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You may have heard electrodisco jams like “Discotto Plastique” on every runway in New York City and noticed the band was always wearing clothes from underground NYC designers like Garo Sparo, but Hong Kong Counterfeit are way bigger than New York. They are everywhere. They are Asian because Japanese model Ayumi P is in the band now and the name is based on infamous, Hong Kong, 80s Eurobeat / Italodisco club Hollywood East. They are Russian and European because Russian vocalist (and ex-man) Katya Casio brings reverent tributes to Eurodisco into every song. And they are New Yorkers because beats man Inform3r (who put out the Sex Offender EP on Gigolo) is a crucial part of the NYC electro family. We talked to them about their internationally famous sound and it didn’t go so great.

VICE (in an email to the band): Here are my questions for the VICE interview. How soon do you think you could turn these suckers around? I need them by Sunday.

Can you give me a bit of a background? What was the environment that begot Hong Kong Counterfeit? I’m guessing the NY club scene (I’m going to put this answer in my words and make it the intro so I look real smart).

What kind of bands did you love most in the 80s?

A lot of people don’t know you play all those instruments. They think the guitars etc. are sampled. Why bother? Why not just sample?

Katya is now a real-life woman. Is it harder to get club work now that you’re not a guy in drag? Like it’s not kooky enough anymore?

Katya Casio (in a phone message to VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi after reading the above questions): I just took a look at the interview. John told me you wanted me to take a look at it earlier but I didn’t get a chance to look at it until now – sorry. Unfortunately, the person who wrote it doesn’t really have much knowledge about music and obviously doesn’t have much knowledge about our band – our directions and things like that. A lot of the questions were simply silly from a musical point of view and some of them were kind of perverted, which I didn’t like. If you’re still interested in doing an interview with us you can email us and maybe you could find someone that’s a little more knowledgeable about this. Someone who might even do some research before they ask the questions. I had our manager forward the writer some interviews we did in the past for Swiss, German, and Japanese magazines, but he told me the journalist wasn’t interested in that. He said the journalist wanted to take it “to a new direction.” We didn’t like the direction he took. We thought it was kind of lame actually. Let’s do an interview with someone else and they can take a slightly different angle.

CHRISTI BRADNOX
HKC have released an EP under the name Lectronix called Window Shopping in the Mirror on Throb Records.

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