Altered Zones

Dear Eloise is a lo-fi, noisy, borderline shoegaze bedroom-pop duo from Beijing. Though this string of adjectives could describe any number of Western acts, Dear Eloise is one of the few of its kind in China, taking the bedroom recording paradigm to its logical extreme: they have never performed live, and probably never will.

Dear Eloise makes private music casually offered for personal consumption. Their ability to fly so far under the radar-- quietly releasing their debut LP last year, and even more quietly slating two 7" singles for later this summer-- is odd given that one of its members, Yang Haisong, is the lead singer of P.K.14, which is arguably China's most accomplished and well-known indie band. Aside from building a massive domestic following, P.K.14 has also blazed trails for Chinese bands internationally, having toured the US, Europe, and Australia, attracting the attention of TIME Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Yang's passionate vocal performances and deft, poetic lyricism have fueled P.K.14's raw post-punk outbursts since the band's formation in 1997, influencing several generations of Chinese musicians in the process. In Dear Eloise, which formed in 2008, he yields vocal duties to his wife, Sun Xia, focusing on creating minimalist pop guitar and drum backdrops. On this track, "Castle," Yang crafts a simple 4-chord progression that lapses into moments of feedback-as-bridge, while Sun Xia's rich, reverb-enhanced vocal melody ties the song together. "Castle" is reminiscent of the nostalgic re-appropriation of hazy surf-pop coming from US contemporaries, but swaps that hyper-chilled beach vibe for something that is darker, more nuanced, more intimate. --Josh Feola, International Tapes

MP3: Dear Eliose: "Castle"

You can get their album, The Words That Were Burnt, on CD from Maybe Mars, and on soon on vinyl from Genjing Records. Genjing will also be releasing two 7" slabs, Castle and Hers and His