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And Yet We Ain’t Alone, Rose Tang’s debut album, is a testament to our shared humanity and the collective uplift only possible through direct action and protest songs that accompany it. Composed by veteran musicians and social change agents in their own right, NYC-based musicians Evan Strauss, Rose Tang and Jarvis Earnshaw performed alongside Diana Zinn and JP Lenon in Seattle to record an improvised album of music and poetry. The songs revolve around Tang’s electrifying poetry—her original pieces as well as Sichuan folk music and classical poems from the 12th century Song Dynasty—delivered in English, Mandarin, Sichuanese and Cantonese. A universally understood emotionality that rumbles through each track. 

Tang, a Mongol who was raised in Southwestern China, recounts that her first public music gig was conducting protest songs in Beijing in the 1989 Tiananmen Movement. She now performs regularly in New York where she has lived and worked since 2005. This album is the product of the first meeting between Tang and the other Seattle-based musicians, all united by an experimental, avant-punk approach to music. While Tang has been pursuing experimental music since 2014, when she began collaborating with 577 Record’s Daniel Carter, she had long been involved in the art world as a visual artist, award-winning journalist, radio documentary maker, public speaker, activist and journalism teaching fellow at Princeton University. 

This album, and the lyrical protests throughout, were inspired by a traditional vocalization method called “hou shange” (吼山歌), or “hollering among mountains,” to amplify the voice by roaring in natural settings. The practice is culturally significant, passed down by generations of nomads, laborers and peasants in Sichuan and neighboring Tibet, who used it to communicate messages in times of joy and despair. The whole album fittingly draws its sound from traditional Sichuanese folk music, punk rock, free jazz and Tang’s preeminently poetic, unmistakable voice. The project is migratory: uniquely suspended in cross-cultural, cross-temporal collaboration, speaking to larger themes of conflict and struggle. Dedicated to Hong Kong, and to the millions of protesters who demand democracy and independence, these tracks speak to the roots of their deep social unrest. 

Tang’s work has long revolved around the pursuit of justice, an orientation that pervades the album’s charged lyrics and sometimes cacophonous tsunamis of sound. Every musician on the album played multiple instruments. None had discussions before the recording, and every track was improvised and recorded in a single take. And Yet We Ain’t Alone is a testament to the spontaneous and dynamic nature of a social movement, people joining forces to achieve a brighter future. The tracks are complex, difficult and lyrical. Layered amidst the somber tones and complicated harmonies are moments of possibility and unity. Tang shouts over the crescendo of sound a prescient, rebellious message of hope. 

//I dig “And Yet We Ain't Alone” a whole lot. Love its energy rhythms its overall attitude. beautiful great very real, and I bet they’ll dig it too. I think it has great punk influences so if you got other stuff that’s even more punk, great! Y’all have definitely renewed/refreshed my love of punk, and not for the sake of nostalgia, on the contrary the way y’all incorporate punk clearly contributes to music’s forward motion.// - Daniel Carter