This coming Saturday, Antidote will be hosting Knifehandchop from Toronto and Sulumi from Beijing. Antidote organiser Michael Ohlsson aka DJ Ozone explains why he invited the two DJ's:These guys are producers, not just DJs. I've always been interested in music that is current, innovative, cutting-edge ... but also accessible. Not just experimental noise. And I love to share this new music with people. The music that Sulumi and KnifeHandChop are doing is very different from... more ›

No, pictured here isn’t the vaunted Apple iPhone, it’s a Meizu M8 … maybe. Meizu? Not exactly a household brand name next to Apple. But for what it's worth, this Chinese manufacturer does make some pretty decent, portable music/video players, seen here. Some have even managed to find their ways to overseas markets. But, not everyone is thrilled with their product, Meizu has caught some flak for what some had considered to be an outright ripoff of iPod's design, though this Shanghaiist wasn't entirely convinced: Just because it's a portable music/video player? Just because it comes in black and white? That was until yesterday. more ›

Tim Kao, musician more ›

Michael Ohlsson, underground DJ more ›

Shanghaiist doesn't know much about emocore or nu-metal (can you be both at once?), but we decided to give local band Slit a listen while they were performing last night at Shuffle, a new music venue on Xingfu Lu, a stone's throw from where the old Tang Hui rock bar was. Shuffle just opened (on December 31 we believe), so there weren't too many patrons there, but that kind of suited us just as well since we hate crowds anyway. The place is decorated/designed in a minimalist warehouse way, and the peanuts are free and plentiful, and you can even throw the shells on the ground. Back to Slit -- we like the frontman's dark tortured artists thing, especially the crawling on the floor punctuated by epileptic fits. The music we thought catchy, if that's the word for this kind of thing -- the guitar riffs could be rousing and the singer's falsetto howls were eerily captivating -- but maybe we're getting too old for this stuff because it's hard for us, as audience members, to keep that buzz going when we have no idea what the lyrics are and are running low on whatever unnamed angst fuels this music. That said, we look forward to the day where this band gets a little more polished because we feel that while they aren't going to be the staple of our live music world (and that's just personal preference), they are a welcome injection of a little something different in what otherwise would be a scene of dreary sameness. Shuffle is going to have more acts of different genres, which we think a good idea, financially as well as "artistically". Definitely something to keep your eye on. more ›

Greetings, music fans. Below you will find, in Shanghaiist's humble opinion, all the music you should have been listening to in the first half of 2005. And if you haven't been able to check these albums out yet, you still have plenty of time to load them on to your mp3 player of choice before 2006. Five Shanghaiist contributors submitted five albums each for a total and 25 -- and they wrote exactly 25 words about each one (exactly, only if you are very lenient with your rules of hyphenation). And yes, we are aware that these "Best of the Year (so far)" lists should really happen at the end of June and not at the end of July. But we're a start-up blog in China -- you expect us to be organized? more ›