Virgin Vacation’s Improvisational Impulses

It’s a month until showtime. Exactly 30 days before experimental Hong Kong rock group Virgin Vacation (假日貞操) will perform an entirely new set of music. And so far, they haven’t completed a single piece. “Yeah, and we usually follow a fairly slow writing process, to be honest,” says guitarist and multi-instrumentalist James Hedges, with a grimace, from amid the clutter of the band’s rehearsal space. “I mean, is it mad? Is it foolhardy? You tell me.”

The real challenge, though, is that the music they’re composing is somehow meant to soundtrack Tides of Time, a new graphic novel by the artist Jay Wong. The quartet will perform this 40-minute conceptual suite just once, on December 14, from behind the large glass windows of Until Coffee in San Po Kong. Audience members will stand outside, listening in with headphones, silent-disco-style, in some twisted laboratory experiment.

Meanwhile, the graphic artist will sit on the sidelines and live sketch pieces inspired by music he’s never heard before – establishing a feedback loop, blurring the origin of any sonic or graphic idea to even the creators themselves. “Which is interesting, because it means we’re going to leave the music fairly open-ended, so we’ll be able to interact with the artist – it will almost be like Jay is another musician where we respond to what he’s drawing,” adds Hedges. 

Wordless wig-outs

There is of course a reason why Wong approached this group of musicians to realise this concept: Virgin Vacation’s wordless wig-outs may be uniquely suited to the task. Channelling both the drama of post-rock and the droning repetition of ambient electronica, with a dose of retro psychedelia thrown into the mix, the quartet’s music conjures its own vivid pictures in the mind. And much like Wong’s stark monochrome, existential imagery, it’s not always an easy ride. 

Wong’s dense 125-page graphic novel is an oblique science fiction of sorts, with little dialogue or obvious narrative to grasp onto. A week earlier, the band sat down with the book and wrote down the visceral flows and themes they detected. This week, after our interview, they will attempt to turn these ideas into music. “We’re trying to summarise what we felt were the most important images, the through lines,” explains Hedges. “And now we’ll start jamming to soundtrack those scenes, in a way. So, it’s like, the words define a mood and then you jam in that mood.”

Three quarters of the band are assembled around a glass table in their shared band room in Hong Kong’s bustling Lai Chi Kok neighbourhood, surrounded by stranded instruments and tired electrical cables, tattered gig posters and scuffed carpets. To add to the pressure, the performance will be recorded and released on cassette but, sipping from cans of zero-alcohol beer, the trio don’t appear super phased by the challenge. 

While their music appears highly organised on record, a clear improvisational bent underpins the band’s formative live performances – evident at off-the-radar, mid-pandemic warehouse gigs in To Kwa Wan and Kwai Chung. At first glance appearing as a typical two-guitar, bass and drum act, there was a thrill in witnessing the quartet multitask — layering electronic beats, synths, samples and, most oddly, glockenspiel and “sitar guitar” — to conjure churning, unnerving soundscapes, riding on jagged riffs and irregular rhythms. 

Recently, and fittingly at another secret location, the quartet lent further into their improvisational impulses with an “alternative set” of new material jammed out based on crowd-sourced ideas. “This will not be a normal concert,” Hedges announced at the beginning of the show, captured in a privately listed YouTube clip, which begins with chiming gong bells and a solo on a plastic recorder. Then, 45 minutes in, they stop the sprawling psych jam and ask the audience to write prompts on pieces of paper, that after being selected at random from Hedges’ witches’ hat, prompted further spontaneous compositions entitled “mango wine,” “moist winter” and “this is not a piece of paper.” 

“We were pretty nervous about [that show], honestly,” admits Hedges, “because it’s a bit of a high-risk situation in Hong Kong, especially. Audiences prefer to hear the songs that they have heard on the record. We thought it might be a risk that didn’t pay off, but actually it was quite liberating, and for me certainly, I felt more confident to do more of that kind of thing in the future.”

A bag of honking cats

The band might have earned a certain sense of security after successful tours to Japan, mainland China and Taiwan – and recently being recognised at the latter’s 15th Golden Indie Music Awards, following in the footsteps of previous local trailblazers including indie songwriter Serrini and all-girl math-rock band GDJYB. Virgin Vacation’s debut album Dapple Patterns was nominated in the international Best Asian Creative Artist category, going head to head with regional outfits including China’s NaraBara, Japan’s Lite and Korea’s Silica Gel. While they didn’t take home a trophy, the quartet was flown out for the ceremony, at Taipei Music Center on November 2, and the full rock star rigmarole of make-up, mingling, media interviews and after-parties.

By sheer coincidence, they also shared a bill with Silica Gel at Clockenflap’s big post-Covid comeback in March 2023, where Virgin Vacation opened the Friday evening – technically making them the first act to play the festival’s main stage after five years of cancelled or postponed festivals. They pulled out all the audiovisual stops for the occasion, with MC Gold Mountain brought on to deliver his guest vocal on single “Forest.” Notably, an instrumental take appears on Dapple Patterns, and they’ve since retired the vocal version from the set. Why? “Because he wrote very, very personal lyrics,” says Hedges, “and then at some point, he didn’t want to perform them anymore because he found it was emotionally taxing.” 

