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  Rebuilding the Rights of Statues - TV Show (Hang the Police)
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Rebuilding the Rights of Statues are:

Hua Dong - guitar, vocals
Liu Min - bass, vocals
Ma Hui - drums

Genre: Post-punk

Formed in Beijing, China: March, 2003

Current Release: Cut Off!

Labels:
Tag Team Records (USA)
Modern Sky (China)

Born in the shadow of post-Tiananmen nihilism, the collapse of state run industry and a desert that will someday swallow the city whole, Beijing-based Rebuilding the Rights of Statues delivers explosive, danceable, unsettling post punk that leaves you unsure whether you want to take your clothes off and shake the spiders out, or go look for a rope, a closet and a copy of Iggy Pop�s The Idiot.

Raised in a family of Nanjing intellectuals, charismatic, sinister Rebuilding front-man Hua Dong was immediately attracted to music in a way that was both unfocused and insistent. He spent a few inconclusive years writing songs, studying in Germany and drumming for seminal Chinese rockers PK14. After meeting bassist Liu Min, who had been playing in bands in the Nanjing punk underground, the pair drifted to Beijing where they were introduced to drummer Ma Hui.

What had been unfocused came suddenly into sharp detail and Rebuilding was formed in March of 2003. The trio began electrifying audiences in Beijing, the beating heart of China�s rock underground, with their riveting, explosive performances.

The trio went into the studio in fall of 2005 to record their debut EP Cut Off! and attracted the attention of legendary composer/producer and all-round nice guy Brian Eno, who was using the studio to record some of his Afternoon Ambient Works. Eno sat down with the band and contributed guest keyboards on several tracks. As Hua Dong puts it, �he wanted something exiting, and there we were.�

In over 5000 years of unbroken civilization, China has produced no analogues, no precedents nor peers for Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, and so they have built a catalogue of influence combed from internet piracy, black market CDs, and mix tapes worn thin from being passed from friend to friend. One can detect a careful ear to an international underground that was both hopelessly enchanting and heartbreakingly unattainable. Hua Dong credits bands like Bauhaus, Joy Division, Television, Pere Ubu, Blond Redhead, Modest Mouse, and the Futureheads among his greatest influences, and acknowledges the incongruities of developing their music in a Chinese environment.

�We stand on the shoulders of those great bands,� Hua Dong writes. �Maybe we have seen further because of that. Our vision, however, is rootless. The ground that supports our music, so to speak, doesn't belong to our own culture. The ideologies behind their music might be exactly the opposite of ours, and this all too often generates an unavoidable clash.�

It is precisely this dynamic tension that drives Rebuilding�s tangible sweat-soaked darkness and blood-pumping atmospherics. Cut Off! Reverberates with Liu Min�s irresistible bass lines and staccato, strangely sensual yelps and still holds the echos of the earthquake that wiped Ma Hui�s birth city off the map in 1976. Hua Dong stands over it all with his shattering vocals and addictive open-fisted guitar, stitching the flesh to the muscle like some demented monkey king.

This visceral music, �built from the bones up,� is more �bermensch than Frankenstein�s monster: beautiful, brilliant and brooding.