Sustainable Sounds – On the Lives and Afterlives of the Hong Kong band Tatming

The Hong Kong electronic duo Tatming Pair has been creating music since 1985 that yields commercial success, music awards, and critical acclaim for its timely engagements with social and political issues – the very engagements that rendered the duo relevant but unwelcome in mainland China. In our paper, we engage with what we like to term professional fandom of Tatming, that is: cultural intermediaries, cultural producers and key opinions leaders (incl. for example the indie ban My Little Airport). We will show how these actors all help to further open up a space for Tatmings politics, both locally and regionally. While Tatming is banned in China, it is through such indirect route that their influence is still felt, for example on a Friday night in a bar in Beijing, when DJ Funkie plays a compilation of their music for a queer crowd, or on the platform douban, when fans eagerly share their views on Tatming. We argue that it is through the numerous afterlives and cultural translations, that the politics of Tatming bleeds to other localities, to other moments, to other people. We thus show how music is more than music, and how one band in a rhizomatic way connects, lives on, has both effect and affect.