Music Of The Month: The Genre-Warping Blood Wine Or Honey

DTx2 has a much more dance-centric sound than previous releases. How did you settle on this sound? And what are the themes and thoughts central to the album?

Joseph von Hess: The album is more dance-adjacent than it is dance-centric. It's a bit off to the side, on the margins of many things. We didn't settle on a sound. We don't really work that way. Rather than deciding on a sound, the sound found us. We make noises and then we justify it later. We're a mere conduit for the totality of eternal vibration, a medium for the message that's already out there. We had been talking a lot about the wonderful craft of making records calibrated to induce the body to move. We also thought a lot about stirring in all sorts of disparate elements: disco stabs, found sounds, rave synths, folk instruments, chants, sub bass. 

Themes and thoughts-wise: well, the album took shape over quite a long period of time, rather than that idea of being thrashed out in a rented studio with a producer over a week or two. We are our own engineers and producers, which gives us choices, and therefore sometimes it takes quite a while to narrow down or frame what it is we're doing. Although it was largely completed during these months, getting on for years now, of Covid, it isn't a "lockdown" album. However it is a bit agoraphobic: we decided it was like dancing inside a wardrobe.

What is your favourite memory from the process of making this album?
JB: On this album we worked with a bunch of new and old friends on collaborative tracks and that was pretty exciting: Laujan from David Boring and Paul Morley from Art Of Noise on I Shall Rush Out As I Am, Preservation on Messenger, Zoë Brewster and Kamal on Testing Time, and of course KT Tunstall on Attraction (with some ace drumming from Tim Weller.) In most cases, we didn’t know what to expect from these collaborations and that was interesting for us. There was the whiff of danger, as to whether we could pull things off, whether we could make things work.

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One thing that surprised us was when KT Tunstall came back to us with a whole song she’d conceived, with words and everything. We thought she was going to do a bit of flute (she’s pretty good by all accounts) and instead she’d written this anthem. Working with Laujan [Janice Lau] was another highlight. Once we understood Paul Morley’s vision for the track, we thought Janice would be a good fit and that decision was vindicated by the result. She is very passionate about what she does and was quite involved in the gestation of the sound and the structure. It’s great to have that level of commitment from another artist.

Could you explain the artwork of your new album? What inspired it? 
JvH: Someone suggested it looks a little like the aftermath of a rave. That's fine, but like the music, we wanted the incongruities of the images to speak to people in different ways. We did want to centre and elevate this beach ball so that it became imbued with meanings, as if it were a sacred object, or had just landed or been left behind. It’s an alien anti-monolith, since like all objects, it is fundamentally temporary: the air will slowly escape, or the bubble might burst. It’s a toy. It’s vulnerable, a little bit silly and frivolous. And we liked the idea of us solemnly straining, Atlas-like, to support this object that is so lightweight, hollow; an empty vessel. 

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During the pandemic when playing live was off the cards, how did you maintain creative expression and stay connected with fans? 
JB: We didn’t really try to maintain engagement with fans; we just focused on creative expression. Of course, it's easy to get a bit lost in the hermetic environment of a studio, which is basically what we were doing during the more extreme covid times. So that was easy enough, enabled even, with the lack of shows or other distractions. But we are very lucky, somehow people still care about what we are up to even when we ignore them!

You have attracted lots of attention internationally, but what is it about the band that is intrinsically Hong Kong? How does the city inspire your music? What is the value of being a band linked to and based in Hong Kong?
JvH: Yes we have, um, raised some eyebrows internationally, which is good. Somehow being a "Hong Kong band" is interesting for anyone outside Hong Kong, but until recently maybe not so interesting for those from here. However, you're never a prophet in your own town. And we can accept we're always, in some way, going to be on the margins. That's not such a bad place to be, though. Culturally, Hong Kong has so often looked to the West. Maybe that's changing. One thing is clear: Hong Kong is obviously so much more than the limp clichés of "East meets West". It's a far weirder cross-fertilisation of ideas and influences. I like to think the music reflects this complexity.

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As a band, we're just as likely to be influenced by memes as by music, images, food or nature. We make all this stuff inside these industrial buildings, these concrete monoliths, to the sound of industrial presses. So the city does loom large. Creatively, the totality of our respective experiences is there, and that is impossible to unravel. But from our lives here—both of us in the band have brought up children, created music and performed here. I hope that has value and I think that being linked to Hong Kong has tremendous value, at least to me. I am proud of it. I have thrived here as a musician in ways I never expected to.

Playing live in Hong Kong has always been a challenge, now more so than ever. What do you envision for the future of Hong Kong's live music scene? 

JB: We haven't really played live that much: a combination of being picky and being in Hong Kong. Performing in other countries comes with logistical considerations. The current quarantine requirements for entering Hong Kong have basically stopped most outside artists coming here to play. This seems to be creating more opportunities for local independent acts to perform on larger stages with more fervent local support. Hopefully we can be part of that, and it should lead to a more vibrant and diverse local live scene. We recently just did a secret show in a swimming pool. They took the water out for that. We're really excited to see where our live show leads—we're full of new ideas, interested in getting guests in, and want to make it really special.

Hear more from Blood Wine or Honey via Bandcamp, Spotify and Apple Music.

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