In The Pink: Chochukmo’s music is alive and well in Hong Kong’s indie scene

As Jan Curious and Mike Orange jammed on a couple of acoustic guitars one summer in 2005, they decided it was time to form a band. So they gathered a bassist and a drummer, jammed a little more and then decided to come up with a name. Each member wrote a Chinese character on a piece of paper, chucked it into a hat and decided to name their band after the first three words they pulled out. Those words were “cho” (catch), “chuk” (persist) and “mo” (feather).

Thus was the quirky origins of one of Hong Kong’s most enthralling indie acts of recent times. Indeed, virtually everything about Chochukmo appears ad hoc. Mike, Jan, Kitty Trouble (guitar), Lester (drums) and sole female member Yanyan Something (bass) find minimal fuss in crossing genres, capably swinging from silky acid jazz to 80s new wave ala Talking Heads and right into raucous noise rock, all in a three-minute span. At times the music giggles like a kindergarten art piece, then abruptly barks like one possessed by the ghost of At the Drive-In. “We're all greedy people,” says Mike, cheekily describing their sonic stew. “We just want to do something interesting, surprising, energetic and, last but not least, different.”

And yet when this frenzied cacophony comes together, the finished collage is often mesmerising. Time Out Hong Kong recently declared Chochukmo one of the island’s top 20 music acts, and the band have already toured the Philippines while garnering a substantial fan base back home, culminating in a slot right behind headliner Simon Webbe on one of Hong Kong’s leading music festivals Jamfest.

In the midst of their ramshackle art lies a definite agenda. "We just wanna express ironic facts in reality,” says Jan, who also serves as the band’s main lyricist. “In our songs we tend to tell sad stories or [share] sentimental yet ironic feelings through our energetic music. Such a contradiction is indeed an irony in itself."

The band’s love for the unorthodox extends into their live shows, where they sport shocking pink clothes and let a self-produced video run in the background while they thrash about. “Some people might find it interesting to see five pink humans onstage,” says Mike. “So they might start to pay a bit more attention to what we're doing. Even though they might not like us in the end, at least we've had an opportunity to be heard.”

And heard they have been. A demo released in June has spawned crowd favourite ‘Head To Toe’, which extends a rudimentary dance punk groove into one swaggering jam session that relishes in the band’s three-guitar excess and Jan’s hyperbolic vocals. It has also paved the way for a five-track EP entitled Heads Down And Count Your Toes, due sometime around Christmas.

For a music scene so swamped by the colourless tedium of Canto pop, Hong Kong could do with a flashy anomaly like Chochukmo. “Although more and more people are getting more interested in indie, it’s still a very small proportion,” admits Mike. Nevertheless, his ambitions remain grand. “We're having great hope that sooner or later more and more people will pay more attention to, and care more about, the indie sounds of the city.”

Words Chris Photo Chochukmo

www.myspace.com/chochukmo

*Taken from JUNK's December 2008 issue