Yang Fan is a Beijing-based musician, composer and producer. At the age of 15, Yang Fan started her first band, called Hang on The Box, the first ever all-girl punk band to come out of China. With this band, she recorded three studio albums and one live album. During the years of 2001-2003, Hang on The Box presented their most acclaimed album, Yellow Banana, to the USA and Japan. In 2007, after the Hang on the Box buzz died down, Yang Fan founded her second band, Ourself Beside Me. We recorded one studio and one live album. “My motivation with [Ourself Beside Me] was to innovate the way in which songs are written, to break with the tradition, and to create alternative modes of writing,” says Yang Fan. “To achieve this, I experimented with many types of different instruments, ranging from the common ones to inexpensive and handmade instruments found on Beijing street markets.” After having produced the Ourself Beside Me’s first album, Yang Fan started to build her own home recording studio to continue her sonic experimentation. Since then, she concentrated composing and performing music for theatre and film. These productions have included: Girls! Girls! Girls!, a modern dance drama; Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, a German animated fairy tale-film from 1926; the modern drama E-Station, staged in Edinburgh, Scotland; and two modern dramas called “Qiao Bu Si” and “Ibsen.”
Yang Fan Li
