Dusty Ballz seeks to build bridges, introducing musicians reacting to Chinese contexts into international dialogues around new music. Founded by China-born, currently London-based Mabu Li in 2020, all releases on Dusty Ballz have been recorded in China, predominantly by artists who currently live there.

Several artists on Dusty Ballz, such as Lao Dan, Sheng Jie or Zhang Meng, have formal training in Chinese classical music. Others, such as Chunyang Yao or Hugjiltu, make music which embraces the traditions of their ethnic minority heritages while challenging exoticising expectations. Meanwhile, the label is also informed by fieldwork Mabu did for his PhD on dakou, also known as cut-out culture, in China. In the 90s, surplus tapes and CDs were shipped from the West to China to be recycled into raw material for the manufacturing industry. The discs or tapes were cut with the intention of making them unplayable. “The cut was to show it’s no longer a cultural commodity, it’s become plastic waste,” Mabu summarises, explaining that it was through dakou that a large bulk of western pop and alternative music entered and circulated through China. “People found ways to repair the tapes and discs so they could be listened to, which led to a grey economy, which led to the first underground music scene in China.”

Through Dusty Ballz, Mabu seeks to publish music that reflects and experiments with these diverse traditions and histories.

Lao Dan
“鹅不食草 Goose-no-eat Herb”
From Chinese Medicine 草乙术 (2020)

Dusty Ballz originated in Mabu’s desire to present the music of Lao Dan – a classically trained Chinese bamboo flautist who in 2013 picked up the saxophone and ventured into free jazz – to an audience outside of China. Chinese Medicine documents a 2019 live set where Lao Dan plays tenor saxophone with his hands and zheng, a Chinese zither, with his feet. His saxophone playing oscillates seamlessly between fluid and jagged, as if streams of notes are being poured through a maze of crooked plumbing. The zheng comes in as sporadic clumps, off-grid punctuation to the saxophone’s swings between jagged, yelping and soaring.

Deng Boyu
“三条 Three-Bamboo”
From Tractor Academy 拖拉机学院 (2021)

Deng Boyu’s Tractor Academy sees electroacoustic approaches to percussion collide with dank noise and scrambled beats. Deng Boyu’s tools include, according to the liner notes, “a vibrator, a gong, and various metal objects”. While Deng Boyu’s background is as a drummer in free jazz and improvisation, Tractor Academy is a tape of relentlessly distorted, vertiginous glitches combining to give the impression you’ve got your ear pressed up against an over-burdened speaker in a barely lit basement club. It occasionally drops, such as on “Copper Ball”, but these moments when the splayed rhythms turn into more concrete beats add to rather than alleviate the music’s bewildering onslaught. “In his electronic music Deng Boyu wants to do a Chinese version of IDM,” suggests Mabu. “He heard IDM through dakou when he was really young. On Tractor Academy he’s engaging with that tradition from a Chinese perspective.”

Hugjiltu
“城楼 Gate Tower”
From Cycle 循环 (2022)

Based in Beijing and with roots in Jarud Banner, Inner Mongolia, Hugjiltu was part of the groups Hanggai and Ajinai. His solo work stems from a frustration at those two groups having been “habituated” to performing a specific type of “Mongolian Sound”, according to Cycle’s liner notes. Across these tracks Hugjiltu’s unconventionally tuned five-string guitar anchors melodies on Tsuur, Morin Khuur and Khoomei throat-singing. Cycle reflects his life in Beijing – traditional Mongolian instruments are applied to daily reality as the album’s arc tracks a commute from the suburbs into the city. A suite of billowing, lushly layered improvisations where languid passages dissolve into gentle forward motion, urgency creeps into the music as the accompanying environmental recordings become increasingly urban.

