Collected Tweets

Twitter link flotsam from the past few weeks. Follow @syntaxfreeblog if you want to get these when they’re funkyfresh!

May 14, 2012 | Links | Leave a comment
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Schizophrenia Is Taking Me Home

In typical music snob fashion, I disdain SPIN’s views on music unless they affirm my own. And in naming my two favourite members of my favourite band (i.e. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth) as joint number 1s of their “100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time” list, together with my favourite Sonic Youth album (which is not actually Daydream Nation) as the high water mark of their guitar work, and my favourite song on that album as their “Most Heroic Moment”…well, let’s just say the last time someone’s views coincided so much with my own, we were exchanging vows on our wedding day. (This is not to say that Alec’s views generally coincide with mine, because that would suggest he is more obsessed with Simon Cowell than is healthy. But I’d say we were pretty much in agreement on stuff like vows and shit on our wedding day.)

If you will bear with my fanwank a little longer, this is a nice opportunity to meander into a little story about seeing Thurston Moore (i.e. one half of the Greatest Guitarists Of All Time winners) live in London last year. I previously described the wonderful luck that allowed me to attend that gig at all. As always seems to happen to me in London, this was not the last serendipitous musical moment I was to enjoy there, and the extent to which this was all Sonic Youth related is kinda ridiculous.

Earlier in my trip I’d been to the fantastic Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Tate Modern. The only reason an art doofus like me even knew who Gerhard Richter was, of course, was that Sonic Youth had used one of his Candle paintings for the cover of Daydream Nation, and I’ve basically been longing for a print of that painting ever since the age of 14. So I went to the exhibition, loved it, and bought the print.

candle

Candle, Gerhard Richter

So far, so freakin’ awesome. There was just one problem. Given that I was frequently changing accommodation to crash on different friends’ couches, a 100 cm by 100 cm poster stored in a large protective tube was rather unwieldy to schlep around London with the rest of my luggage. While standing in crowded trains with this monstrous protuberance wedged between my legs to save space I couldn’t help but feel like some train perv with a massive boner, and after various instances of dropping or nearly dropping it while digging out Oyster card and suchlike, I did begin to question the wisdom of going through all this just for the sake of a poster of a giant fucking candle.

So how did I resolve this problem? The same way I resolve most of my problems in London: I imposed on Russ. Which is how, just after dropping the huge poster off at his workplace (for him to hold on to until I was leaving London), I was wandering around Shoreditch with no particular agenda other than to indulge in one of my I-love-East-London reveries, and suddenly this materialized in my rose-tinted, Lomofied, heavily vignetted sights.

ATP Pop-Up Shop

(ATP, for anyone who isn’t a music nerd, is a music festival I love, firstly because its lineups are far more interesting to me than those for more famous festivals like Glasto or Coachella, and secondly because attending it doesn’t require you to sleep in a tent. Sonic Youth are pretty regular features at ATP festivals, as are many other favourite artists of mine. So basically a shop like this, to me, is like Famous Amos to the Cookie Monster.)

I must have looked like the dramatic lemur upon spotting the sign, and then the OMG cat while exploring the shop. While I was very restrained in my shopping – lugging around a poster of a giant fucking candle can have this effect – I also noticed a poster on the wall advertising the Thurston Moore gig I would be attending on 2 December. And because I am a huge sap, I really really wanted that gig poster as a souvenir of both the first instance of serendipity I linked to earlier, and this second instance of just chancing upon my dream music nerd shop in the course of an errand involving a Sonic Youth poster. (Still with me? When the going gets tough, just imagine how much more stupefyingly boring this would be if I were telling it to you face-to-face!)

Gig posters like that are usually for advertising purposes and not for sale, so I shyly asked, feeling really awkward about the weirdness of my request, whether it might be at all possible for me to buy a copy of the poster. Most commendably, instead of calling psychiatric social services to come pick up this stammering, bug-eyed Stan, the kind shop attendant shrugged her shoulders, smiled, and said, “Just take it off the wall, you can have it.”

Cue embarrassing gushing in the vein of “OMG, you don’t know what this means to me and you just totally made my day!”, me lovingly removing the poster from the wall, rolling it up and holding it with more care than I held my degree scroll, and then me bouncing happily down Rivington Street while calling Russ on the phone and explaining that, um, I needed to meet him again to pass him another burden poster.

The story ends, predictably yet happily, with me seeing Thurston at the Union Chapel. The gig was everything I had hoped it would be.

