brown notes

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According to Wikipedia, the "brown note" is a legendary infrasound frequency that causes humans to lose control of their bowels due to resonance. There is no scientific evidence to support the claim that a "brown note" (transmitted through sound waves in air) exists. However, here in Hong Kong the Brown Note Collective is exploring the often shady boundary between music and noise, and whether we can make people shit their pants or just get shitty...

Mick, Tegan and I had timed our return to the towering neon city of Hong Kong for a reunion with the BNC, performing at the Cattle Depot Artist's Collective - a strange exhibition/studio space housed in an old abbattoir. We were the last act in a series of experimental noise bands - which mostly consisted of people sitting behind laptops and pressing buttons. The eight of us got up on stage equipped with Adam on Steinberger (electric guitar), Shum on vocals, Brian on clarinet/vocals, Tegan on clarinet/vocals, Karin on trombone, Yin Zhuang on electric erhu (2-stringed chinese violin), Mick and I on assorted junk percussion including bubble wrap, a box from hard rubbish and some plastic bags, as well as a conveniently located wheelie bin... to say that we shocked the crowd might be a slight exaggeration but the number of people who came in from the street investigating our odd-time and fake chinese harmonies was pretty cool. We finished up that night by exploring the old Kai Tak airport - out of use since the early 90's, located amidst towering apartment blocks, it's easy to see why landing there would have been scary. But now it's literally the only place in Hong Kong where you can experience "distance". It's a windy, airy, weedy, lonely kind of place and truly excellent for a large crowd of explorers to have a good time in... We climbed the hillock at the end of the runway, jumped down it's excavated opposite side, clambered on the diggers, sang into their buckets and ran around on the runway.

When we first arrived in HK Tegan and i found ourselves homeless, and squatting a rarely-used tutorial room at Hong Kong University. The couches were comfy and we even found some little blankets... however the random entries from "real" students meant that sleep was interrupted by paranoia, and when Yin offered us room at her cosy apartment in Sham Shui Po we jumped at the opportunity...
Yin's place is a smallish but excellent 2 br apartment with an indoor/outdoor music room and a balcony. just downstairs are the veggie markets, where the tofu man gets his supplies delivered at 4.30am and then does excercises for an hour, and the egg man stands and plays with the eggs in his hands before rearranging them and replacing them in different ways. The veggies arrive in trucks driven by portly men who are shirtless on the hot days, and the battered polystyrene boxes are unloaded by leaner men. Across the road is a fabric wholesaler, and groups of men heft the heavy rolls onto the trucks over and over again. The tofu man is relieved by his wife at around 9am. She's a soft looking lady, quick with a smile, who waves to me when I pass. The egg-man likes our music, and gives us on the balcony a thumbs-up.

The room across the hall is a brothel, and the sounds of mahjong's tile-shuffling emerge constantly, and the doorbell rings at all hours. The man from the noodle shop below the flat asks whether Yin rents out her rooms to foreigners, there are so many staying. Mick has been staying too, and occasionally his girlfriend Christina as well. We cook hot potato chips, banana pancakes and mee goreng (or did until Christina's research revealed chicken is one of the hidden ingredients), and Yin and I spent hours looking at cool photos and talking about the end of the world as we know it, going out and planting flowers in the local park (mostly eaten by local bugs) and making a new garden out of bits of an abandoned cupboard and polystyrene boxes, planting them with chilli and sweet peas and wheatgrass and beansprouts and parsley... recording the sounds of random rubbish, like plastic bottles newspapers magazines... playing our favourite songs on cello and erhu... performing ukulele surgery - implanting pickups into Adam Mick and Bryan's ukes... watching poetry slam on YouTube... Yin's dad came down from Shanghai and happily spent most of his time either drawing people or cooking for us - he did sketches and oil paintings of both Tegan and me, and sketched a whole bunch of people at the pub one night. In his spare time he taught me some chinese.

The days have rolled by without me noticing them pass. Catching up with the HK street art crew has been excellent - everyone's cranking with their art in between design work. Kathy presented us with new shirts featuring her "fat lady" and we've been loaded up with new stickers. The launch of "galleri" magazine's 3rd edition was a pretty good night, despite it being massively overbooked we still managed to have a great time with our free drinks in the corner. Redi and others saying "what happened to you - you look so girly!" to which I reply "... dunno just felt like it".

For Mick's birthday we went to see "The Story of the Girl In Blue", a puppet show by a Hungarian group which took a Picasso painting as inspiration, and created a dreamlike adventure for a girl who steps out of a painting. Their puppets were damn cool, and their puppetry was inspiring. I particularly liked the cubist 2D people who danced to the sound of a cubist violin...

Sunday saw the Brown Note Collective wind it up for a marathon performance at "Folk Tales From Many Lands" (www.folktellers.tk). The event was a series of performances and installations at 4 different venues around Hong Kong, each representing a different kind of environment - grassland, desert, mountain and sea. BNC played almost constantly - to draw the audience to the next venue, to accompany some of the performances, as well as on the bus in between stops... Our fluoro yellow marathon runners' outfits were awesomely bright, and our music was excellently ridiculous. My new favourite toy - a tour guide's portable microphone with its own volume control - awesome for vocals/beatbox/and FEEDBACK! Having survived the day we and the other performers/organisers had a weird time at an unlicensed thai restaurant (only 2 cooks for about 50 people - they made all the meaty dishes first) and then gave up and went for a massage.

As usual Hong Kong fascinates and repulses me with its huge concrete towers and mass consumption. But living Kowloon side this time has taken me away from the expat ghetto of Hong Kong Island, and is leaving me with a far nicer taste in my mouth than the last trip. In amongst the shady (dark and dodgy) lanes of Mongkok and Sham Shui Po I'm finding heaps of hidden gems, like the fabric markets, pet fish markets, huge old paperbark trees, a lane of bottlebrushes, the stinky freedom-hating bird markets, the awesome orchids at the flower markets, the satisfaction of creating a box garden out of rubbish - all against a backdrop of Yin and my constant discussion about the end times/collapse of cities, with a soundtrack of distorted erhu and rubbish percussion.

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