Chunyang Yao
“旁旁 Beside Her”
From Post-Oblivion 泯默集 (2023)

Chunyang Yao is a Naxi artist born in the city of Lijang. Post-Oblivion was inspired by her 2019 residency to Hokkaido, where she spent time among Japan’s indigenous Ainu. “She was observing the Ainu, and realised she was throwing the gaze she’d received from the Han Chinese,” Mabu suggests. Post-Oblivion is partly informed by processing that experience, and resonances Yao felt between Naxi and Ainu. Field recordings from Hokkaido weave through fierce electronics, Naxi chants and Yao’s palette of vocal techniques. The result is a swirling, triumphant vortex of sound whose very form seems to call for futures beyond exoticisation or extinction for precarious indigenous cultures.

Sheng Jie aka gogoj
“做核酸 Nucleic Acid Test”
From Review (2023)

Review was recorded in November 2022, shortly before Covid restrictions were lifted across China. Field recordings of elevators, loudspeakers instructing citizens to scan Covid test QR codes, and dogs barking in the distance from Sheng Jie’s window capture a world transitioning between lockdown stasis and accelerating uncertainly back to full speed. These fragments of space and time stitch together compositions which teeter between twitching nervous energy and eerie tranquillity. Tense knots of cello, guitar and analogue synth capture the turmoil between an external world resetting and an inner life still upended. The long echo of anxiety, disassociation and asocial distancing continuing to reverberate as the outside world tentatively moves on.

Ghostmass
“鬼洞 Ghost Cavern”
From Improvisation For Dusty Ballz 大抱散 (2024)

Ghostmass is a supergroup from Beijing, featuring poet, musician, conceptual artist and Wire contributor Yan Jun alongside Li Weisi and Li Qing – members of post-punk band Carsick Cars who later formed the ultra-minimal synth duo Soviet Pop – and Yang KuKu, a professional aquascaper who hadn’t played in a band previously. Despite those diverse backgrounds, Ghostmass remains an unexpected, sideways turn into heavy music. Improvisation For Dusty Ballz was released simultaneously with the LP Ghost Meditation (both were collaborative releases between Dusty Ballz and French label WV Sorcerer Productions). The latter is two side-long droning, groaning monoliths, while the former is a far more volatile affair, babbling vocals, squealing feedback and skittering instrumentation seeing the quartet conjure a surreal overlap of doomy atmospheres and gleefully form-breaking free improvisation. “The history of metal in China goes back to dakou, it used to be the most expensive genre on the market. Some of the members of Ghostmass were metalheads in the early 2000s – it makes sense Ghostmass play metal now, but the fact it’s an experimental form of metal also makes a lot of sense,” Mabu explains.

Zhang Meng
“A Divided Man 分裂男子曲”
From Noising Sheng 噪笙 (2025)

Zhang Meng has played sheng in folk orchestras, contemporary classical ensembles and rock bands. Noising Sheng documents a 2024 live concert where he takes the sheng out of its traditional accompanying role and wields it as a solo instrument. The performance was half-improvised “on a written script”, and we hear Zhang deploy thrilling technique to stretch the sheng towards vibrant new possibilities. At points, such as “A Divided Man”, Zhang plays his reed instrument with such precision and angular velocity it starts to sound like a synthesizer. “It’s a radical gesture musically, but he feels an urgency to push this form of art forward,” Mabu explains.

Xu Shaoyang
“Live from Underpass, Beijing, 2019.3.21” (excerpt)
From Taipei, Beijing 臺北 北京 (2025)

Born in Hong Kong, Xu Shaoyang now lives in London. A regular collaborator with Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Xu’s music embraces amateurism, simple tunes performed in ways which provide ample possibility for chaos and collapse. Taipei, Beijing collects two live performances with small ensembles of local musicians in the cities in the tape’s title. Both took place in pedestrian underpasses, with Xu singing through an FM transmitter songs he originally wrote while putting his newborn baby to sleep. “It’s a journey by someone not from mainland China or Taiwan, through these two different scenes,” suggests Mabu. “It’s a slice of history that documents what the scene was like. The best form of that kind of musical traveler exists in that sort of amateur music making world.”

Read Daryl Worthington’s full Unlimited Editions report on Dusty Ballz in The Wire 497. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.