Last winter, Beijing-based artist bloodzboi 血男孩 was listening to tracks on SoundCloud, just as he normally does. For most, this may seem like an incredibly typical way to pass the time, but in order for bloodzboi 血男孩 to get on SoundCloud, he has to break through the Great Firewall of China.
For the uninitiated, the Great Firewall is a combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People’s Republic of China to regulate and censor the Internet domestically, which in turn blocks access to selected foreign websites (including SoundCloud). Today, the easiest way to get around the Great Firewall is to use a virtual private network, or VPN. A VPN anonymizes one’s identity online by masquerading their location and hoaxing another by falsifying data. It was with a VPN that bloodzboi 血男孩 came across singer and producer Darcy Baylis, who was over 5,500 miles away in Melbourne, Australia.
Darcy and bloodzboi 血男孩 would DM back and forth as they began to work together online. A few weeks later, Darcy impulsively bought tickets to Beijing, asking to crash on bloodzboi’s couch. Just an hour after landing in the Chinese capital, videographer Goudan Lee started filming Darcy and bloodzboi 血男孩 in the music video for their multilingual track “Same Page / 梦魇.”
As Darcy opens up the single crooning in a cherubic vocal range, viewers watch the two as they wander around Beijing on a cold winter night. bloodzboi 血男孩 raps in Chinese for his verse, smoking a cigarette as he describes a “梦魇,” or a nightmare. Darcy returns once more to take the track out, singing his painful lyrics in a high register, “heartbreak don’t make sense at all when we’re on the same page.” And just like that, the music video fades to black.
Darcy Baylis and bloodzboi 血男孩 make an unlikely pairing, yet the two offer listeners an incredibly fresh take on alternative hip-hop when they combine. As we wait for their collaborative project to arrive, watch their music video for “Same Page / 梦魇” below.