It’s oppressively hot on the day we meet Olivier Cong. The nagging humidity claustrophobically hugs the sun-starched streets around the musician’s Ngau Tau Kok studio. The weather is appropriate: Cong’s latest album, Tropical Church, is a meditation on heat.
“People said my first album reminds them of winter,” he says, dressed all in black, sipping a can of Guinness. His debut album, A Ghost and His Paintings, was indeed chilly and gothic, lush and string-layered, but also comparatively conventional output from an introspective alt-folk singer-songwriter, melodramatic yet mature for a then-22 year old. Tropical Church is an abrupt about turn, a mostly wordless, beat-less, experimental sound collage likely to alienate any non-discerning listener.
One wonders what happened to this searching soul in the intervening six years. Whatever it is, he’s keen to share. On June 20 and 21 — the symbolic height of summer, the solstice itself — Cong will perform Tropical Church for the first and likely only time in Hong Kong, before he splits from the city for six months. To hammer the heat home, these farewell shows take place at an oppressive un-air-conditioned former slaughterhouse, the Cattle Depot Artist Village in Ma Tau Kok, forcing the audience to sweat out this charged music alongside its author.
Yet a physical distance remains. The performance space is divided into two connected, semi-open rooms; Cong will perform in one — alone, looping himself live — while his 180 paying guests assemble next door, with live visuals by art director Man Lim-chung for company. “I have no idea if it’s going to work out. This is the least controlled environment I’ve ever planned a concert in,” says Cong. “But why do I have that inspiration? It’s like the people are kind of like cattle, just looking in the distance.”
Which poses the question, why would he want to distance himself from his audience? “It could be that I’m not sure what I’m doing with my music,” he adds, instantly undermining any earlier hubristic art-speak.
Something holy
The “tropical” in the title references Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, and a blurry still from the Palme d’Or-winning film’s folkloric romance serves as the album cover. And the “church”? Cong was raised Catholic but hasn’t practised since his teenage years. Yet he calls the huge church bell marking the floor of his cavernous studio floor his proudest possession, and a big black bible sits menacingly among the hundreds of eclectic books lining the walls.
Cong launched his debut album in 2018 with a choreographed happening at St Andrews Church Kowloon complete with a full choir wandering the cloisters. He later released the recording as Through the Window I See No Star (Live at St. Andrew’s Church), but later deleted it from streaming platforms. (It can still be found and purchased on Bandcamp.) “I don’t know why, I got insecure and I just took it out again,” he says. “People still ask me why.”
At the time, Cong often felt lumped into a generational quartet alongside fellow soul-searching singer-songwriters, notably Jabin Law, Tomii Chan and Jonathan Yang, a fraternal trio who recorded a session together in London’s Abbey Road last year. Since those days, the now 30-year-old Cong has moved on from mournful melancholia, thinking big with a string of concept-driven installation-performances.
His multimedia concert “The Dreaming,” at Freespace in July 2023, culminated in a simulated ritual where audience members were passed dirt by an almost-naked dancer. A month earlier, the dance work “His Temple” attracted his largest audience yet to Hong Kong City Hall. “That was too crazy,” he laughs. “I did this metal guitar thing on stage. Just me. Doomsday-like. And then we switched off all the air conditioning, and the whole place was engulfed in smoke. Thinking about it, it’s not the best show I’ve done. It made me kind of doubt myself for a bit.”
The Freespace performance was an early opportunity to hear live versions of pieces that would appear on Tropical Church, a collection that began life as a scrapbook of archive pieces, composed earlier to accompany dance performance and art exhibitions, some dating back to 2016. Inspired by his discovery of British sound artist David Toop, Cong’s decision to build on them for his long-awaited second album was fuelled by two individuals dear to his heart.
One of them was Cong’s father. Originally from Mauritius, he moved to the UK to study architecture, which is when he met Cong’s Hongkonger mother, a future urban planner. They eventually settled in Hong Kong, but during the pandemic, the elder Cong returned to Mauritius for an extended stay to care for ailing relatives, and sent a series of heartfelt letters home that made his son rethink his relationship to climate, location, roots and colonialism. “In his letters, he wrote a lot about temperature, I don’t know why,” says Cong. “It kind of resonated with the Hong Kong weather. It’s just the feeling of the wet and humanness. There’s this complexity in the air.”
The other influence was Cong’s former romantic partner Karen Yu, chief curator of Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, who encouraged his explorations of the sound art that would be central to the project’s evolving narrative. “Karen showed me a lot of little textural stuff,” he says. “I’d be observing from afar: like, okay, what does this mean to music? Because I’m more of a melodic kind of guy, right?”
