House and garden bar-and-venue Kult Kafe, home to Sundays on the Hill and the Tropical Temple dance party series will now host a brand new quarterly series of small concerts, aptly titled Concerts On the Hill, with a line-up of both local and regional music acts that don’t necessarily fall within the same genre. The series kicks off on Aug 14 with a two-part concert featuring bittymacbeth x Evan Low–a collaboration of improvisation, live-looping and intriguing lyrics by an expressive local songstress and a local music producer–and the lauded Aussie-Cambodian band, Cambodian Space Project.
Why is this a big deal? Well, because it’s rare. Singapore is no stranger to lavish concert venues, from the state of the art facilities at Esplanade to the massive Star Performing Arts Centre to National Stadium to the glitzy Mastercard Theatres at MBS, all of which regularly bring in biggies like Bon Iver, Tegan and Sara and even old legends like Scorpions. But it’s the small venues our island is sorely lacking. Other than Blu Jaz, The Substation and a handful others, our concert scene has lacked the range of venues necessary to bring in the smaller, more intriguing indie bands.
The concert space at Kult Kafe will be held outdoors in the parking area and can hold about 300 people, a perfect place to see a cool and trippy band like Cambodian Space Project.
It’s especially exciting when you stop to consider the enormous risk the organizers are undertaking to execute the series, especially since there are no sponsors.
“There’s quite a lot more infrastructure [to consider] as compared to a venue that’s already equipped,” says May Leong, co-founder of Hyphen, one of the collaborators for this music series.
She added, “There are definitely financial challenges because when you rely solely on ticket sales, it depends heavily on the demand. And sometimes when you start something like that–because the program is very eclectic–you might not have that kind of volume of people coming.”
With Concerts On The Hill, Hyphen and Kult Kafe hopes to capitalize “on the transformative potential of the site” and develop the series into a “signature regional music platform in Singapore”.
Be a part of it!
Tickets are priced from $28 and will be available via Peatix. More info on Concerts On The Hill here.
