How RE: ANALOG is Spreading The Love for Vinyl in Beijing

By Dalia Gulca

“I started doing this because it felt like a map with many points. Eventually, they all connected and led to a project called Snax, is perched on a shelf, by a red-accented Parentesi floor lamp and a potted fiddle-leaf fig. It’s clean, sparse, warm. 

On that map? YouTube channels and projects that have inspired him, like My Analog Journal, and the documentary An Impossible Project. A deep desire to work with analog materials. Frustration with his tech job at an internet company. And the final push: China’s COVID shutdown in 2020.

Ming shares mellow vinyl mixes on YouTube with a modest international following of 84,000 subscribers, often weaving between soul, Ryuichi Sakamoto. But when he began DJing from his apartment during the COVID lockdown, he gravitated toward slower, groovier tracks — drawn in by the tempo that felt most natural to mix.

In Wantlist

Snax

Mndsgn

2018

Hip Hop, Contemporary R&B

Vinyl, LP

Shop Want

“At first, I was just playing records one by one — no mixing, just dropping one after the other,” he says. “But once I learned how to DJ, how to blend tracks smoothly, I realized that slower tempos felt more natural to me. It’s not high-speed like house or jungle, nothing too intense. It’s mellow, more chill — that’s my pace, my vibe.”

Ming’s international breakthrough came with a YouTube video of him spinning vinyl on the shores of Aranya Beach in China. The seaside wind wreaked havoc on his setup, causing needles to skip and forcing multiple re-recordings. But the effort paid off. Today, he says most of his fans come from outside China.

It’s past 1 a.m. in Beijing — 13 hours ahead of where I’m interviewing Ming over Google Meet. Still on European time, he’s just back from a month in Berlin and Paris, where he dug through record stores and flea markets for local sounds he can’t find elsewhere and filmed new segments for his “CITY GUIDE” YouTube series.

In fact, many of the records in his collection come from overseas expeditions. A seasoned traveller, Ming has gone crate digging in Seoul, Japan, Berlin, Paris. Since starting RE: ANALOG, he’s also upped his pre-trip research and now gathers extensive information on which record stores to visit, what to film, and where to stay (he often books AirBnBs or hotels already equipped with decks).

While he found his love on records via the internet, he’s made it a recent mission to try and build more of a vinyl community in Beijing. The city, while massive (it’s the second most populated city in China, which, respectively in the second most populated country in the world), isn’t the same record shopping paradise that nearby countries like Japan and Seoul are. This is partly due to restrictions. Some of it comes down to geography, though. Still, he’s dedicated to use his influence and network to help build something.

Thinking of visiting Beijing? “Call me,” Ming says. “If some vinyl lovers come to Beijing, they can share records at our workspace.”

He notes that there’s a limited number of record stores in the city.

“The cost of opening a record store here is extremely high. To survive, you have to be commercially driven,” he says. “ion fuels it, of course, but the expenses make it hard for truly unique stores to last. A major challenge is getting legal permission to sell records.”

On top of tight government regulations and high operating costs, there’s also the sheer sprawl of Beijing to navigate. To compare, in approximate numbers, New York City has a population density of 29,303 people per square mile, Seoul’s is 41,000 people per square mile, Beijing’s 3,500. Only Tokyo is the somewhat similar density with 6,480. However Tokyo has had such a historically significant impact on the global record industry thanks to company’s like Sony and stores like Tower Records. In Beijing, the first record store didn’t open till 1999.

In recent years, more vinyl DJ performances have popped up at small livehouses — what music venues are often called in China and parts of East Asia — but like record stores, they remain relatively rare.

“We cannot grow the vinyl community like in a small city because the distance between people is really [far],” Ming says. “It’s not a neighborhood vibe. I think online is the most important part for us — to spread the information, so people can know about it and then come to the offline.”

In Wantlist

Thousand Knives

Ryuichi Sakamoto

2019

bstract, Experimental, Synth-pop

Vinyl, Album, Reissue

Shop Want

Ming says most of the local interest in analog comes from online platforms — especially Xiaohongshu (known in English as “Red Note”), a TikTok-like app popular in China. He also shares content on Weibo and Bilibili, China’s answer to YouTube. Still, he and his partner Souya are finding creative ways to spread vinyl culture offline in Beijing, from pop-up events to riding around the city on a turntable-equipped bicycle cart.

“After we started organizing vinyl expos in the city, more people became aware of vinyl culture. Last year, we launched a project called Vinyl Nomad,” says Ming. Soya drew a prototype of a bicycle cart for the vinyl equipment on paper, and they sent it to a local manufacturer to get it assembled. Then they loaded it with turntables and records and took it out onto the streets. “Street corners, parks, markets — anywhere we could create a moment for people to slow down and experience music in a new way.”

He says the inspiration for this idea came from seeing videos on YouTube of people using CDJs on bicycles in European cities. He thought, why not make it vinyl? “We wanted to introduce people to analog music — the physical experience of touching and interacting with vinyl. So we used this format to spread that idea. It really caught people’s attention, and they started to gather around, curious about what we were doing,” says Ming. 

Now that people have become familiar with his deck-equipped bicycle in Beijing, he’s retired the custom build following a final pop-up event this month where he ed two other local music curators, DJ DiGGERS and DJ Watermelon. Currently, he’s looking for another creative way to bring vinyl culture to the city. He’s considering doing local workshops, teaching small groups to spin records. 

Beijing may struggle with achieving the kind of established vinyl culture present in European cities or Japan. But the value of the analog experience pushes Ming forward.

“I used to work at an internet company, dealing with data, not interacting with real people — just working with code. It wasn’t a good experience for me,” Ming reflects. “Even if you own just one record, it’s enough. I once heard a local podcaster compare it to a kind of Buddha-like attitude — you place this object in your home, and it gives you a different feeling, something tangible in the physical world,” he says. “That’s the most important part — you need to experience that difference to truly understand it.”

KEEP DIGGING

Music

15 Essential Post-Punk Albums

From the angular attack of Gang of Four to the gloomy sounds of The Cure, explore essential post-punk albums from the ’70s and ’80s.

Music

Must-Have NYHC Records From the 1980s

Following on the heels of the city’s punk rock star, a faster, straight-forward alternative arose in the form of these DIY pioneers.

Collecting

The Art of Grading Vinyl Records with John Manship

For over 55 years, John Manship’s clear and consistent vinyl grading practices has shaped his perspective as a legendary vinyl vendor.

Music

Inside ’s Underground Jazz Movement of the ’60s and ’70s

In ’60s and ’70s , a wave of boundary-pushing jazz artists redefined the genre — crafting some of the era’s most adventurous sounds, now ripe for rediscovery.