Most Hong Kong musician: Choi Sai Ho, aka S.T.

Last April, Choi Sai-ho took the stage at Grappa's Cellar, lanky, bespectacled and dressed in a white button-down shirt. He was the middle act in a 10-band showcase of Hong Kong indie music, but standing behind a laptop, face lit by the screen's white glow, he looked rather out of place.

Then he started his set. Frenetic, intensely layered electronic music blasted out of the speakers, accompanied by videos that evoke the neuroses of Hong Kong life: skyscrapers, crowded streets, Mark Six lottery forms. Choi was as energetic as his music, pounding his head to its beat, dancing around the stage.

The crowd loved it. "He's like a salaryman gone insane," whispered one audience member, before shouting at the stage: "Choi Sai-ho, I love you!" When he finished his set, Choi looked overwhelmed and slightly embarrassed by the crowd's enthusiasm. "Doh jeh," he said shyly. Thank you.

At 27, Choi, who performs under the stage name S.T., has become one of Hong Kong's most intriguing musicians. Cobbling together a panoply of sounds from different sources -- eight-bit Game Boy music, violin, self-recorded samples -- he creates compositions that are at once high-concept and fun listening.

They're fun to watch, too. Choi is a multimedia artist, not just a musician, and his videos and music exist in a kind of symbiosis, each feeding off the other. "Some people tell me that if my show didn't have the visual stuff they wouldn't come see me," he says. "Electronic music is hard to understand. If you're on stage playing the guitar, it's obvious what you're doing, but not if you're just standing in front of a laptop." 

In person, Choi is as charmingly jittery as he is on stage, and he is eager to reveal the mechanics of his craft. Sitting in a Sheung Wan café, a glass of orange juice in front of him, Choi pulls out a dusty IBM ThinkPad from his bag. ("People ask me why I don't use a Mac," he says. "Technology is just a tool for creators to express their art. If you play good music, it doesn't matter what tool you use.") Using a couple of basic audio editing programs, Choi painstakingly arranges dozens of short audio clips, stacking them on top of one another until he achieves the sound he is looking for. He makes his videos in a similar fashion by editing them frame by frame. It's a bit like performing surgery by separating individual cells. 

"Every day, we receive a lot of information, an information explosion," he says. "Especially in Hong Kong. That's what inspires my music."

Music has been a part of Choi's life ever since his parents put him in violin lessons as a child. He went on to join the school orchestra in secondary school and played violin in some of his friends' bands. When ATV World began playing MTV music shows in the late 1990s, he took an interest in Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers. That's when Choi began experimenting with electronic music, eventually going on to study under renowned media artist Ip Yuk-yiu at the City University School of Creative Media.

High-rise blocks of sound and image

These days, Choi earns a living by performing, teaching and doing freelance work like composing film scores for local indie movies. (Choi wrote and performed the score for the first movie by Heiward Mak, the new darling of the local film scene.) He still lives with his parents in North Point.

"In 2004, my parents did go to see my show," he says. "They were very honest -- they said, 'I don't know what my son is doing on stage.'" He laughs. "But that's okay. They are supportive. We're in different generations. What they listen to and know is very traditional. They know that I put effort into my work and they see that. They have their opinions, too -- my father says, 'Can you add more local stuff into your performances?'"

Imbuing experimental electronic music with Hong Kong themes is a hallmark of Choi's work. "I love Hong Kong -- it inspires my tempo," he says. His most popular works are those that most explicitly evoke Hong Kong's culture and atmosphere, like "Violin Cityscape", which deconstructs Hong Kong's high-rises into building blocks of sound and image, or "Star," which raises questions of cultural heritage.

In a way, Choi walks a fine line between pop and art, keeping his music intuitive and accessible without sacrificing its high-mindedness. Scrolling through the gigabytes of work stored on his computer, Choi opens a file that contains a remix he made of "Shadow," a 1985 song by Cantopop master Alan Tam.

"When I was a baby I loved Cantopop so much," he says. "My parents still tell me that when I was four years old I would sing and dance when Alan Tam and Leslie Cheung came on TV. Once, my parents took me to buy cassette tapes, and I told the sales lady I wanted one by Alan Tam. She didn't believe that I actually listened to it -- she thought I would listen to children's music -- and she asked me to sing something. So I sang the chorus to one of his songs."

Choi has performed the remix at shows overseas, but he is hesitant to release it in Hong Kong, lest the music industry's copyright lawyers descend upon him. But it captures the essence of his philosophy towards music. "You have to have a concept," he says, "but you also have to learn to be entertaining."