Shi Fu Miz Turns 10, and Its Warm-Up Party Just Put Southeast Asia on the Bill
Hong Kong's Shi Fu Miz festival marks a decade with Chez Damier headlining a new site on Nov 14-15, after today's warm-up party put Singapore and Jakarta selectors on the main stage.
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A Warm-Up With a Southeast Asian Accent
Hong Kong's Murray House, a 160-year-old colonial building that was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt in Stanley in 2001, hosted an unusual bill today. "Road to Shi Fu Miz 10," the official countdown party for the city's longest-running house and techno festival, handed its main stage to a trio of Southeast Asian selectors marking Darker Than Wax's 15th year: Singapore's Daryl Knows, Thailand's Pam Anantr, and Jakarta's Jonathan Kusuma. Local Hong Kong support filled out the rest of the afternoon, which ran from 3pm to 11pm.
It is a small booking on paper, but it says something about who Shi Fu Miz considers its extended family. The festival was founded in 2016 by Hong Kong's FuFu Asia and the French collective La Mamie's, and FuFu Asia has spent the years since building out well beyond its home city, including running Sunda Festival and Nomad Solar Sound in Singapore. A Singapore label headlining Hong Kong's own anniversary warm-up is not a coincidence so much as a paper trail.
The Real News: Ten Years, One New Home
The warm-up matters because of what it is warming up for. Shi Fu Miz turns 10 on November 14 and 15, and for the first time in its history the festival is leaving Cheung Chau island, where it spent six years at Sai Yuen after starting out on Pui O Beach on Lantau. The new site is Tai Tong Organic EcoPark in Yuen Long, a rural stretch of the New Territories, with capacity set at 2,000 and tickets running HK$508 to HK$788.
The anniversary lineup, confirmed directly via the festival's official Eventbrite listing, is headlined by Chicago house originator Chez Damier, one of the genre's foundational DJs and a co-founder of Prescription Records with Ron Trent. He is joined by DJ Maria., Dr. Rubinstein, and the Melodies International crew among roughly two dozen acts across two days, running from noon Saturday to 4am Sunday.
Why It's Worth Watching From Southeast Asia
Shi Fu Miz has never been just a Hong Kong story. FuFu Asia's Singapore ventures, and now a warm-up bill built almost entirely around Southeast Asian names, point to a festival treating the region as part of its core audience rather than an afterthought. It follows the same regional through-line Loopliner traced when Darker Than Wax marked its own 15th year last week, a label built in Singapore that keeps showing up on bills far outside it.
For a festival built on the idea of an escape from the city, a rural eco-park is a fitting next chapter. Whether it can pull the same Southeast Asian crowd this time around, four hours by plane rather than four stops on the MTR line to Cheung Chau, is the real test still to come.
