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An indie showcase gets a new showpiece, writes Hamish McKenzie

The lift only goes to the 15^th floor of the old National Court building in Jordan. Until a year ago, that floor accommodated a set of alternative businesswomen that the police – having decided their lurid enticements were undesirable – ultimately evicted. Here – up one flight of grotty stairs, along walls smudged with dirty finger-prints and scuff marks, and past two abandoned speakers sitting lonely beneath a grid-worked window that looks out onto nothing – sits the Mark-1 Music Centre.

A sign on a pin-board inside the small reception area reads: “Mark-1 Music Centre is the music place that pursuit the Best Quality and the Best Service. We Love the Music, and We Love the Music People!” A cramped bathroom occupies one corner of the room. On top of a disused Xerox machine, there’s a box of old CDs on sale for $10 a pop. And in a control room just wide enough to park a shopping cart in, sits the burly Koya Hisakazu, bedecked in an ever-present bandana, in front of two decrepit computer monitors, beside a mixing desk marked with masking tape, and behind a line of electric guitars waiting for repair.

Through the soundproof glass pane, the glam-rock band Velvette Vendetta run through their scales, tune up, and test their distortion in a triangular studio crowded with tangles of chords, dark grey squares of carpet that move under foot, and posters of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Jeff Buckley on the wall. The drummer has propped up his kit with a crushed beer can.

Hisakazu, a Japanese national, has owned the 30-year-old Mark-1 Music Centre for the last decade. He used to live here, but the lack of external windows and ventilation meant he suffered nightly asthma attacks (it also probably didn’t help that he smokes). The always-smiling Hisakazu is indie personified. DIY. Gritty. Funny. “I am a human being, so of course I have weaknesses – one of my weaknesses is promotion, because I don’t have record company connections,” he explains in his Japanese-inflected accent, before adding cheerily, “Also, I’m quite lazy”.

It must have been out of character, then, for Hisakazu to approach Chris B, organiser of the Underground indie music showcase, to suggest a combined project. “Koya came to me and said, ‘Would you like to do an Underground compilation?’, and I said, ‘Fuck Yeah!’” recalls the former front woman for rock band Sisters of Sharon, who insists on never printing her last name. Chris wants the compilation to show off the originality and talents of Hong Kong’s many under-appreciated bands. “I don’t think people realise how good they are,” she says. “We want the rest of the world to know.”

And so we find ourselves in the studio with the Vendetta, one of 11 bands selected out of 47 hopefuls to appear in the compilation. “The main problem for Hong Kong artists is people don’t have a chance to listen to them,” says lead singer Jacky Ho, dressed in a black dinner jacket, a black blouse, and black PVC boots that have comically-high, thick soles. (He’s also the one who brought the beers.) Velvette Vendetta have been playing Underground shows since 2006, and they’re hoping the compilation will expose them to new audiences.

Their soaring, Queens of the Stone Age-esque Night Before the Snow Storm kicks off the two-disc compilation, which brings together aspiring rock stars of varying colours. There are the hard rock acts (the nu-metalish FBI, Hisakuza’s improv-driven Sea Monsters, classic rockers Tai Tai Alibi), melodic rockers (Vendetta, The Sinister Left, Forgot, Lazy Susans), and the more experimental acts (trip-hop trio Violent Jokes, double-bass-led punk-lite Born to Hula, and the ska-, Latin-, and even dub-influenced Cho Chuk Mo).

As with Juicy Orange’s Hong Kong, City Sounds compilation, released earlier in the year, the standard is uneven, but all bands deserved the chance to record – which was, according to Chris B, one of the criteria for selection. In order to have a fair representation of their music, the bands each have two songs on the album, which helps turn up genuine star acts – namely, Velvette Vendetta and Chochukmo, the former being an exemplar of blistering anthems and mastery of rock instrumentation, the latter being a spunky demonstration in angular and bumpy, guitar-based eclectica.

The compilation, says Chris B, has been a labour of love that has taken months to produce. Hisakuza donated his services free of charge, while she is taking care of all the promotion, as she does for her well-attended Underground shows. It has proven a challenge. “It’s a lot more consuming than organising a show,” she says. But that doesn’t seem to be deterring her. While they had to say no to a lot of bands who wanted to be on the first compilation, recording for number two is already underway.

The Underground compilation will be launched with two parties on successive weekends. The first takes place at The Cavern on Saturday 20 at 8pm. $150 gets you entry to the party, a CD, a drink, and a chance to win a business class flight to Taipei with Cathay Pacific. The second party takes place at Club Cixi on Friday 26 at 9pm. $150 gets you entry to the party, a CD, a drink, and a chance to win a night in a suite at Hotel Jia in Causeway Bay.