Words & Photo: Garrin Faturrahman

With the pace of our algorithm (and everything, really) fed to us through the small screen we carry everyday, we might have been losing a piece of our minds, hindering us from actually taking in what’s within our reach. One of them happened to be a four-piece instrumental unit from Hong Kong, Virgin Vacation.

Yet, we can pinpoint a couple of resemblance between ourselves and the band—from our appreciation towards each other’s local music scene, to living lives under suppression and repression from those with unchecked power. There’s plenty to talk and understand about their ways of keeping it together under such pressure, and how they approach songwriting. Turns out, there’s plenty to do with the element of spontaneity and being content.

The eclectic, psychedelic-tinged band had their show last February at Krapela, as brought by our good friends at Kolibri Rekords, and with their help, we got to sit with all four (with their additional saxophonist, Tomii) to check out their artist reccos, tips on realizing a song, to a brief tip in doing good in trying times.

Upon listening to your songs, you seem to put forward an eclectic—kaleidoscopic, even, most importantly during your more psychedelic numbers—attitude in songwriting, and an element of spontaneity and improvisations can also be felt here. May I know each of your references/influences in music?

James: We have so many, I wouldn’t even really know where to start with myself, but I think from the beginning of Virgin Vacation, I was interested in Krautrock music, so like CAN and that kind of German experimental music, and then kinda more increasingly interested in kind of spiritual jazz and more electronic music because I’m into synths and stuff, so these are some kind of touchstones for me.

Wing: I think each of us have very different tastes in music and personally we all like different stuff… 

James: Yea but the question is you—what do you like?

[distant chuckle from others] 

Step: Oh well, it’s hard to answer but maybe for this band, I used some concepts from contemporary art music. Working as a band not to [only make music], but as an artist thing, direction, well–in a way of thinking about music. 

Kuro: Ummm, before, I was kind of an RnB stuff fan, so I listened a lot to that kind of songs, also some kind of heavy titles—not exactly metal or comfort-feel heavy, but like a mixture of this guy with one heavy and also a goofy chill way.

Tomii: And I grew up on cantopop, classical, and then later switched to blues, and that’s really a new starting ground for me, and everything that stems from that tree I guess. Like, I usually listen to Robert Johnson, Pedro Williams and then Muddy Waters, BB King, and their followers such as John Mayer, Eric Clutten, etc.

Stevie Ray?

Tomii: Yea, Stevie Ray, I used to learn his songs on guitar when I started playing. And then a lot of soul music follows too like D’Angelo, especially neo-soul, D’Angelo, Joe Scott, Erykah Badu, and then later on ambient music had become part of my life too like Brian Eno, and some more—I feel like many more contemporary musicians—they all have an ambient, like a soundscape background in their sound, with the common ground being they all, the songs that I listen too, they have a lot of improvisation element into it, apart from Cantopop ‘cause that’s my childhood in Hong Kong environment, and yeah… 

How do you blend all those sounds together?

Step: Just jamming!

James: Yeah, we just jam, like we play together and we have many diverse influences and not only do they process through us individually but kind of processed as a unit by the whole band, and so we jam them out, I guess.

So we get some quite unexpected juxtaposition, like we got that kinda movie-y, kinda Quentin Tarantino thing, it’s got some jazzy thing, and we got these strange collisions of all kinds of music which only happen with all of us kinda throwing all of our influences together.

How about your overall approach in music?

James: We never really start with an idea as—we do some sort of games where we put together and we draw words out of a hat and stuff and something to spark ideas which we can explore and develop into music for jamming, but we never start with a top down idea. We never start with something like “oh, hi, guys I’ve written something and we’re going to make an arrangement,” it’s always a process of development from nothing, essentially.

We wrote down words in paper and put them into a basket or a hat and then pick out one or two of them and then we might have two words like for an example, “vibrant feather”, “premium feather”, these are just two random words that are on this tissue package here but, you know, it could be the next two Virgin Vacation songs, I don’t know [laughs].

We all get a feeling from that, we take that as a starting point for the exploration we’re gonna go on. After that, we usually record it, we listen back, we reiterate, reiterate, reiterate, and then after a long period of time we have some kind of a polished thing. 

Tell us more about you performing live for Jay Wong’s Tides of Time (2024) graphic novel.

James: We kind of engineered a quite special event which took place in a small coffee shop with plate glass windows and there was only space for the band within the shop and the audience were outside wearing headphones, which is quite an interesting image in a winter night in Hong Kong, but we designed some music in response to certain parts of the book and it was designed to be frameworks upon which to be improvised, so they were very improvised-based things, it was kinda interesting to using that as a starting point to write music as well or to develop music.

How did you actually bring the sequences and the stories to life? How did you see your music within the graphic novel? 

James: I think that’s gonna vary for every person here. For me, I can’t read Chinese, so I can only respond to the images rather than the details of the storyline. For me, it’s exploring the imagery rather than trying to tell a narrative.

Step: Well, because the comic artist sent a book to us, he wanted us to touch the paper and the ink and color of it, so I try to look into details of the texture and looks, and details of it.

