The contemporary music scene in China--except for the omnipresent bubblegum pop--is hard to find if you’re not in Beijing or Shanghai. That’s the unequivocal impression I get living here in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province. Being an Australian music journalist, I was keen to find any Chinese music here upon my arrival nearly nine months ago. Alas, however, there appears to be extremely little contemporary music in Wuhan--or at least if there is, it’s been hiding from me phenomenally well.

This changed during the week-long May Day holiday period with, apparently, the first rock music festival in Wuhan’s history--the 2007 Love and Peace Music Festival. As a seasoned music festivalgoer, I was interested in seeing what went down.

First of all, the venue was strange--a cross between a community arts center, a factory exhibition space and an oddly designed industrial skateboarding hall. I certainly don’t think it was designed to ever hold a music festival, so it was rather a brave move on the organizer’s part to give it a go. Acoustically, for instance, the venue looked like a nightmare, but the mixer, for the most part, fixed these problems well by using some delay.

As far as the music itself, it was certainly diverse. Interestingly, along with the different genres of music, there were also different reactions to the styles. For instance, there was a pretty good nine-piece Latin/Cuban group called Tarem (complete with synthesized trumpet), and a lot of the audience just didn’t know how to move to this infectiously moveable music. It was fun watching an older Chinese man watching this Latin band--he was staring at them with an utterly dumbfounded expression, as if aliens had just landed in front of him.

There was also pop, pop-punk staples ala Green Day, hip-hop/beatboxing (occasionally sounding like the Black Eyed Peas), but the music that the crowd moved the most to was the hardcore grind/industrial metal, complete with the “Cookie Monster vocals” of Panteras/Fear Factory et al. It was also during these performances that I saw the Chinese version of moshpits (area in front of the stage where people usually get into frenzied slam-dancing), which was very interesting to me, as I’d frequented them in Australia. They’re much milder here.

But speaking generally again, as I said, music like this in Wuhan is hard to find. There seems to be an audience for it, but I have no idea how big that audience is. Maybe the music and the audience don’t currently know where to find each other--I’m not sure. Things are different in Beijing and Shanghai. For instance, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd recently toured Shanghai, and Beijing now has the Beijing Pop Festival, which last year attracted the large Western groups Placebo and Supergrass. Beijing also has the polished magazines Pocket Music and NoMusic. But here in Wuhan, there’s only a little punk venue analogous to Melbourne’s Arthouse Hotel, a few light music venues spattered here and there, and a few DJ clubs not dissimilar to ones in Melbourne (but more of King St than Swanston St, for the readers who know what I mean). A lot of the music scene is glued together by www.whrock.com, but since this site is in Chinese, it doesn’t help a foreigner much. So in my time in Wuhan thus far, I’ve found very little else apart from this music festival.

From an outsider’s point of view like mine, this new festival is a risk, but a risk worth taking. The Beijing Pop Festival managed to attract Placebo in only its second year--that’s quite a feat for any promoter, and a sure sign that a Chinese audience exists for this kind of music. What I saw this weekend was, hopefully, the humble beginning of an annual music event that will grow with every year. It may be musically ethnocentric for me to say that Wuhan needs this festival, but a certain proportion of Wuhanese have seemingly embraced distorted guitars, post-teenage angst and oesophagus-punishing vocals, so this sort of festival should exist to accommodate this new demographic of music lovers, in order for them to find each other and revel in their new common interest.

Music in Wuhan is hard to find for a foreigner, but in 10, or even five years’ time, things might be very different. And if they are, I think that events like this will be a major driving force in making that change. Hey, seeing how quickly things change in China, it might only take a month. Let’s see what happens.

Ashley Brown is an Australian music journalist currently teaching in Wuhan, Hubei Province.