Dear Readers,

Hi, it’s Adam here. I am a medical student at the University of Hong Kong and I formed Spermatic Chord in 2002. I think interviews are stupid, because we don’t really know what to say. After we give one answer, we will immediately think that it was not what we really meant, so we’ll give another answer. Continuing in that way, we will probably end up giving 10 different answers. So let’s skip the interview part, save the reporter some trouble and I’ll tell you about my band directly.

I bumped into Shum, our vocalist, at an S&M party three to four years ago. Yes, you read me right, at an S&M party: I was dressed in a leather outfit and Shum was dancing on stage in his bikini. We didn’t know each other but I thought he was awesome. Later we started to meet regularly and became friends, as we share the same music interest and, well, the same fetish. Our drummer Eugene is still in high school – we saw each other in various band shows.

People often ask what sort of music we play but I can’t explain it. You have to watch our show. But I can tell you this: we play noise to piss people off. We try to play bad taste music, music that people will think is poor and stupid. Everyone is making mainstream music so why shouldn’t we play something everyone hates?

The name Spermatic Chord is actually a twist of the medical term ‘spermatic cord’ which I came across while cutting up dead bodies in class. I thought, “Why not name the band Spermatic Chord?” And we also name our songs in an odd way – we just give them numbers. People put so much effort into naming songs but usually the names don’t represent anything at all. We just want to be unconventional, so we do the opposite… Okay, I am bullshitting here again. I admit it – I am a mathematical nerd. The reason behind numbering songs is so that we won’t lose track of song titles. If someone in the audience likes a song they will shout, “Hey, Number Three is my favourite song!” Isn’t that fun?

Weird enough, though people do hate us (once at Edge I think the audience wanted to kill us), we have achieved something. In the U-Sound Festival 2005, we broke almost every rule – our song was over six minutes, we changed the band members before the show, our singer wasn’t there and we didn’t even pay the entry fee. But we won the awards for Best Band and Most Original Song – two out of the three awards they had!

And we do have a serious side too. We care about social issues, like the tearing down of the clock tower and neglecting the importance of our cultural heritage. Shum cares about it so much he even dressed as a clock tower. And the air pollution here: just look at the sky – it is in your face, man! You can’t avoid it, but we try to do something about it through music.

What? You still want to know what type of music we play? Well, thank God for MySpace and YouTube. Go to www.myspace.com/chord and hopefully your computer won’t crash when you hear us. Have fun!

Cheers,
Adam.