 

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Wing: I respond in a way that’s more about the atmospheric meaning of the book. It’s hard to talk about the book because it’s very visual, it feels so watercolor-y, in a blue-colored, the way it’s about the ocean and everything. So I’m more about responding to it in a way of creating a similar atmosphere.

Kuro: I feel the same way, because I tried not to focus on the story too much because it may become very direct to describe the story, it’s not what we’re trying to do. Before we jammed, we tried to take some keywords from the book, and then we saw ‘ocean’, we tried to write about ocean, and then ‘alien’, and we combined those keywords and we jam. So it’s quite similar to what we did before. 

What do people usually get wrong about Hong Kong? 

Wing: I think most people think that Hong Kong has a lot of Gangsters– 

[Everyone laughs]

Wing: –but it’s not true! We have gangsters, but not everyone’s part of the gang. [chuckles] So yea, I think that’s the biggest misunderstanding about Hong Kong.

Tomii: And we have a beautiful countryside too! 

[Everyone cheers]

Tomii: Yeah, that’s your answer! Beaches, mountains, it’s not just about high-rising buildings.

James: Exactly, yeah, most of Hong Kong’s area is countryside and it’s beautiful, it’s not just the big city—look at the statistics, they never lie [laughs].

Tomii: Yes, come and we’ll show you around! 

James: Beaches too, nice beaches. 

When people think of Asian songs, Japan and South Korea are the first two names to come up. Where do you see Hong Kong in the bigger picture?

James: I think we’re competing with the K-Pop industry?

[Everyone laughs] 

Statistically speaking, or? 

James: [Sarcastically] Yes, statistically speaking.

[Everyone laughs] 

James: Well, actually, NO! No, not yet [laughs]. 

Wing: Are you asking from the music industry’s perspective or just from an audience perspective or? 

I’d like to know from the audience’s perspective. 

Wing: Well… It’s hard to answer that.

Tomii: Can I say something first?

Sure.

Tomii: Besides us going out to Indonesia or Singapore to see the world, I hope more people can come to Hong Kong too, like, I don’t wanna put myself in a place where I compete with other people or regions all the time, like Japan. That’s the bigger market, let’s go there, or Europe, that’s the bigger continent, let’s go there and make meaningful connections.

Hong Kong is very diverse in cultural practices, in people, in languages even, and in music also. And besides us going out, we do hope people could go to this place and discover also.

So, it’s about going out and about?

Tomii: Going out, but also bringing in. 

Kuro: Yeah, and I’m not sure if people will mainly just listen to Japan or Korea music these days, though they’re the biggest countries statistically speaking [for music]. But I think nowadays a lot of different Asian bands are working together in different ways, like Thai bands and Japanese bands working together, or us with other bands, to create a more diverse community across Asia.

 

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Indonesia is reaching new lows in freedom of expression. With how Hong Kong youth movements had gone through a lot for the past few years, do you have any words to say to us Indonesian youths?

Tomii: I guess what we can say to ourselves, [in the midst of that situation] the worst thing to come up is just to be yourself and take first hand experiences to try to filter out the information you’re getting in daily and to not forget how you feel at this moment, and be content.

Be content straight away, especially when it’s like that there. There are things that you feel like you can’t say and you gotta be careful and that’s suppression, that makes you feel suppressed, but finding and breaking that chain would be the only way out actually, and be good to others, be good to yourself, be good to your neighbors.

With you guys being here, have you got a taste of the Indonesian music scene? Are there any notable acts that you liked?

James: We’ve got a little taste of the Indonesian music scene just through the bands we’ve collaborated with on some shows and who people told us about, and it looks very cool. You guys really got a thriving scene with a big range of music and really enthusiastic musicians. 

I like The Panturas, Under the Bright Yellow Sun, and Flukeminimix too, they’re kinda like a doom-y post-rock band, they’re really awesome.

Step: And Lightspace too, the first band [we discovered], they’re very cool. 

Kuro: For me, I like Thee Marloes. Someone told me about them, although we’ve never played with them, but I’ve heard their songs online and I like them. They’re exciting. 

We’ve been meeting a lot of musicians here and I feel like we’re making real connections with these people and it’s really good, and it’s like what you talked about, making connections between scenes across different places in Asia. 

Do you have any Hong Kong bands recommendations? 

Tomii: On top off my mind, although he’s not a band, he’s a singer-songwriter– 

Step: Tomii-chan! Yay

Tomii: Shut up!

Step: “He’s not a band,” [laughs].

Jimmy: He’s very sensitive about this, please forgive me.

Tomii: He’s my friend, a person I know, Wong Hin-Yan, he does film scoring and also Cantonese folk music. Really interesting soundscapes, I would really recommend.

Step: I like this band called The Crush. 

Kuro: David Boring?

James: David Boring is great, yes. Lucid Express is also good, so check them out too. 

Kuro: Wellsaid?

James: Wellsaid is also nice, they’re excellent.

Wing: They recently toured in Indonesia, last week.

 

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Do you have anything to say for aspiring bands and musicians? 

James: Rock and Roll never dies!

[Everyone laughs]

James: Keep playing music because music is the most important thing in the world. So yeah, keep doing it. Don’t give up!