Hong Kong, SAAL, Unit D 3/F King Wan Industrial Building, 21:00 August 19, 2016, FB
Noise to Signal is an irregular noise and improvised music event. This time it took place in what appeared to be a recording studio and record shop in an old industrial building in Kwun Tong. Walking there on a rainy night seemed like a scene from some surreal film noir. The building was crumbling and a couple of rats welcomed me as I climbed the used-up staircase, which seemed a slightly safer option than the creaking cargo lift with hand-operated doors.
After locating and opening the nondescript door of unit D, I encountered a much cleaner space, separated into a bar, a recording room, a small stage, office and storage at the back. Only a couple of people were presents, most of them the artists themselves. Probably hoping for at least one or two more audience members, they procrastinated, maybe waiting for some friends running late.
Around 21:30 Sin:Ned, the regular appearance and organizer of Noise to Signal, started his performance. From previous experience, I expected some quite harsh and rather unfriendly sounds to be suffered through. And indeed the beginning of the performance did not disappoint in this sense. But slowly, the creaks and wailing of electronic feedback loops gave way to a more structured and graspable set of sounds. It was still very rough, yet listen-able due to the percussive nature of the sounds where looped pops and clicks where interspersed with micro moments of silence in between, making it appear almost as some more experimental version of Autechre. Occasionally more harsh sounds and high-pitched squeaks appeared, but their occurrence was scarce enough to be meaningful, creating breaks or transitions between different settings and loops. Sin:Ned’s performance turned out to be the biggest surprise of the evening, as I did not expect this clicks’n’cracks’n’pops style hinting at the possibility of a rhythmic element.
Five Zero Four could hardly keep the level set by Sin:Ned. They looked young, so one should not be too harsh on them, but I did not feel it. I would categorize at as a vaporwave-noise, where the frequent random settings changes and use of stereotypical synthesizer sounds appeared like a parody of what they attempted to achieve. The noise element was also too strong too, coming across as simply random noise.
Szkieve, the foreign guest and “headliner” of the event was next. He set up his little USB controller connected to his MacBook in the middle of the audience space and asked people to sit around him. His performance was less noise or sample based and came across mostly as one slowly evolving drone increasing and decreasing in intensity. Simultaneously with his performance, a custom-made handheld camera shot video of some cave exploration trip was projected. Every few minutes Szkieve looked over his shoulder behind himself to check the position of the video, making it clear that he was synchronizing his concert to it. About one third into the performance, he let out one surprising (vocal) scream during a second of silence. The performance was quite short, but intense, and I understood his aim: short and to the point, especially after the previous noise randomness this was highly appreciated.
Ring Chan was the last to perform. Due to the delayed start of the evening it was getting late, and due to the length of the first two performances I was reaching my daily noise limit. He started off immediately with a quite high sound level, and I saw a microphone facing straight to the monitor speaker, hinting at some rough feedback noise. A short while later, the artist pulled out a contact microphone equipped metal pot and started banging on it with a metal rod, all amplified by the microphone-monitor feedback loop. This was a clear signal for me to depart and I evacuated the site quickly.
