Homegrown bands on home turf
From folk to progressive rock to hip hop and funk, Hong Kong’s diverse local indie music scene emerged from the shadows at The Week music festival. Neil Li reports.
Formerly known as The Gig Week, The Week music festival was started in 2017 by a group of people who had a hard time finding local music acts playing the lesserknown genres that they enjoyed. One of the event’s founders, Paul Sedille, lived in Beijing before moving to Hong Kong which seemed to lack the diversity of the music scene in the Chinese capital at the time.
“In Hong Kong, you can find some of the bigger genres but then when you’re looking for more specific or underground music, it gets harder. Because of that difficulty, we started looking around and as we organized the event, we discovered a lot,” says Sedille.
With the goal to make Hong Kong indie music more accessible and bring it to a bigger audience, the organizers put together seven consecutive nights of shows at seven different venues around the city for the first edition of The Week last year, covering genres such as acoustic, hip hop, punk, metal, dance rock and electronic. The event was well-received. The model seemed to have worked in Hong Kong. This year, the gigs followed the same format with new acts except for one repeat band. New genres like world music, progressive rock and soul and funk as well as an all-female lineupthemed night were featured.
“The whole point of the event is to push more bands on more stages more often. The idea is to change the lineups every year to give people more opportunities,” Sedille explains. “All the venues are different as well from last year except for one. A lot of them are new live houses like Lost Stars or This Town Needs. The genres changed as well, we didn’t repeat genres this year besides metal and hip hop. All the others are new because there is so much going on in the city that you can’t cover everything in seven days.”
Engaged audiences
One of the performing acts, ReOrientate, was happy that The Week had dedicated a night to world music, to fit them in. “Normally people don’t know where to put us. This time we’re not sandwiched in between a progressive rock band and a hip hop act. It has been said that ReOrientate fits equally well in an arts festival theater and all the way to an indie rock venue,” says founder De Kai.
Described as “a dialogue across musical languages, across time and space”, ReOrientate is a collective of musicians from a variety of backgrounds who collaborate and create a blend of music influenced by cultures along the Silk Road such as Chinese, Indian, Middle-Eastern and others. Their performances incorporate traditional music elements such as a cajon, erhu, flamenco dancers and Indian singers along with advanced technology like virtual reality.
De Kai expresses that like in many places around the world, the Hong Kong audiences are not too familiar with music outside the mainstream, such as world music and especially music that is produced locally. However, that doesn’t deter the collective from trying to play in front of as many diverse audiences as possible in order to bridge cultures, often with positive results.
“It’s amazing because every single place that we’ve played in, every single audience has just been incredibly engaged, warm and wonderful,” De Kai says.
“When we play in a mixed