noista/gia · 噪噪噪噪切

Debut album · Best Album Producer (Instrumental)
32nd Golden Melody Awards
 

Tea-house chatter, railway announcements, cash machines, karaoke and fragments of Cantonese: noista/gia takes familiar sounds of Hong Kong apart and gives them unfamiliar lives. They become rhythms, pitches and textures, carrying traces of the places and experiences from which they came.

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The title brings together noise and nostalgia. Developed over five or six years, the album began as a search for my own musical identity and became entangled with the changes unfolding around me.

Identity
 

While studying at Berklee, I encountered musicians whose practices were grounded in distinct musical traditions. Hong Kong had an abundance of cultural material, but I struggled to locate my own position within a musical language. I began looking for it through sound instead.

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The material came from particular attachments: memories of yum cha with my family, the atmosphere of waiting for the last train, the emotional familiarity of karaoke. I was not trying to identify a definitive sound of Hong Kong. Recognisability alone was not enough; I needed a connection worth composing with.

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As the work developed, the city changed around it. Nostalgia was no longer directed only towards a distant past. It entered my relationship with places, experiences and possibilities disappearing in the present.

Metaphors
 

Sounds carry meanings shaped by culture, memory and inherited responses. We often perceive their significance before consciously attending to them, listening through our relationship with the physical world.

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I work with these meanings through editing and juxtaposition, using sounds as poetic devices. Metaphor, repetition and unexpected relationships can shift what a sound evokes without erasing its existing associations.

For me, music is a way of listening. Composition shapes the encounter, but what becomes music emerges between the sounds and the listener.

Selected compositions
 

Dim Sum · 點心

Memories of family Yumcha connect two places: the ambience of Hong Kong’s Luk Yu Tea House and tableware recorded in a Boston Chinese restaurant. Alongside a Dizi (Chinese flute) performance, these sounds are dismantled and recomposed. A familiar social setting becomes material for music made away from home.

Last Train · 尾班車

An almost empty Tsuen Wan station made its announcements and semi-open acoustics unusually apparent. I recorded the scene on my phone, then altered its timing and pitch: an ordinary railway environment made to feel both real and artificial.

Surreal Estate · 天空之城

Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density photographs become patterns of white noise and chords. The repetition and ordering of densely packed buildings pass from image into sound. The title connects this surreal density with the conditions of Hong Kong real estate.

Compassion Fatigue · 同情疲勞

Fragments of news broadcasts meet electronic material developed through modular synthesis. Drawing on the experience of being overwhelmed by news during the 2019 social unrest, the piece builds a sense of accumulation, disorientation and exhaustion.