Tian Qiyi’s sophomore album, Songs For Workers, sees brothers John Tian Qi Wardle and Charlie Tian Yi Wardle team up with their famous father, Jah Wobble, for 10 tracks that mix the family’s Asian and Celtic roots while adding a heavy dose of dub. 

The siblings’ serious skill with traditional Chinese and Mongolian instruments – something passed on from their mother and grandfather – characterises the pieces. See-sawing string drones, their melodies sometimes tilting toward Romany, and shaken, ceremonial percussion. Dramatic, hammered zithers, and tumbling hand drums. Mike McGoldrick adds pipes and woodwinds, while their dad brings his beast of a bass to more than half of the album. 

Some of the tunes are more traditional than others. At The Beginning, for example, feels like a festival. Full of excited shouts, and steadily spinning up to dervish tempo. Others draw on the early `80s post-punk musical melting pot that their father first emerged from, where folks, quickly tired of punk, and still bored of rock, were looking, worldwide, for new rhythms. Dharma is one of those. Trippy, trance-inducing, sort of like Papa’s Invaders Of The Heart, with the dangerous air of Burroughs and Gysin in Marrakech. The title track, Songs For Workers, is another, but more muscular, more PiL-like, with a space-rock guitar finale, care of Marlin Chung.

Pretty much everything is further spiced with dubwise delay drops, mad phasing, filtering and tape effects, lending the set a very psychedelic vibe. This is especially true of the vocal numbers. The Route Of Desire is a raga, that builds to a wild freakout, via what sounds like didgeridoos, Tuvan throat-singing, and touches of Strawberry Fields… and Tomorrow Never Knows. Mongolian Dub is a slow, pummelling prayer-like spiritual, riding a room-shaking rumble. Charlie’s voice taking these tracks into territory somewhere between The Stone Roses and The Beatles at their most stoned. 

Tian Qiyi’s Songs For Workers is out now on Pagoda Records.