Stone Age instrument meets modern rock

For a band that began with a name about the difficulty of reaching an ending, finishing the album was therefore significant. But it was never intended as a conclusion.

"It's just a very small part of my creative career," Wen says. "We'll keep writing."

When Xian Ke announced the album, the pair described standing for a long time in front of the "wall of sound" they had built, moved to tears by what they heard.

The image captures something essential about the record. Xian Ke wanted to create not simply a collection of songs, but an expansive sonic space — "a whole expanse", as Wen describes it, made from different frequencies and layers of sound.

They wanted the listener to stand in front of it and feel its scale.

That ambition is partly why All Things End, Yet Nothing Ends feels larger than the familiar description of "traditional Chinese opera meets rock", often attached to Xian Ke, which formed in 2019.

Both members trained at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, and their relationship with traditional theater runs deep. Wen studied theater; Wang Pushi is a Kunqu Opera performer and works with the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre.

But Xian Ke is increasingly wary of being defined by the label "traditional Chinese opera meets rock music".

The label exists, Wang acknowledges. People use it. But for the band, traditional theater is not an aesthetic costume that they put on when they make music. It is part of the way they think.

"We write what we know," Wen says.

There was no elaborate calculation about how much traditional Chinese opera to combine with contemporary rock. Their musical languages have developed together naturally.

For Wang, the difference between performing traditional Chinese opera and performing with Xian Ke is particularly revealing. On the traditional stage, he is playing a character. His job is to express that character's emotions rather than his own.

"With the band, it is 100 percent my expression," he says.

He describes himself as a theater director within Xian Ke, while Wen is the writer. Together, they bring a theatrical way of thinking to their music: songs become scenes, sounds become characters, and the album becomes a world.