The gentle sea breeze caressed the sands of Aranya, mingling with the melodious sounds from the Xiami Music Festival stage. Recently, the 2024 Aranya Xiami Music Festival, produced by Xiami Music Entertainment and Aranya, returned for its third year. The festival featured a three-day music extravaganza with performances by Zhao Lei, Hu Defu, Xu Wei, Chen Qi Zhen, and other musicians, drawing tens of thousands of music fans from across China to Aranya’s Golden Coast.
The three-day festival includes a standard format with a pre-party, a sunrise special, and two full days of performances. At the pre-party, Zhao Lei performed a special 110-minute set with his “No Signal” and orchestral-electronic band, delivering both the nostalgic storytelling of Chengdu and the emotional surge of Our Time. During the sunrise special, the 70-something Taiwanese folk music pioneer Hu Defu sang Pacific Wind, sharing a beautiful morning with the audience.
The 2024 Aranya Xiami Music Festival boasted diverse styles and an internationally-oriented lineup. This year, the festival featured 28 musical acts, including 8 international artists such as Grammy Award-winning R&B singer Corinne Bailey Rae and American singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata. These artists are well-known in their home countries and have received various international awards such as Grammys and BRIT Awards, covering genres from electronic and folk to rock, R&B, and indie.
On the Chinese front, the festival maintained its unique aesthetic. Performers included Xu Wei, Chen Qi Zhen, Yang Naiwen, Re-TROS (Rebuilding the Rights of Statues), Stolen, Xu Jun, Zhang Weiwei, and Li Xiaoyun. Yin Liang, the chief curator of Xiami Music Entertainment and the festival’s main producer, emphasized, “The fundamental logic of the festival is to customize it according to each place's characteristics. If a music festival is the same everywhere, it can only be called a product, not a work of art.” The Aranya Xiami Music Festival strives to be a work of art in the hearts of its audience. Over the past three years, the festival’s lineup has seen minimal repetition, as “the fear of similarity means that beauty is not uniform but diverse in its forms.”
