In China, every musician and music fan knows about dakou records. Different from second-hand records that are circulated in other countries, dakou LPs, CDs and tapes were imported as plastic garbage. They were exported from the West to be used in China as raw materials, but then became available for listeners to buy from semi-legal markets. Dakou albums greatly influenced and enriched the inner world of people who love music. These are some of my dakou memories from 20 or more years ago.

Painkiller
Buried Secrets
(Earache/Toy’s Factory) 1991

Rock music was introduced to China pretty late, and the related musical information was even more lacking. In the early 1990s, as one who just entered the world of dakou records, the most effective way to find a cassette (the first dakou were mainly cassettes) that fitted my taste was to remember the logo of record labels. I was still in college when I bought this album. I had no idea about Painkiller at all, but I had listened to Napalm Death, Brutal Truth and Godflesh, who were also released by Earache. The label’s logo was very impressive. Now the tape is still in a corner somewhere, but the sleeve, which I thought was cool at the time, is lost.

For most uninformed music fans, another intuitive way to pick a cassette is to look at the sleeve. But it’s also easy to be surprised. I bought my first Ramones tape thinking it was metal – their long hair and leather jackets made me misjudge. I remember listening and wondering: where are those heavy metal guitar solos?

Philip Glass
Einstein On the Beach
(CBS Masterworks) 1993

A lot of the CDs that first came onto the dakou market had deep wide notches cut into the discs. It was impossible to listen to the whole record if it was a longer one. I got this set of four CDs by Philip Glass, and I couldn’t finish listening to any of them. The funny thing was that one of the discs had a crack in the gap that extended further into the data area. I remember listening to it and thinking how cool it was, even though I knew it was minimalism, but it was so awesome that it could be repeated in one place for so long. Only later did I realise it was because of the crack that the disc was stuck but kept playing.

Many years later, I saw a better version of the set again at a dakou booth in Hangzhou – only a tiny saw cut was left on the case, and the four discs inside were intact. I got up the courage and finally listened to the whole set.

Allen Ginsberg
The Ballad Of The Skeletons
(Mercury)

After the cut discs came the drilled discs. Although it was also about the destruction of the disc, when you were lucky, these small holes were drilled near the inner rim of the CD, or at the edge of the outer rim, while preserving the complete data area. With a hobby knife or scissors, you could easily fix the hole and then the full album could be played. And the price was cheap, around five to ten Chinese RMB [roughly 55p to £1.10 in UK currency] . Another reason that this Allen Ginsberg disc was an exciting one was that a 1996 book called The Beat Generation happened to be popular among a circle of literature-loving friends at the time. It introduced poets and writers such as Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs. Records and books about the Beat generation appeared in China almost simultaneously. In such an atmosphere, it was a symbol of friendship to receive a drilled disc of Allen Ginsberg from a friend.

Whitehouse
Bird Seed
(Susan Lawly) 2003

Of course, bargaining was allowed when buying dakou records. But disc jockeys, the people who sold dakou goods, were worried that they would sell valuable records too cheap, because they didn’t know much about those records, especially the obscure ones. Meanwhile music fans wanted to be the first to pick out the records they liked. Thus, a strange agreement emerged between the two parties, the open-box price. This meant the music fan got the chance to open a box of newly arrived records in front of the dealer and he could buy any record in the box at the same price. No one knew what was in the unopened box, sometimes a Mariah Carey album was next to a Whitehouse album, because when the box was filled by the supplier, no one would sort the records like they would in a regular record store. I remember I opened the box and picked records of Ryoji Ikeda, Philip Jeck and Current 93 besides this one by Whitehouse. Interestingly enough, two fans got into a fight over a Difang Duana record.

But I only had that one experience to buy records with open-box price, because usually the price would be at least 30 yuan, which was expensive to me. Also, I didn't want to keep calling the dealers to ask when the new stuff would arrive and then wait anxiously to open the box and grab it. It’s better to buy records as you see fit.

Konstantin Raudive
The Voices Of The Dead
(Sub Rosa) 2002

Eventually, original uncut discs and more beautiful Japanese versions started to come out in China in perfect condition. Records became more and more expensive, and fans began to collect more than actually listen to music. They began to pay attention to editions, even as the value of a record was measured by whether or not the Japanese edition had lost its obi strip. But before the arrival of these records, there were also some ‘crushed’ discs – I was told that those records were destroyed by being ran over by a road roller – and some records that weren’t crushed or badly damaged made their way to this underground market. The Voices Of The Dead is such a record. Although it was in poor condition, it could play in its entirety. I had already heard some of Friedrich Jürgenson's recordings of electronic voice phenomena via a CD-R from a friend. I was still intrigued by EVP when one day this Konstantin Raudive record appeared on a street stall. It’s just the amazement of dakou – you could never find such a disc in a regular music store in China. Those dakou records were like shiny crystals in a dark cavern, waiting to be discovered.

Li Jianhong was featured in The Wire’s regular Invisible Jukebox test alongside his partner and collaborator Wei Wei aka Vavabond in The Wire 450. Subscribers to the magazine can read the article via our digital archive.