I WAS BORN in 1974, and grew up in Kwun Tong. I attended Sam Yuk Middle School (now Hong Kong Adventist College), a coed boarding school in Clear Water Bay. My father is an alumnus. It’s a Christian school in a red brick building, and the meals were vegetarian. Sometimes, after lights out at 10pm, my classmates and I would leave our beds and snack on cans of twice-cooked pork.
WHEN I WAS 12, I was listening to The Checkers, so I would wear checked shirts I had bought from the Ladies’ Market. I played the piano all through school. I didn’t learn new songs at boarding school, but I would play notes and try to come up with sounds. That was my first experience with improvisation. It influenced my decision to study contemporary music at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts later, in 2002. I teach composition and electronic music at the school now.
Nerve, aka Steve Hui, aged nine. Photo: courtesy Nerve
MY BOARDING SCHOOL friends and I weren’t really trying to learn instruments; we were just listening to music together and hanging out at record shops to meet other like-minded people. My father had a synthesiser, a drum machine and a mixer. It was a simple set-up and, when I was around 15, I started doing what I did on the piano on the synthesiser. Then I moved abroad for school, one year in Toronto, Canada, and another in Florida, in the United States. I asked my father to mail me a keyboard, and I went to my first rave party.
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IT WAS DECEMBER 1992. I was 18, spending Christmas in Toronto. I had gone to buy a 12-inch record and the salesperson told me there was an upcoming rave, then gave me a number on a ticket with instructions to call on the day. A recorded message told me the meeting point. It was outside a subway station and there were dozens of us waiting there. A yellow school bus came and picked us up and took us to an abandoned warehouse in a rural area. It was a completely DIY operation. Before that, listening to music was a very detached experience, purely audio. But when I saw a thousand people at a rave, I thought, “There are a thousand of us who came all this way because we listen to this music.” It went from an individual experience to a scene. It changed everything for me.
A twenty-something Nerve’s bedroom studio in 1998. Photo: courtesy Nerve
I WAS SUPPOSED to attend an art school in San Francisco, but there were issues with my visa. I wasn’t anxious about it though because I just wanted to make music. Back in Hong Kong, I was picking up albums at Monitor Records, reading zines and a column in Youth’s Weekly by Xper.xr, who was introducing these mysterious bands like SPK. In 1993, I went to a show organised by Sound Factory, a label that put out AMK’s albums. They held an ambitious two-night festival at Ko Shan Theatre, with Otomo Yoshihide, Tats Lau and live industrial noise performances. Someone was holding an electric saw and another a hammer. It made me want to perform in Hong Kong. By then my friends and I already felt we were more sophisticated listeners than those who attended metal shows at the Ko Shan.
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AT FIRST I WAS listening to all the mainstream artists – New Order, or Brian Eno, Depeche Mode, Japan and Ryuichi Sakamoto, names that (Cantopop duo) Tat Ming Pair had mentioned in an interview. Then, I got into techno and started listening to LFO, 808 State, The KLF, all featured in magazines like NME and Melody Maker. From there, I found even more obscure music.
