Beijing's nugget Opens New Location in Guangzhou

Katie Coy theBeijinger 2022-06-17

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Pretty much any Beijing business is going to tell you that the last month has been a real struggle, especially for independent businesses. However, it’s not all been bad news for nugget, who have just successfully opened their second branch down in Guangzhou.

I recently interviewed co-owner Jen Rao about the online music festival nugget created, titled Nugchella, which took place last Saturday, but was also curious to know more about their new branch that has just opened in Guangzhou in May.

Firstly, why did you decide to open a second location?

Basically ever since we opened our Beijing operations in 2020 it has been quite tough to stay afloat and keep our heads above water. I think most people will tell you that just operations of any kind in Beijing are quite difficult, in terms of cost, in terms of dealing with the authorities, neighbors, politics, all of these things.

And we knew immediately that, once we opened up and operated there, it wasn't sustainable and we would have to maybe think of alternatives to expand etc. In Beijing, in terms of finances, we rely on our business operations, but with the Guangzhou location, Dave [nugget's fellow co-owner] and I have invested our own personal savings and finances into a much smaller operation in the hope that it can support the Beijing location because it's so financially difficult, so for us Guangzhou was kind of a personal project.

Why was it that you decided on Guangzhou?

The reason why we chose Guangzhou is because we are really inspired by the music scene down here. So when we founded nugget records in 2019, the sound and visual aesthetic of the label, was very much influenced by the South of China.

There are some southern indie labels such as Qiii Snacks, which is based in Guangzhou, and a record store called Puppy Fat Records, based in Shenzhen, that we really liked. Just in terms of their sound quality, the style of music that they represent and also their visual aesthetic, it was something that we really resonated with. We just thought it was amazing and it was something that we didn't see a lot in the north, in Beijing.

In Beijing, the sound tends to be more hardcore. There's a lot of post rock, there's a lot of experimental, but in terms of this sort of more lofi Indie pop sound it’s something that's quite rare to come across. Also in terms of visual aesthetics, Beijing tends to lean on the very cool, very sort of abstract black and white, quite hardcore in terms of the visual aesthetics. We wanted to bring some of that brighter, more whimsical, illustration style that I am personally really passionate about. We see a lot of that in the south and we wanted to bring that up to Beijing, and so Guangzhou has always been a big inspiration for us.

Can you tell me a bit more about your Guangzhou location?

The venue is situated in a cultural area, there is a hostel nearby, a bookstore, an illustrative merchandise store, a livehouse... it’s sort of an up-and-coming area. Although it’s not the city center or what’s considered to be the coolest place right now, they are really pushing for indie culture to kind of happen here.

Essentially they had a program where businesses could apply and the government would offer some support in terms of rent control, a really stable agreement and support of the events we’d be organizing. We have some friends down here who are involved in the Indie music and art scene and they basically were like hey are you interested in applying.

This was six months ago and Dave and I thought why not give it a go, so we applied and submitted everything about what we do including our events, the work that we do with musicians including information about our LGBT events, art events etc. They really liked it and they accepted our application and we ended up with a spot here.

So we got the location and I came down to Guangzhou just before Beijing got into lockdown, around the end of April. I’ve been down here setting up the place, we’ve done a month and a half of renovations and trying to get a ton of merchandise in here. The space in Guangzhou is a cafe bar, mini live house (even mini-er than Beijing) and also shop for selling zines, tapes, band merchandise etc. The section for people coming to browse merchandise is a little more established than our Beijing location. We actually have quite a lot of zines from creators in Beijing, some from the south here, and the Guangzhou location is more focused on the shop, whereas Beijing is more focused on the bar element.

How have things been going since you opened?

For opening weekend we had three gigs, which was a lot to manage on my own but somehow we managed to pull it off we had two evening gigs - one was indie pop in style and one was experimental electronic, and then we had an afternoon gig that was indie pop.

Then we also had our first LGBT event, which was really nice. It was actually a story telling event, kind of taking inspiration from Spittoon, and I just put the event poster out there and had friends share it around. We really don’t have much of a community here yet, but we do have a small community that’s growing we got an audience of eight people which I was really happy with for our first LGBT story telling event. It was a nice open, very comfortable setting for people to share their experiences. Then after a member of our staff who is a musician did a DJ set and we just had a little party afterwards.

Overall, we’ve been very lucky in Guangzhou and things have gone very smoothly, though not without a lot of hard work! But we’ve just been lucky in terms of having the support that we have and we’re hoping that it will take a little bit of pressure off from trying to keep Beijing afloat. We also hope it will just generally help us in our operations moving forwards, in terms of developing ourselves musically and artistically.

I absolutely love the space in Guangzhou, partially because I built it myself -- with my bare hands, sweat and my tears -- so it’s just my little baby and feel like it’s even nuggetier than the nugget in Beijing. We have a really great team here and everyone is really passionate about just making it our own little space, so I’m really encouraging everyone from Beijing to come and hang out with me while I’m here!

Although with the annoying asterix on the travel pass for us living in Beijing it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to make it to Guangzhou anytime soon, you can still support nugget in Beijing. One thing not to miss is their Showcase happening on Jun 17, see the poster below for more details.