Tropical Church opens with nameless participants sharing their greatest fears on the track “I Am Afraid Of,” and closes 53 minutes later with Cong reciting a poem over brooding cello on “Prayer of Mine.” In between, one encounters haunted eerie piano chords, swirling ambient electronics, stark percussion, and improvisations on the Chinese sheng (in the track “Burning”) and a stringed ruan bought from Taobao (in “闔家平安” or “Family Peace”); as well as verité audio snippets captured on Hong Kong’s steaming streets – claps of thunder, the sound of rainfall and lapping waves recorded in Kennedy Town (“Dok”).
Split personalities
Cong’s airy studio is a living monument to its occupant’s many passions and personalities. Its space is intuitively divided into themed zones for different needs and times of the day: a homely reading couch; a writing desk with vintage typewriter; a wooden kitchen table for animalistic consumption; a sealed off, plant-lined smoking area; and even a man-cave gaming area. At the heart of it all sits his cyberpunk-ish workstation, lined on three sides by keyboards.
It’s here that Cong recorded all 30-odd string parts of the frantic “The Response”, a frightening 12-minute orchestral assault penned for the Hong Kong Ballet, part of the score for original piece Between the Emotion and the Response. When the excerpt was performed at Hong Kong Cultural Centre during the International Gala of Stars in 2019, the production was put on ice. “No one clapped,” remembers Cong. “Everything was too dark.” The composition was later released on Cong’s 2021 City of Strange EP, a prayer for a “dying city … gasping for air, trying not to drown under the currents of time,” as the album text described it.
Cong has composed film soundtracks, including those for Ka Sing-fung’s Lost Love (2022), Ann Hui’s documentary Elegies (2023) and Wong Siu-pong’s Obedience (2024). He worked with Hong Kong Museum of Art for the recent Diary 23, a musical response to the exhibition True Likeness: The Art and Collection of Jingguanlou, and has penned several collaborative works for the stage, including the powerful score to the City Contemporary Dance Company’s recent production Certain Movements and Shadows.
Cong also recently worked with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra to arrange and sing an old Cantopop tune for an upcoming movie. Yet contemporary composition is the pursuit he feels least secure about. In 2023, he was paired with acclaimed Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür for a Freespace chamber concert that saw him perform his work onstage alongside musicians from the Hong Kong Philharmonic, dramatically reading extracts from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, in between pieces by the Estonian heavyweight.
“The insecurity was so high,” admits Cong. “It was so bad, I actually had to ask one of my friends to help me orchestrate it.” What did Tüür think of Cong’s work? “He’s a nice guy, so I don’t really know,” he replies.
That pairing was likely orchestrated by Kung Chi-shing, the former Freespace programming head who has gone from touting Cong at every opportunity, to becoming his bandmate. The unlikely pair began an improvising live duo that debuted last year in Kakegawa, Japan, and was witnessed onstage earlier this month at the new jazz kissa Coda. An unnamed album is being prepared for release later this year. “People get really put off by the classical world, it’s quite intimidating, a system of gatekeeping language,” says Cong. “So that’s why me and Kung work so well together. Because we just go for it.”
Before he leaves Hong Kong for six months, heading to New York on a Rockefeller-funded fellowship from the Asia Cultural Council, Cong has one more shock up his sleeve. He is debuting a new post-punk group, Midnight Cowboy, at Freespace’s Lau Bak Livehouse on July 3. “It’s just for fun, you know, for friends and stuff,” he insists, before sharing plans for the band’s upcoming album to form the basis of a film musical in the style of director Leos Carax’s 2021 Hollywood outing Annette, recently screened at Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Cong still promises his next solo release will be another singer-songwriter album – with words and songs and guitars. Back in 2021, he previewed a new collection of songs at a show called “I’m Afraid of,” but got cold feet about releasing them. Or maybe just distracted. “I’ve been talking about recording my singer-songwriter stuff for forever, but I just never do it,” he admits. “In terms of artistic value, I don’t think I am there yet. The people I look up to, they just write one book at a time. Paint one thing at a time. I don’t think I can be like those – I can’t focus.”
In his studio’s effective zoning, one imagines a desperation for clarity, the battle between art and commerce playing out in real time. The demands of all these creative outlets wrestling with the advertising, soundtrack and production jobs he is forced to take so he can make rent.
“And that’s why I turn to all the paying jobs or interesting collaborations,” he says. “But then, it also takes away from – what is the potential? I always ask this question, because I don’t have time to answer it. There is this very huge contradictory kind of feeling to it. Like, maybe I should just spend time to practise the piano, learn Bach, or Chopin.”
Olivier Cong performs Tropical Church at Room 12, Cattle Depot Artist Village, on June 20 and 21, 2025. Click here for more information.
Note: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of a dance performance. It is “His Temple,” not “His Tempest.” We apologise for the error.