Janette Slack

Few DJ/producers have had the adventures of Hong Kong’s Janette Slack. While based in the UK for 15 years, she became a resident DJ at the fabled London fetish club Torture Garden. “Playing at Torture Garden is like being on a sci-fi and medieval film set rolled into one,” Slack says. “The production is done at such a high level, it really feels so surreal playing there – and it’s an absolute privilege. Some have described it as a mini Burning Man, without the sand, in terms of the artistic epicness of it all.”

Those experiences bled into the electro-breaks stalwart’s 2013 debut, Torture Garden Session, which she’s continuing to promote with singles like the grimy bass Kut Me Sum – a collab with Some DJ and femcee Tuhin Chisti. It was “a mission” to record the LP, Slack reveals. “What I learnt from making the album was that I need to be faster at completing and composing stuff. I found that when I got to track six or track seven, I was very bored of track one and two because they didn’t symbolise where my head was as an artist. The album taught me a lot of discipline.” Torture Garden Session is outlandish. Girl In Black, an earlier single, sounds like Joan Jett masquerading as Miss Kittin.

Slack, who has a Chinese mother and Scottish father, began her music career as a teen in HK. She then moved to London. Slack intended to study hospitality management but ended up doing a course in audio engineering. She’d fall into the nu-skool breaks world. Slack worked at Finger Lickin’ Records. Two years ago, she launched her own Slack Trax. These days Slack prefers adjectives to ‘genre’ tags. She describes her musical hybrid as, “cheeky, chunky, twisted and demented – with a hint of credible cheese.”

In London Slack networked extensively. This helped when she required ‘daylight’ jobs to fund her album. Slack was an extra in Richard Curtis’ rom-com About Time, remembering it as “a long day of filming.” “When you’re in the groove of a busy city, you come across a lot of people along the way and get called in to do fun random things,” she says. Indeed, she’s also been asked to appear in “death metal music videos”.

Lately Slack returned home, realising that she missed her parents. “I thought it’s time to come back.” HK’s scene, like the city, has changed. “I feel like Marty McFly from Back To The Future [Part] II,” Slack admits. “Everything is the same, but different – it’s more futuristic. The thing is, as time goes by in any city, everything evolves – not just with music. People here are passionate and enthusiastic about pushing the scene, and a lot of people here are hungry for really good stuff – so it’s a really nice thing to come back to.”

But Slack isn’t done with Torture Garden – she’ll be playing its next Valentine’s Day ball. Before that, Slack, a regular visitor to Oz, is DJing at Ambar’s Breakfest launch party. “I’ll play something along the lines of what I did at Breakfest last year, but probably a bit nastier – and more of the brew stuff I’ve been cooking up.”