Month: November 2025

Following the previous blog…

Massive fun would be lost if the audience is lacking the cultural context. But still, they can appreciate her work in more of a reduced listening mode. When I was struggling with the way to make this cultural background thing accessible to everyone , Ingrid pointed out it is not my responsibility to do so.

Many reviewers say she makes “土(tu)”(the local, the tacky) become “cool.” Instead of running from China’s grassroots culture the way many artists do, she turns it into something powerful and emotional. The ethos of the original spirit of culture is rare among Chinese artists but rather common among Latino and Black people. Charlie XCX revived the electronic pop of western clubs in the 2000s- DJ Gurl was doing the exact same thing and localised it. Chinese culture has been under Western hegemony for so long that it has developed a habitual inferiority complex: anything ‘local’ is invariably seen as “土(tu)”. Elements considered as “土(tu)” is actually due to the relegation to the bottom of the hierarchy of contempt by capitalist logic. Thus, many Chinese artists shy away from, and even disdain embracing and promoting the spirit of their roots. In fact, non-mainstream culture and hip-hop culture in the US were both emerged under various structural pressures, but they share complete different aesthetic comments. Why have 喊麦 (hǎn-mai) and non-mainstream culture been stifling? Because the right to speak has never been in our hands.

What surprised me the most was the integration of a large number of folk elements. Either non-mainstream pop songs in the 10s or northeastern rap with a strong northeastern dialect, combines with the highly futuristic hyperpop elements. It gives a sense of paying tribute to the past from the future. Listening to her is like walking into a chaotic childhood internet café—flashing lights, skating rinks, stolen CD mixes, forums, QQ show. But the production is strangely modern and artistic. It’s not just cheap nostalgia; it’s more like using “low” culture as rebellion.

One of her album 头七 (Tóu-qi)- named after the Chinese spiritual ritual on the first seventh day of passing, constructs the afterlife of DJ Gurl. This album offers a substantial atmospheric contrast to the 节奏的奴隶 (Slave to the Rhythm) series and features a compelling narrative arc. Inspired from Asian horror movies, she intends to critique the tragedies behind the core element “resentment” with electronic music and to infuse a sense of warmth. The album’s journey begins with DJ Gurl’s death announcement, moves into a ‘life flashing before her eyes’ montage, discussing love, the scene of masturbation and rental house, and ends with the revenge and her last grief.

Sometimes I feel myself loosing time scrolling through short videos without remember anything watched, which feels similar to dissociation. This situation is not like what happened in extreme trauma cases or PTSD, but functioning as a daily pressure-coping method, a way of avoiding the reality.

For short-video creators, certain metrics are more important than what the audiences are familiar with including likes, saves, shares and view counts. Indicators such as the 2-second exit rate, 10-second watch rate and the overall video completion rate play a more direct role in boosting video exposure and the platforms’s recommendation algorithm push. That’s why dozens of short-videos can easily catch us with its bright colours, loud transitions, half-second cuts, text overlays, meme music and surprise endings- everything is well calculated and formulated. Thus, in this dense information realm, our brains cannot process everything, so they shut down the “conscious” layer and leave us in the half-present buffering mode.

ADHD communities often say short-videos feel like a “dopamine drip”. But the reality is no narrative, no continuity, no emotional arc or no time to breathe. This combination means our brain can’t form long-term memory, which leaves us with stimulation but no substance- the perfect recipe for dissociation.

In addition, people don’t open TikTok because they’re happy. They open it because they need to escape from work, anxiety, loneliness, the pressure to be productive, or overstimulation from everything else. So short- video scrolling becomes a ritual of “I don’t want to feel this, just make the world go quiet for a second.” But it’s the kind of quietness that leaves us hollow rather than rested.

What’s more, under a solidified efficiency-oriented mindset, we (at least myself) are always multitasking: watching videos while eating, listening to something while walking, etc. Eventually, we build a strange, paradoxical survival strategy for our nervous system where silence feels threatening and noise feels comforting. That explains when we scroll through videos, our brains slips into the familiar state where it feels half awake, half absent, safe but numb.

