On PRI's The World yesterday I heard a Chinese band, Mamer. Pretty good overall, but a few songs really stand out, check out proverbs on myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/mamermusic1


[quote]PRI Marco Werman Reports:. . . Very Chinese, even though there's an acoustic guitar. And the words are in Kazakh. This is the music of Mamer (mamour).

You can almost hear the wide expanses of the grasslands in northwest China, Mamer's native home. These days he lives mostly in Beijing, with a couple of trips home each year to Xinjiang province where his family still lives.

Mamer's no country bumpkin though. He grew up listening to King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic and British art rock from the 70s. Now he's returned to his Xinjiang roots with a style he calls Chinagrass. Mamer's purpose -- says his producer Robin Haller -- is to take Chinese rural music and do to it what alt country bands in the US have done to country and western.

“Chinagrass describes a lot of things. It could be Mongolian music. If you were in Beijing or Shanghai, you'll find Mongolian bars where people sit and get drunk and listen to Mongolian bands kind of playing away. And I suppose what Chinagrass is about is sort of reclaiming this sort of roots music from the grasslands, from Xinjiang, from near Tibet, from inner Mongolia. It's about making real art music and singing also in local languages.â€