Music defines Gary Ieong's life and career
His musical leanings define indie record store boss, concert promoter and label owner Gary Ieong, writes Richard Lord
Gary Ieong certainly has perseverance. For 10 years, he has run White Noise Records, the leading independent record shop in a city largely impervious to the charms of such emporia. He is also, under the White Noise name, the promoter of many of Hong Kong's more challenging live gigs, and the owner of a record label that among other artists handles Japanese math rock favourites Toe.
All this because of his single-minded, dedicated love of ambitious, experimental, lovingly crafted music. And yet, he says, "Even now my parents still ask me when I'm going to get a proper job."
We had no money, no stock, and the music we were selling was mostly noise
To mark a decade in the business, on Saturday Ieong is bringing to Kitec in Kowloon Bay the underground jazz-rock-fusion project Hotel New Tokyo and instrumental rock group A Picture of Her, both from Japan and both appearing outside the country for the first time.
White Noise is everything you'd expect from an independent record shop. Hidden on the first floor of a walk-up at the Prince Edward end of Kowloon's Shanghai Street, it is jammed with hard-to-find vinyl and CDs in every genre except the mainstream, from Japanese underground to post-rock and math rock to experimental noise to the more extreme versions of metal and techno. If it's offbeat, unusual and good, the shop will probably have it. It wasn't always that way. "When we opened we had no money, no stock, and the music we were selling was mostly noise. It was quite crazy, considering the audience in Hong Kong," Ieong recalls.
Ieong had grown up mainly listening to Canto-pop, but as a teenager he started getting into Japanese rock and from there more underground types of music. "I was still at school, and I said to myself: 'I really like music and I need to find a job related to it'."
Just after turning 18, he got his first job in the Sha Tin branch of a chain record store, knocking out hundreds of Jacky Cheung CDs a day, at a time when physical record stores were starting to become an endangered species; the shop closed about four years later.
"Music is a really hard business to make a living in," Ieong says, adding that becoming a musician wasn't an option as he had no particular talent in that direction. "I was a DJ, but I was really bad. I mainly played minimal techno, and people in Hong Kong were just not interested, so I'd always just be playing to myself."