After making their debut at Sónar, Hong Kong band Blood Wine or Honey are ready for the next stage

A kind of benign musical manifestation of globalisation, Blood Wine or Honey are two Britons and an American who live in Hong Kong and met in the city, making music that betrays a smorgasbord of influences from around the world: a wildly experimental mash-up of psychedelia, madcap jazz, off-kilter funk, Afrobeat and electronica.

Adding to the band’s postmodern credentials, they existed as a concept long before their members ever picked up instruments together, and they have only played live once, at Hong Kong’s recent inaugural Sónar electronic music festival – quite a place to make your debut. On the back of mounting radio and label interest, and with a canny attitude born of the members’ many years in the music industry, the band have as good a chance as any from Hong Kong in recent years of making a splash internationally.

Blood Wine or Honey – whose debut EP Anxious Party People comes out on April 28 and then gets officially released at a second live show on May 6 – are made up of Shane Aspegren (drums and electronics), James Banbury (keyboard, bass and cello) and Joseph von Hess (wind instruments and percussion), who separately came to Hong Kong with their families between five and seven years ago.

Aspegren, from the US, was previously half of electronic music duo The Berg Sans Nipple during a seven-year period living in Paris; he’s also well known as a video, installation and performance artist.

Banbury, from the UK, has worked as a performer, composer, producer and arranger for the likes of Richard Ashcroft, Talvin Singh, Natalie Imbruglia, Snow Patrol and U2, as well as spending most of the 1990s as cellist with The Auteurs, a delightfully miserablist indie band with song titles such as Light Aircraft on Fire and Unsolved Child Murder, led by misanthropic contrarian Luke Haines; Banbury has also worked in film and extensively for TV commercials, through his company Component Music.