Clockenflap 2024: St. Vincent "Enchanted" by Hong Kong

Indie superstar and music polymath St. Vincent is “enchanted” by Hong Kong. Making her Clockenflap debut on the evening of Saturday, Nov. 30, Dallas born musician St. Vincent (Anne Clark) told local journalists that she finds Hong Kong to be a Sci-Fi city, with "a lot of heart and soul.”
Clockenflap 2024 marked the Grammy Award-winning artist’s second visit to Asia, and her first performance in Hong Kong. After just 48 hours in the city, she described it as "romantic," likening the atmosphere to Blade Runner.
“There's so many people and so much going on. There's romance, opulence and sketchy things all happening at the same time,” she adds.

Widely considered the patron saint of indie and art-rock, St. Vincent was a popular choice to headline Clockenflap’s main stage, bringing her emotionally cathartic and electrifying global hits to an ecstatic audience.
St. Vincent fans were treated to broody alt-rock songs from her latest album “All Born Screaming.” Her rich, deep vocals wooed the crowd, backed by a four-piece band that remained in flawless control throughout the night.
St. Vincent alternated between swagger and grace—gliding backwards on her tiptoes one moment and dazzling with her virtuosic guitar playing, shredding both her guitar and black tights in the process.

In true St. Vincent style, her connection with the audience and her four-piece band was critical. This included her leaping into the crowd, exuding pure, primal, dominatrix energy. Nobody was left on the sidelines during her performance of her touching ballad “New York” from “Masseduction.” She locked eyes with fans atop a sea of enthusiastic people, singing her uplifting lyrics, “But for you, darling, I'd do it all again.”

Her Clockenflap appearance comes hard on the heels of her seventh album: "All Born Screaming," a funky and introspective compilation of noise rock, chamber pop, electronica, and more. Listen out for guest performances by Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, Cate Le Bon, and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, as well as the track “Sweetest Fruit,” a tribute to electronic music producer SOPHIE, who passed away in 2021.
"All Born Screaming" is St. Vincent’s first self-produced album. She told The Beat Asia the creative process for the record began when she experimented with electronic improvisations.
“The making of the record started backwards in a lot of ways,” she explained. “I started having a lot of songs with modular synths and twisting knobs and finding ways that the electricity was passing through this unique circuitry.”
“Then I would come back and find moments of electronic improvisations, and think, oh, I can make a whole song around that,” St. Vincent added.

Developing these electronic motifs into fully fledged music tracks was no easy feat as St. Vincent pointed out this method of work was more demanding than traditional songwriting techniques.
“Ultimately writing the song is the hardest thing. A song has to have an epiphany. It has to feel whole. So I started with pieces, and then eventually created my own Frankenstein construct. It was quite laborious. There’s a reason why people just sit down with one instrument and write a song.”
St. Vincent continued to share that it was also a rather solitary pursuit: “I spent a lot of hours sitting alone in a room, dreaming, trying and failing! It’s a terrible thing which I wouldn’t wish on anyone!"

Despite this, she reflects that self-producing came quite naturally, as she had many years of experience devising bedroom recordings when she was young, learning the techniques of music production in the process.
“Since I was a 14-year-old, I was recording myself in my childhood bedroom. Production, engineering, and recording has always been a part of my process.”
As an adult, she finds that being able to self-produce has become an integral part of the creative process. “This time around, I had places to go emotionally, and I knew I just had to go alone and find myself.”

Staying in full control of the creative process, from the first whispers of inspiration, through the multiple stages of sound production, is how St. Vincent keeps her distinctive highly personal sound. “As a result, I am able to reproduce the sound inside my head; it’s something I’m very proud of and attached to,” she said.

Despite clearly benefiting from the experience of holing up in a studio on her own, St. Vincent is no stranger to collaboration, having worked with major stars like David Bryne, Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and Dave Grohl. She mentioned she is still open to new collaborations.
“I remain constantly surprised by the people I get to work with, and if I follow my instincts of trust in the music, then it leads me to the right people.”
Among a diverse palette of influences, St. Vincent cited industrial rock and metal bands such as Ministry and Skinny Puppy and even British pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Referencing the veteran rockstars of the 70s, she claimed, “No one does it better than Bowie.” She of course, holds a special place in her heart for legendary Talking Heads vocalist and guitarist, David Byrne. “He’s a genius,” she said. “He changed the way I thought about art, performance. He changed my whole trajectory as an artist.”

The cover of "All Born Screaming," designed by Alex Da Corte, features St. Vincent bent over with her arms outstretched and engulfed in flames, dressed in black and white. She explained to curious Hong Kong journalists she didn’t actually set herself on fire for this image, although not because she was unwilling.
“I would have happily done it for art. I've done many things for art. I've been punched in the face for art, had bruises all over my body for art, but it's too expensive and complicated to light myself on fire.”
St. Vincent also released a Spanish version of "All Born Screaming," titled "Todos Nacen Gritando" in November 2024, which features all her vocals meticulously translated into Spanish. She describes the album as a “little token” for her Spanish-speaking fans, who she had met on tour in South America and Spain.
“I had these pivotal moments where I was looking at thousands of people singing back to me in perfect English, in what was not their first, second, or maybe not even their third language. They’ve been coming to see me for so long, so it was like, why couldn’t I meet them halfway?”

Asked about her first impressions of Hong Kong and whether they could inspire her next industrial rock album, St. Vincent shared she is affected by the scale of the city’s architecture.
“What's interesting to me about the city, looking at it from above, is that there's so much going on, there's so many buildings and so many people, but it's not a grid. It has a circularity and flow to it. It should be total chaos, but it somehow works.”
Always attuned to her surroundings, St. Vincent believes her time in Asia will undoubtedly inspire new sounds. “I’ll get to discover bands in Hong Kong that I’ve never heard of before, so it will work its way into a song somehow,” she says.

With her new album fresh off the ground and Asian tour ongoing (see dates in Chiba, Seoul and Manila scheduled for January, 2025) fans will be eagerly anticipating St. Vincent's next move. She certainly made her mark at Clockenflap 2024– leaving both veteran fans and newcomers satisfied yet craving more.
Given the extent of her experience and her endless curiosity for new influences, St. Vincent will surely continue to deliver new exciting sounds, keeping her work fresh and alive. She explains that there is no marketing plan. Instead, she goes where the music takes her.
“It's just a process of following music…What's going to be hot in two years, like who cares? I have no idea. Just believe in music. Music is stronger than we are.”
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