Josh Feola of Pangbianr gives CW a peek at the upcoming roster of music and film events lined up for spring. Check out a list of Pangbianr’s upcoming music and film events, or find out how to get involved with the group at pangbianr.com

With so many events lined up for spring and early summer, it feels like Pangbianr is having a coming out party. What are you most looking forward to? At the moment I’m most excited about an independent film screening and discussion series we’re holding at HomeShop as part of the JUE Festival and a film/music event we’re organizing at Three Shadows in Caochangdi for the opening week of the PhotoSpring Festival.

It’s an unusual choice to mix rock and film. To date most of the work we’ve done explicitly mixing film and music has been documentary in nature. Our main videographer, Benny Shaffer, edits great live videos and has done a few short interviews with bands from Beijing and elsewhere in China. One of Pangbianr’s core members, Maya Rudolph, has some short scripts of her own that we’d like to develop with local musicians providing the score and acting in the films. The ideal result of these collaborations would be an event series in which the band performs live while the film is screened.

Where did the name “Pangbianr” come from? [It] started off as an in-joke referring to our affinity for low-key, out-of-the-way spots. Someone would say they wanted to go to a club, but we just wanted to sit outside on plastic stools and drink ¥3 bottles of Yanjing, so we’d hang out “on the side.” [It] then evolved into a kind of catch-all slang word. It seemed like a good fit.