‘Cantopop is so unhealthy!’: inside Hong Kong’s new experimental music happening, Freespace Noise Fest

Kicking off at the West Kowloon Cultural District Venue on July 24, the inaugural Freespace Noise Fest is Hong Kong’s largest experimental music event to date

Curator Kung Chi-shing promises a wilfully unapologetic affair, presenting largely improvised performances alongside avant-garde icons Yoshihide Otomo and Senyawa

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The inaugural Freespace Noise Fest is Hong Kong’s largest experimental music event to date and offers a loud rebuttal to the city’s syruppy pop sounds, says curator Kung Chi-shing, who has programmed more than 30 acts to perform at the West Kowloon Cultural District venue from July 24. Photo: Eugene Chan

Published: 12:45pm, 19 Jul 2024

Faced with following up 2019’s inaugural Freespace Jazz Fest, but finding engaging programming difficult with international travel amid pandemic uncertainty, in-house curator Kung Chi-shing conceived a series of virtual encounters for 2020: pairing local musicians with contemporaries elsewhere on the globe.

It quickly became clear to Kung that even a minuscule digital delay would scupper any syncopation, so sprawling, free-form improvisations became the norm. The sessions begat what will become Hong Kong’s first large-scale experimental music event, the Freespace Noise Fest, set to bring two weeks of live sonic debauchery to the West Kowloon Cultural District from Wednesday, July 24.

“We will provide earplugs at the door,” says Kung, laughing. He is not joking. “I really care about people’s hearing. I just want people interested in strange things to come – sometimes Hong Kong seems so normal on the surface.”

Kung’s subsequent experimental curations since the cube-shaped concert space opened five years ago – organised first under his Experimental Lab tag within the Jazz Fest, later as the stand-alone Sonic Encounter series – kindled the contemporary composer’s interest in left-field musical styles. Now, as Freespace’s head of contemporary performance, the 63-year-old Hong Kong native will host seven evenings of experimental gigs over a fortnight of wilfully unapologetic performances.

Faced with programming the annual Freespace Jazz Festival during the pandemic, at its second edition in 2020, curator Kung Chi-shing presented a series of virtual encounters pairing Hong Kong musicians with contemporaries elsewhere on the globe. The Experimental Lab would be repeated for at the 2021 event (pictured) and a third time in 2022. Photo: Freespace

“The word ‘noise’ is all embracing – you can have melody but you don’t need it, you can hear the beat but you don’t need to,” says Kung. “Noise is challenging – it isn’t supposed to be easy listening. Noise challenges the way you define what music is; it may not be comfortable, but noise may open a new universe for you.”