23/11/2025
Nothing like Berlin’s warehouses or London’s industrial spaces. In Hong Kong, high rents, strict licensing and a club landscape dominated by commercial venues meant underground music never had much physical room to take root — and with the city favouring demolition over preservation until the late 2000s, there were few places to experiment at all.
But the region is shifting. As RADII reported last month, raves across Asia are increasingly slipping into temples, warehouses and century-old landmarks — and Hong Kong is finally part of that movement.
Born from an eight-month revitalisation project, 01 Festival is Carnaby Fair’s attempt to bring underground energy into a space that has almost never hosted it.
“We had the opportunity to partner with the venue, and the idea was to revitalise one of Hong Kong’s oldest monuments — borrowing inspiration from places like Berghain, and imagining what that energy could feel like inside Murray House,” says Karen, CEO of Carnaby Fair.
Their first edition in August sold out instantly — and, as Karen laughs, it “literally shook the building,” after 300 people dancing caused structural issues on one of the floors. Old architecture comes with its own rules.
Murray House is a Grade I historic building: built in 1846 as an officers’ mess in Central, taken over by the Japanese during WWII, long rumoured to be haunted. In the 1980s it was dismantled into more than 3,000 numbered granite blocks, stored for nearly two decades, and eventually rebuilt by the sea in Stanley — where it stands today.
