Beijing’s DMC venue shuts down amongst a year marred with other closures
I’m not even going to attempt to write anything that could be better written then what Cool Ghoul posted about the recent announcement of another Beijing venue closing down:
“In what has to be one of the shittiest years for the Beijing music scene in some time, yet another live music venue will bite the dust. On September 12th, the mighty Dirty Monster Club ( DMC ) will hold its final event, featuring its co-owner, Spike Li’s band DEMERIT.
Unlike the recent, seemingly out-of-the-blue, abrupt closure of MAKO Live House, Spike had been considering this for a while. Back in the late days of winter he was very serious about cutting shop then and there, but reconsidered. This morning the news was made official via the official Weibo account of DMC. After September 12th Asia’s 100% pure D. I. Y. punk club and Tongzhou’s last standing underground music venue will be no more. It was preceded in death by a kind-of predecessor to the recently-deceased XP; Tongzhou-based experimental music club RAYING TEMPLE (and in solidarity with the RT guys there is a RT logo adorning DMC’s walls).
Exlcuding MAO’s closure happening around December, DMC stands as the sixth casualty in an unusually brutal year for live music venues in the nation’s music capitol (and there’s word that another live house may be biting the dust before the year is over, possibly making this an 8 venue bloodbath). Factoring in the kids losing both the Midi and Strawberry Music festivals this year, the authorities shutting down the 3:30 Metal Festival, the death of Lei Jun, and overall lower turn out for rock local rock shows in general: this year has been an, interesting time in the Chinese sense of the phrase.
With the loss of DMC, the mainland punk music scene has lost its one pure punk club (Some understandably label School Bar a punk club, but when you consider its origins and its purpose which includes punk into its greater panacea of championing underground, independent music in Beijing there’s a substantive argument to be made that it’s more than a punk club, while DMC also started by punks has had punk music as its nucleus, and in two years of existence 95% of its shows were punk rock shows.). We’ve lost a refuge that was our own. Once you entered DMC there was no mistaking its raison d’etre.”
This is what’s going on in Beijing…it has been a weird year beyond belief in many MANY aspects.
Here’s a link to DMC’s last show:
http://www.smartbeijing.com/wire/music/dmcs-last-show-is-on-saturday
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