Sonic Sinofuturisms: Sonic Fictions in Shanghai’s Deconstructed Club Music

Abstract

Since the 2010s, the emergence of Deconstructed Club Music (DCM) has marked a shift in electronic dance music culture through its conceptualism, avant-gardism, experimentalism, and, especially, worldbuilding, diverging from the genre’s historical association with hedonism and inauthenticity. Early collectives such as GHE20G0TH1K in New York and Night Slug in London embraced and spearheaded this movement.

In China, a related strand of futuristic, avant-garde sound has emerged from labels such as SVBKVLT and Genome 6.66Mbp. More importantly, their emergence in Shanghai––a highly globalized metropolis of China––is no coincidence. Meanwhile, this decade has also witnessed China’s accelerated technological and economic development, evidenced by recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and industrial dominance. The theme “China is the future” has thus become less a catchphrase than a reality. Echoing this sentiment, Sinofuturism—a concept formulated in the 1990s by Steve Goodman from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University—has gained renewed interest, catalyzed by Lawrence Lek’s video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) (2016). These speculative conjectures about China’s future and Shanghai’s futuristic-sounding DCM have surfaced in parallel, as both cultivate diverse worlds through conceptual worldbuilding and various modes of futurity. These worldbuildings, as Lek points out, owe a significant debt to Afrofuturism, even as they diverge from the latter’s historical contexts.

While this thesis explores Sinofuturism in Shanghai’s deconstructed club music, the term “deconstructed club” remains muddled as a genre label and thus requires stabilization as a conceptual category. I therefore first establish deconstructed club music as a genre formed through “discursive formation” (Brackett, 2016, p. 127), followed by a discussion on the literature on “authenticity” in electronic dance music studies and its limits. I then highlight the incompleteness of current formulations of Sinofuturism in the work of Steve Goodman, Lawrence Lek, and Anna Greenspan, and propose a relational Sinofuturism following Conn and de Seta (2023), defined through relationships rather than temporalities. Building on this, I propose Sonic Sinofuturism as one possible manifestation of a relational Sinofuturism. In tandem, I address authenticity in electronic dance music through its Afrofuturist lineage—a framework referenced by early Sinofuturists and foundational to Kodwo Eshun’s concept of sonic fiction. Throughout, I analyze musical works through Eshun’s framework of sonic fictions (Eshun, 1998), foregrounding their sonic worldbuilding and conceptualization.

In the latter part of the thesis, I analyze Shanghai’s DCM by tracing the genealogical lineage of discursive interactions between UK Sinogrime and electronic music produced in China—an exchange inflected by techno Orientalism and auto Orientalization. Against this backdrop, I articulate the various futurities at stake in the Chinese context by examining releases from two Shanghai labels—SVBKVLT and Genome 6.66Mbp—as distinct sonic fictions. I conclude by identifying the emergence of Sonic Sinofuturisms, in the plural, and argue for a multiplicity of futures showcased through their music as a local response to global club music trends.

Date of Award	8 Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Damien CHARRIERAS (Supervisor)