to Tzusing, who asked him to play his Stockholm Syndrome night at Shelter, where Gaz Williams heard him for the first time.

Osheyack's first EP, Fake/Fiction/Fraud, is one of the label's heaviest releases, a mix of lunging ballroom stabs and itchy-feet percussion. He came into his own two years later—around the same time he released his first album, Sadomodernism, on Bedouin—with the Empty Hell EP. The encroaching influence of techno and rave is stronger here, with the gabber kicks of "Hidden Teeth" and even a cheeky edit of Corona's "Rhythm Of The Night" that uses snatches of the chorus like a battering ram.

Gooooose

Gooooose is the alias of Han Han, an artist who started out playing in bands in Hefei in Anhui Province. He wasn't all that experienced with electronic music, but a tip led him to Shelter around 2011, where the music took him by surprise.

"The best thing about Shelter and ALL is, while it can function as a typical club on the weekends, you can also find lots of experimental, harsh noise or ambient music on weekdays, which is mind-blowing to me, especially in Shanghai," he wrote over email. "This attitude definitely resonates with the music styles of the label."

"I was super curious about how electronic music was made, so going [to Shelter] was kind of a learning experience. I met Tzusing, who went to Shelter a lot, and we were talking about gear and software. He was a good friend of Gaz so I started sending stuff to him, mainly because I had no idea whether the track was good or not. Actually, if it wasn't for him and Tzu I might still be playing math rock and adding random preset synth sounds into my track and thinking I'm making proper electronic music."

Han Han's music doesn't sound rooted in any one style of dance music—imagine discovering several subgenres at once in a dark, loud club, and you can start to understand where his music is coming from. He creates his own Max/MSP devices and then uses them to write his tracks, which move in unpredictable ways with odd, alien sounds. He references Autechre, but his music also has a lot in common with classic experimental artists like Iannis Xenakis and David Tudor (whose work he studies intently), even as it interacts with the experimental club music around him.

His Rusted Silicon album is one of SVBKVLT's most striking releases. Breakcore-style Amen runs suddenly crash into Boards Of Canada-style chords on "Plasma Sunrise," while trap-informed percussion rolls across the stereo spectrum on "Uncanny." His tracks rarely have a discernible structure, but they hardly feel freeform either: there's a method to the madness in a slow, pounding, itinerant track like "Resort."

Zaliva-D

Zaliva-D is a duo from Beijing. Li Chao makes music while Aisin-Gioro Yuanjin handles the visuals, which should indicate the most important aspect of their work: it's crafted for live performances. Even the records have the rough thrust of angry punk. Chao's sounds are halfway between futuristic industrial and traditional Chinese music, with hard-to-place instrumentation and unconventional melodies.

The project has been around since 2003, and by 2016, Chao was fed up with not being heard outside of China. No one he knew seemed interested, so Tzusing directed him to Williams, who jumped at the chance to release Zaliva-D's music, starting with the Sky Singing album in 2018.

"When I was young, I listened to extreme music all the time," said Chao. "Although I stopped listening to this music a long time ago, something with similar characteristics stuck in my mind forever. I have always had certain fantasies and conjecture about the old, distant and unknown, and most of them are negative, depressing and even obscene. I really enjoy it. It gives me a special mood when I'm making music."

The idea of the "old" is at the heart of Zaliva-D, which sounds more rustic than electronic. On Sky Singing and its scary follow-up EP, Calling, voices appear often, in grunts and strangled gurgles, before being manipulated into percussion. It's easy to imagine this music soundtracking ancient rituals or battles, and both Zaliva-D records on SVBKVLT (they've also released on Amsterdam's Knekelhuis and Chinese black metal label Pest Productions) exemplify the label's uncanny approach.

"Looking back, I'm glad I didn't release music on the European labels that rejected me," Chao said. "Maybe they could have brought me much less than SVBKVLT, which brought vitality to new music in the new era."

33EMYBW

After a lauded performance at Unsound 2019 and a mind-bending album last year, you can expect to hear the (unpronounceable) name 33EMYBW a lot more this year. She first appeared as 33 on the 2015 compilation Downpour, where "EMSYGYDL" hinted at what would become her signature: inscrutable vocals and mallet-like percussion that wiggles in elliptical patterns. Her musical career goes back to the same Hefei band scene as Han Han's, and her introduction to electronic music was the same: Shelter. And, like Gooooose, the music of 33EMYBW is unprecedented, described by the artist herself as "limb dance."

33EMYBW's approach is highly conceptual and often obtuse, centered around technology, the internet, the occult and Chinese anime and gaming culture. But more than anything she's inspired by arthropods, an animal phylum that includes crustaceans and spiders, and their regimented, almost robotic limbs, which represent the kind of cyborg hybrid her music seems so consumed with (look at her trippy cover artwork or check out the video for "Golem," taken from her 2018 debut album of the same name).

33EMYBW turned heads with her second album, Arthropods, which took that idea to heart and imagined a world ruled by spindly, hard-shelled critters. She layers rhythms in a way that would be impossible for a human to play, bringing to mind scorpions and spiders scuttling along a tiled floor. It sounds like music from a different universe, and the mix of human and inhuman vocals—operatic wails, heinous grunts—adds to a feeling of strangeness. This is where the value of 33EMYBW's music lies: in a constantly referential and reverential music scene, where past glories are repeated and reshaped, 33EMYBW and the other artists on SVBKVLT are doing what often seems impossible.

Label of the month mix

Subculture cofounder and former Shelter resident Blaise Deville mixes a comprehensive history of the label.

Tracklist /
Faded Ghost - Signal Jam
Zaliva-D - Calling
Gooooose - Resort
Zaliva-D - Groan (Citizen Boy Remix)
MIIIN - Metagame
Mun Sing - Left
33EMYBW - Arthropods Continent (feat. Li Jianhong) (Ikonika Remix)
Tzusing & Hodge - Electrolytes
Hyph11E - Black Pepper
Hyph11E - Black Pepper (Slikback Remix)
Prettybwoy - Cat Street
Kai Luen - Ash
Osheyack - Fake
Nahash - Terror Corps
Swimful - Shanghai (Howie Lee Remix)
CELES7E - BLIZZARD
Scintii - Deux
Seven Orbits - Ravevv101
Osheyack - I Not Me (KABLAM Remix)
33EMYBW - Adam Bank
Gooooose - Uncanny
Caliph8 - Tetrahedron
SLV - Dagger
SLV - Killers VIP
Gabber Modus Operandi - Kon
Seven Orbits & TSVI - Submechanophobia
Slikback & Hyph11E - ISHU
33EMYBW - Drum3
Slikback & Hyph11E - SHIMIAN
Nahash - Changement De Régime
33EMYBW - Seeds of the Future
Gabber Modus Operandi - Sangkakala III
Swimful - Sapphire - Swimful
Gabber Modus Operandi - Calon Arang
Yen Tech - 진짜 Jincha
Swimful - Agony (feat. Yayoyanoh & Organ Tapes)
Yen Tech - Torque
Swimful - Dove (feat. Palmistry)
Kai Luen - And So It Begins..
Downstate - Wait Up
Faded Ghost - Buried