“Sub Jam”, Yan Jun’s fanzine, 1998

It’s not the first time we talk about Yan Jun (颜峻). A rock critic and experimental musician from Lanzhou, Yan Jun was at the frontline of the Chinese “new sound movement” of the 1990s – like the title of a book he published in 1999 with Ou Ning (欧宁). We already talked about his implication during the outburst of rock magazines in the mid-1990s, he is also one of the most prominent figure of the dakou generation – you can fin an excellent interview by Josh Feola of Yan Jun on “Tiny Mix Tapes”, and he recently uploaded on his Bandcamp account part of his dakou collection before getting rid of them. His rock critics and poems have also been translated into French, “Génération dakou: écouter, recycler, expérimenter”.

In 1998, Yan Jun published his own fanzine in Lanzhou, “Sub Jam” (also the name of his DIY label), heavily influenced by Allen Ginsberg – quoted on the front and back cover of the zine. The originality of the fanzine is that Yan Jun exclusively talks about underground music scenes outside Beijing – Nanjing with PK14, Nanchang and Punk God (盘古), Urumqi with Tongue (舌头 – they were however already in Beijing), Wuhan and SMZB (生命之饼 – even if the page dedicated to the Wuhan punk band is empty…), etc. The fanzine provides a vital overview of the Chinese underground music scene of the late 1990s.

Download the PDF version of Sub Jam here.