Virgin Vacation were also joined that day by a three-piece horn section, which has become a defining feature of the group’s larger shows, the braying, organic brass combating the steely electronic synths, samples and effects-heavy guitars. “Originally, we just thought about using brass for the song ‘Red,’ because that riff was endlessly looping, never-ending,” explains guitar, synth and glockenspiel player Wing Chan, piping up halfway through the interview. “I had that idea of, like, an orchestra – symphony pieces always have a very dramatic ending, but they come back again, one or two times, and it sounds like they’re never ending. I wanted to create that never-ending loop feeling.”

Instead of calling up the best players in town, the band sought out a deliberate miss-mash of musicians from different backgrounds and abilities. “The first horn player we approached was [the guitarist and singer-songwriter] Tomii Chan,” remembers Hedges. “And we kind of asked him, can you play the saxophone? And he was like, ‘No, not really.’ And we were like, ‘Perfect!’”

Tomii was joined by classical trumpeter Oscar Lam and trombonist Ming Nichols, better known as the virtuosic bassist behind out-there heavy bands Streets of Rage, John Travoltron and, most lately, King Death. “It makes it a bit more, like, honky – it feels like you’ve got a bag full of cats all pulling in different directions, and it’s got this kind of slightly raucous energy,” continues Hedges. “With our music, we end up putting some quite arbitrary ideas together, but that can have something quite unexpectedly successful about it.”

Arbitrary ideas

If you were wondering, the name Virgin Vacation was chosen for the band. But let’s rewind first: the seeds for the project were sowed when Wing returned from studying in the UK, shortly after a romantic attachment brought Hedges to Hong Kong from the same country in 2015. A mutual contact suggested they get in touch, and eventually they formed a conventional vocal-led synth-pop band. But internal strife meant the group never gigged, or even agreed on a name. “We were just kind of having a lot of arguments, basically, and there was a lot of tension,” says Hedges, “and it was just all a bit of a mess.”

Much of the conflict was between the two lead singers – one of which was Hedges – so Wing’s solution was to found an instrumental project. He invited in drummer Step Ip, a colleague at long-standing experimental theatre company Zuni Icosahedron. “We were chatting and saying, ‘Oh, they play in a band without a drummer? Oh, you can play drums? How about we jam with each other?’” remembers Ip. Soon after a blind date was arranged at President Piano – the notoriously ramshackle, 46-year-old Mong Kok rehearsal space where Hong Kong/Beijing/Montreal-based band Gong Gong Gong and Taipei’s Mong Tong recorded recent collaborative album, Mongkok Duel 旺​角​龍​虎​鬥. “So, I met these strangers and then jammed some stuff,” continues Ip, “and then we had our first show in a month.”

The final piece of the puzzle was recruiting bassist Chin Ho Chan, who joined the fold in the winter of 2018/19. By then the name Gaa3 Jat6 Zing1 Cou1 (假日貞操) — Virgin Vacation — had already been coined courtesy of comic book artist Lai Tat Tat Wing, another theatre colleague of Wing’s. “We gave him some demos to listen to, and I told him to come up with just two random words and see how it feels,” remembers Wing. “He came up with a bunch, but these two particular words, ‘gaa3 jat6 zing1 cou1,’ this combination, sounded the most interesting. It’s kind of an undefined feeling that resonates with our music.”

However, in English, it didn’t sound quite so good. “Actually, the direct translation means holiday and virginity – but it doesn’t really make sense in Chinese either,” says Wing. Amusingly for Hedges, the band’s sole expat member, the name comes out as “Holiday Chastity” when he feeds Chinese record reviews through a translator – arguably catchier than the name they chose.

As well as coining their elusive moniker, Lai Tat Tat Wing would also provide the strikingly bright comic cover art for the band’s self-titled debut EP, released as a 10-inch vinyl in January 2021. Opening track “Acid Rain” — an insistent, bass-driven vamp closer to dance music than rock — remains the group’s most-streamed track on both Spotify and YouTube. “There was quite a thriving music scene underground during Covid, because overseas bands couldn’t come and play,” remembers Hedges.  “It was probably quite good for our career locally, because people started being quite interested in local bands in a way that they hadn’t before.” Wing goes one further: “I think that’s probably why there’s a current of local indie bands today getting more and more visibility and show opportunities.”

For a follow-up, the band recruited major scene players Chanka, Alok Leung, Jonathan Yang and Nerve to each contribute a track to a remix EP, released in May 2023, which plugged the gap between this year’s debut longer player: with a broader sonic canvas that fulfils all the group’s earlier live promise, Dapple Patterns takes its name from patterns of light, or horse cross-breeding – depending on who in the band you ask. 

That debate may have to wait for another time. As the night drags on, the anxiety building in the room is palpable – there is, after all, still only a month before showtime, and a whole set to compose. But before they’re allowed to get down to work, we ask each of the three founding members present what the band means to them. “It’s a place where we can dream musically, freely,” begins Ip. 

“I mean, I think if it wasn’t for this band, I might be living somewhere else by now,” says Hedges. “I’m still here in Hong Kong because I want to see what happens next with this band, especially musically.”

“To me, the band feels like a baby,” adds Wing. “It’s like growing up, I just don’t know what he will do.” 

The heavy door swings open to reveal Kuro, a veteran of the local scene familiar from bands The Crush and Franklin Telescope, who took over on bass earlier this year following Chin Ho-chan’s departure. They appear to have timed this arrival carefully to dodge the interview, but take the cute closing question anyway.

“Er,” they hesitate. “A nice band to play with?” 

Virgin Vacation will play at Until Coffee at 8:30pm on Saturday, December 14, 2024. Click here for more information.