In 2007, expat photographer Matthew Niederhauser ’05CC went to hear some music at a dive bar called D-22 in Beijing’s university district, not expecting much. To his surprise, he found a vibrant underground-music scene. The next time he went, he took his camera. Sound Kapital: Beijing’s Music Underground is a compilation of nearly two years’ worth of photographs, featuring the punk bands and underground rockers that Niederhauser came to know. “I became addicted to these live performances and fully possessed by the compulsion to catalog them photographically,” writes Niederhauser, who studied anthropology at Columbia. Intimate color portraits against a red background are juxtaposed with black-and-white shots of performers on stage, all taken at D-22. The book also comes with a compilation disc of the featured performers mastered by Yuli Chen, who produced the music for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Rock on.
