** All revenues from this album will be donated to Lensational, a Hong Kong registered non-profit organisation devoted to training the next generation of women storytellers from across society's margins in a variety of regions in South Asia and Africa, including Hong Kong. **
When I set out to wander around Hong Kong in November 2019, I had no idea what to expect. I’d been once before, in the summer of 2017, and utterly fallen in love with the city and especially with its sounds. Every new street and district that I went to had its own array of bewildering, unique, wonderful sounds. I wanted to go back and listen more, so with the support of the Finzi Trust, I set out on a recording trip. I was searching for hidden sounds, especially quiet or unexpected ones. After a ten-day visit to Hong Kong and seven months of listening back, thinking, re-thinking and re-listening, I felt I had enough understanding of the recordings I’d taken to make an album: *In the Concrete Silence*. It’s a small landmark in my small understanding of Hong Kong, one which I hope I’ll be able to continue developing for the rest of my life. I hope it also helps you to listen to your surroundings, wherever you live, and also to think about Hong Kong in a sonic way, whether you live there or not. I have tried to treat these sounds with respect, but there is also some deliberately written music in this album, partly to remind both me and you that this is only my hearing of Hong Kong, and that millions of other people’s hearings are entirely different from mine.
I hope there are some sounds in here that you didn’t expect to hear. When I first began to open my ears on arriving in Kowloon, the first sound I noticed was sparrows chirping. There are thousands of them in every square kilometre of Hong Kong’s urban areas (Hong Kong Birdwatching Society, a BirdLife partner in HKSAR, conducted a brilliant citizen science bird census project and there’s an article on this at [https://www.birdlife.org/asia/news/urban-tree-sparrows-throng-hong-kong]). Birds quickly became my favourite characters to listen out for, not least because of the variety of species in the Tai Tam Reservoir area and also north of Kowloon in Lion Rock Country Park and almost everywhere else in Hong Kong. Very few of my recordings don’t contain birdsong. Hong Kong Wetland Park is particularly brilliant for the sounds of a huge variety of wildlife. After ten days surrounded by birds, I loved their sounds so much that I’ve reserved a track right in the middle of the album for birdsong, with no music, the one entitled ‘Wings Down’.
You’ll also hear some beach recordings at the start and end of the album. Beaches are some of my favourite parts of Hong Kong and they’re where I’ve consistently felt most at peace. Like birds, water is easy to find and to hear all over Hong Kong. It’s at its most tumultuous in this album in ‘Waves Down’, the fourth track, which is made from recordings I took on the cross-harbour ferry. I think it’s the best mode of transport I’ve ever taken in almost every way and it has a brilliant soundscape. It’s also the journey on which I personally spent the most time thinking about the centuries of British atrocities in southern China. If you’d like to read further about this, there are innumerable broad overviews, but John Y Wong’s ‘Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War’ is one of the most detailed and extensively referenced books I’ve found, although it’s now 22 years old and focuses heavily on economics and diplomacy. Mao Haijian’s ‘The Qing Empire and the Opium War’ is a landmark that’s now available in English translation from CUP. Julia Lovell also wrote a book in 2012 entitled ‘The Opium War’ which is less academic and quite broad.
I heard many sounds whose origin I didn’t know in Hong Kong. I have guesses about where some of them came from and no guesses about others. One of my guesses is that the crackling sound in the second track, ‘Under’, is snapping shrimp. There are only two sets of hydrophone recordings in the whole album and this is one of them (a hydrophone is basically a waterproof contact microphone). The other is a set of trickling noises that appear at the end of ‘Flat Earth’, that I recorded by dropping the hydrophone into the little wave crests on the beach. In these cases the microphone was an extension of my own ears, allowing me to hear sounds that I wouldn’t otherwise hear. Contact microphones are like that; they’re also very cheap! If you find these sounds interesting, I’d encourage you to get hold of a contact mic and start experimenting at home, particularly with water if you can get hold of a hydrophone.
The album ends with an expansive collage containing my favourite street sounds, from water fountains to basketball courts. From my perspective it’s a musical love letter to Hong Kong, as well as a giant thank you to Fern, Hampton and Kristy, who have given so generously of their time and energy towards helping me listen to Hong Kong. I owe this album to them.
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