FM BELOWGROUND closes studio space

After four years of operations in Hong Kong, FM BELOWGROUND held a closing party on July 27 ahead of renovations that will see the community radio dismantled in its now-former home, luxury shopping mall The Landmark.

The party heralded the end of the first iteration of the station and saw many from the city’s underground scene gather to support the free event which featured pizza, beers, and open decks available all evening. A steady stream of merch, from tees and hats to stickers and plush toys, also flowed out from the studio space into the crowd as the FMBG team generously gave away extra stock that had to be cleared out.

FM BELOWGROUND’s self-described Intern-slash-Director Arthur Yeti was on-site for the entirety of the event, giving Mixmag Asia an on-camera interview before the crowds descended. He then spent the remaining hours managing the party, from networking to doing periodic shoutouts from inside the booth.

Given the organised chaos, we reached out to Arthur on WhatsApp after the event for a post-mortem, which the Yeti Out co-founder delivered thoughtfully via multiple voice notes.

Take us back to the beginning, what was the impetus for what became FMBG?

The premise was, “If we were to drop a needle in capitalism, what would that sound like?”. Radio culture goes hand-in-hand with club culture, so we wanted to continue the pirate radio mentality into a web stream radio in Hong Kong. I think a lot of times we’re all shooting at the same goals from different cities but how do we achieve the same thing given our capacity? Berlin has a lot of warehouses, for example, but they have cheaper rents there, so people are able to activate a lot quicker than we can here, but in Hong Kong we have a lot of malls. I think different circumstances and different social and geographical backdrops affect how you might run something.

At the closing party, you mentioned that you saw the space as having documented the Hong Kong scene from COVID-19 to post-COVID-19. Could you expand on that?

What happens when you combat risk management with further risk-taking? This is sort of what we had presented to us in 2020 with trying to turn a shit situation into a good one. There was only one way to find out, so we came up with this plan and started this community radio in a luxury shopping mall, which was a bit insane to begin with, but hopefully, it made sense.

We were presenting an opportunity with the mantra “STILL LIVE” during COVID-19. While people were literally flopping dead, here we were with a radio station that was still live. “Live” because we’re still breathing but “live” because we’re still streaming, still broadcasting, even if we were all in our own corners.

What do you think FMBG’s legacy will be?

I wanted this radio station to be a physical, IRL documentation of a certain time for however long it lasted. Understanding that we caught this glimpse, this gap - this glitch in the Matrix and were able to infiltrate and be in the core of downtown Hong Kong… Who knows what this project will end up being but the least we could do with the uncertainty was to be able to document and process this chronicle in a hard drive.

I often refer to FM BELOWGROUND as a soundbox because of the sound wall that was blasting out into the [Landmark] basement but also, to me, it’s just a big hard drive that’s streaming and documenting, and hopefully some of the documentation will make sense down the line or ripple into other things that are beautiful and take its own course in Hong Kong’s music and broadcasting history.

Mengzy is Mixmag Asia’s Music Culture Columnist, follow her on Instagram.

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