Something I find fascinating is that we used to describe dissociation as individual pathology, but now it’s becoming a meme, a casual phrase, and a cultural symptom. It is not that everyone suddenly has PTSD or ADHD. It’s that we are collectively living in an environment designed to pull our minds apart, fragment our focus, and overload our senses.

I didn’t expect Ghost on the Stairs to hit me so physically the first time I listened to it. I knew the album was about Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), but I didn’t know that sound could simulate a kind of confusion and discomfort that felt this close to real sensory overwhelm. Meemo Comma (Lara Rix-Martin) intentionally uses clicks, distorted kicks, and uneasy loops to create a listening environment where every sound competes for attention—exactly how APD listeners often experience the world.

Tracks like “Caturday” make this tension almost bodily. The gasping, breath-like samples give the rhythm a feeling of panic, like the track itself is struggling to inhale. In “Depersonalization,” there’s a layering cello drone with layering clicks—no melody, no relief—just the pressure of constant sonic information. It reminded me of a moment on a London bus where I was near Bedford Street, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, and suddenly I heard this unbelievably heavy low frequency. I paused my music and it was still there. The drone was so overpowering I couldn’t hear anything else around me. Immediately, I thought of this album of the way it collapses internal and external noise into one overwhelming layer.

What surprised me most is that this album finally helped me understand the difference between sound art and music production in a way I had never felt before. I’ve listened to score-based works and field recording pieces before, but they never resonated so strongly. On the other hand, many underground or niche electronic tracks online feel too polished, too structured—still too close to the logic of commercial music. Ghost on the Stairs sits exactly in the middle with the expression of the way how APD cope with the world while the listenability is somehow works as a medium.

According to the album notes, Rix-Martin explores rhythm by focusing on what isn’t there—the negative space between beats. She merges speech and voice into something alien, blurring every boundary until language becomes texture and texture becomes noise. The drones feel both meditative and claustrophobic, flickering between numbness and anxiety, just like the shifting states she describes in APD.

It’s inspiring to be realising that sound can hold confusion, tension, fear, and vulnerability, not just harmony or rhythm. Ghost on the Stairs made me rethink how I listen, but also what kind of listening I’ve been avoiding. It’s unsettling, but maybe that’s exactly why it matters.

*DJ小女孩=DJ Gurl=DJ Xiaonvhai*

My first encounter with DJ Gurl was through “爱我的请爱我” (Love Me If You Love Me) from 节奏的主人（Master of Rhythm）. The track confused me before it impressed me: aggressively “土嗨”（tu-hai）and early-internet Chinese aesthetics blended with hyperpop and glitch textures, yet still gets compared to highly artistic musicians even Bjork. This paradox of being raw but refined, ironic yet sincere fascinated me and soon I found myself listening through the whole album, trying to make sense of an emotional reaction I couldn’t yet articulate.

This blog seeks to discuss DJ Gurl as an artistic project: her identity, her aesthetics, her cultural significance, and the deeper sociopolitical elements embedded within her “dirtiness.”

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One of the first “twists” I learned is that DJ Xiaonvhai is not an actual girl. The project is created by a young Guizhou musician called 劣(Lie), who describes DJ Xiaonvhai as the place where he embraces his feminine side. The visual identity of “DJ Xiaonvhai” comes from his friend, whom he calls his “Venus.”

By making music in empty classrooms with a cheap laptop and headphones, he received loads of negative comments on his mixing technique. However, he just admitted there’s neither mixing nor fancy gear at all, because being “劣” (low-quality, same as his name) is part of the style. Somehow, this roughness becomes its own aesthetic.

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DJ 小女孩 exploded in 2024 with her 节奏的奴隶 (Slave to the Rhythm). People describe her music as hyperpop, glitch pop, early-internet nostalgia, and even punk collage. She samples everything, not only the significant viral elements among 2000s Chinese internet: By2, Wang Rong, QQ message tones, northeast “喊麦 (hǎn-mài)”, 00s “非主流 (Chinese subculture)” culture, minority folk music, 00s pop songs like 《醉清风(Zuì-qing-feng)》and 曾轶可(Yike Zeng); but also Artists like Arca and Crystal Castle. She refused be known as “Charlie XCX/Yeule/Sophie..etc. Chinese local ver.”, instead, she claimed “DJ Gurl is just DJ Gurl.”