Highway A20

Another in a long list of Chinese guitarists with knuckle-busting chops, Cheng Zhen offers up Highway A20, a self-produced and recorded instrumental CD which finds him throwing in occasional industrial and fusion licks into the hard rock guitar mix. Just as WenLin, Yanliang Lee and othersuse drum machines and beat boxes to give a more contemporary spin to their music, Zhen twists and turns his sequencer into an instrument of its own. Zhen is into radical guitar explorations, but you'll find plenty of musical ground to be accessible to fans of neo-shred. The liner notes are almost completely in Chinese, so information is scarce, but you can thrill to the sound clips before being the first on your block with a copy of Highway A20 in your CD collection.