This city has been run by shadow brokers for years now. Mega-city XX’s skyline crawls upward like a tectonic plate, slowly, and appears to arc in on itself with a fisheye lens type effect. Pillars of glass and steel scrape the sky, attempting to leave the biker gangs and gene-splicer syndicates behind. You haven’t seen the sun in days. You’re desperate for cash after your last Old City urbex scrap & sell went sour. There’s only one thing you can do; listen to Hong Kong Express – Hong Kong (2015).
The album opens with a sing-song sort of dialogue between a Chinese man and women perhaps taking a shower together or maybe caught in a lower city downpour. Then suddenly you’re thrown into a hypnagogic dreamstate of teetering tremolo synths – “Ghost”. The production on this track is stellar and best listened to with a pair of headphones as to hear the synths rotating around you in full stereo. “Ghost” is the most intense track on this album with its hard-psych influence and it paints the cityscape perfectly as a cyberpunk head trip.
*Phew* Nothing like a little rainfall ambiance to wash off the uncensored cyber aesthetic from the last track. Second track “Window” plays like a late night downpour with a Tron rendition of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” intro repeating throughout to remind you that you’re still in the future.
The third track “Return of Dreams” is akin to a mega-corp CEO looking down upon “his” city from an impossibly elevated corner office. He watches the red and white veins of traffic miles below and senses the creep of decay rusting away at Mega-Corp HQ. He grows dizzy and falls to his knees. Just then, a cloud rolls over the window…
You finally let the city take you. You’re just too damn hungry and your neighbor has had her TV switched to static for way too long. Into “Shanghai” you go. Distorted traffic signals and night club thumps pound your ears but your tunnel vision aligns you with the noodle stand three blocks down. Pleasure androids and neo-gypsies blight your path but, damn, do you just want some noodles.
Now this buzzing concrete purgatory REALLY has taken you and a “City Killer” you become. This cyberpunk anthem really hits on all points of HK’s concept. Massive doom synths and stereo phasers send you spiraling into trans-humanist imprisonment by the city’s corruption. You can break free, but first you’re going to have kill.
Of course, the motive to kill comes with a price. Upon arriving at the noodle stand you pull out your empty pocket. Neo-gypsies. Six minutes and forty eight seconds after you thirsted for their blood you are shot dead by Thought Police Officer 29178. But as you lay dying, the final track “HK” comes on and gives you one last dose of scintillating deep future sound. You think, “Heh, that wasn’t so bad after all,”. After all, you had just lived a cyberpunk dream.
Electronique Critique 