2 Kolegas: Who Knew This Indie Music Haunt Started in Ningxia?
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2 Kolegas: Who Knew This Indie Music Haunt Started in Ningxia?
It’s a Friday night at 2 Kolegas, and the dimly lit bar is vibrating with a cozy, anticipatory hum. It’s the club’s first night open since they closed for renovations, and the crowd drifts like a school of lazy fish, waiting for soundcheck to finish. Tonight is Ningxia Night, otherwise known as Ningxia Zhizao, and everyone knows what that means. Everyone, that is, except for me.
“Who’s playing again?” I ask my friend, a 2K regular.
“Three bands are supposed to play, but that doesn’t really mean anything,” she says, taking a sip of her beer and shrugging. “You never know what you’re going to get—just that it’ll be a night of good music.”
A Cultural Oasis in Northwest China
2 Kolegas has earned a reputation as one of the best underground live music bars in Beijing. Its unique location, next to the capital’s one and only drive-in movie theater, is matched only by its history—the bar’s owners, and the majority of the regular musicians there all hail from the capital city of Yinchuan, an oasis of art and hinterland culture in the northwestern autonomous region of Ningxia.
On Ningxia Nights the musicians revolve on and off stage like runners in a relay race, each time clicking into a different position with the dutiful ease of Lego men on a building project. The overlap all seems perfectly natural—until, that is, you realize that the guy who was just crooning folk songs is now rocking some grunge, or that the dude finger-picking acoustic melodies is jamming out on some Hendrix-esque solos.
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