Thurston Moore (Union Chapel, 2 Dec 2011)

Thurston seems happy with it too

Months later, the story I’ve dragged you through here remains one of the most treasured memories of my 1.5 month holiday. I don’t know if my convoluted tale strikes a chord with anyone other than me, and the poster I snagged from the ATP Pop-Up Shop isn’t really much to look at. But as an instant, soul-elevating reminder of a moment when multiple things that take up a fair bit of my heartspace (Sonic Youth, ATP, London and the awesome things that happen to me there) magically converged to make me the happiest or at least most mawkishly sentimental girl in East London, nothing holds a giant fucking candle to it.

Thurston Moore - gig flyer

May 13, 2012 | Favourite Posts, Music Geekery | Leave a comment
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Margrave Of The Marshes (John Peel’s Autobiography)

If you haven’t already heard, parts of John Peel’s record collection will soon become a virtual museum of sorts from now till the end of October 2012. John kept his collection meticulously catalogued and filed with cards he hand-typed on his old Olivetti typewriter, and each week for 26 weeks, users will get access to whatever music was on the first 100 filecards of a given letter of the alphabet, with 1 album highlighted for special attention. (Unfortunately, since access is through Spotify those of us in Singapore can’t actually be part of the fun.)

Alexis Petridis got a first peek into the collection, and wrote a charming article for The Guardian about what awaits us:

In one instance, the sheer obscurity of the music seems to have overwhelmed even Peel. There is a card that features no track listing at all, merely the dark summary “16 songs in Hungarian”.

In light of this, now seems a good time to share some favourite excerpts (I haven’t done that for so long!) from John’s autobiography Margrave Of The Marshes, which was half-written during his lifetime and finished posthumously by his wife Sheila. Funnily enough, I actually prefer the writing in Sheila’s half – the half written by John suggests he never met a comma he didn’t like. Nonetheless, the book is a wonderful read not just for music geeks but anyone who ever enjoyed John’s inimitable personality and radio presence – in my household, for example, Alec (who never listened to The John Peel Show but loved Home Truths) and I (who never listened to Home Truths but loved The John Peel Show) enjoyed it equally. 

The book opens with a quote from John, writing in Disc and Music Echo, 1969:

It is obvious that disc-jockeys, as a class, are essentially parasitic. We are, with lamentably few exceptions, neither creative nor productive. We have, however, manipulated the creations of others (records) to provide ourselves with reputations as arbiters of public taste. There is no more reason (nor no less) why I should be writing this column than you – however I am in this unmerited position and you’re not. I believe very much in radio as a medium of tragically unrealised possibilities and also in the music I play. Therefore accepting the falseness of my own precarious position I will do what I can, wherever I can, to publicise these good things I hear around me. These musicians have made you aware of, and appreciative of, their music – not J. Peel.

Read on for more excerpts from Margrave of the Marshes

May 2, 2012 | Music Geekery, Words | Leave a comment
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The Observatory – Catacombs Launch (Substation, 20 April 2012)

I wrote a fair bit back when The Observatory released their second album about why they are particularly special to me. Although the sound of their fifth album, Catacombs, is rather dark and intense, you could say that the experience of hearing this remarkable band live still filled my world with light the same way it did all those years ago.

The Observatory at the launch gig for their album Catacombs

April 24, 2012 | Music Geekery | 2 Comments
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Collected Tweets

I decided to add a little value to the @syntaxfreeblog Twitter account by tweeting here and there about stuff I’m enjoying, but I still like the idea of collating those here for the record rather than losing them forever in the Twitter swamp. Where possible, I might also rephrase them better than I could on Twitter, or add a little value here which I didn’t have space to mention there. Here are a bunch:

April 16, 2012 | Links | Leave a comment
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Bali: Lovely Lake Tamblingan

As I mentioned, I’m going to write about our trip to Bali more in terms of highlights than according to the sequence of our itinerary. On that basis there is only one place I could start: the beautiful, tranquil banks of Lake Tamblingan. It was not a place we had known to list on our desired itinerary, but a suggestion from our driver/guide Putu Arnawa as a place he personally liked. We had sought Putu out in the first place because he is a photographer, and by now I had enough of a sense of his aesthetic to trust his suggestions. I am so glad we did.

Temple After Rain

Continue reading →

March 24, 2012 | Photography, Travel | 2 Comments
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Bali In Brief

Most Singapore-dwelling yuppies have probably taken several trips to Bali by their early 30s, but we only visited it for the first time in late February. It’s not that we’d never wanted to go, but since the overriding impression we had (based on what other Singapore-dwelling yuppies seemed to talk about doing there, and post photos of on Facebook) was that it was primarily a beach place with some pretty ricefields here and there, we’d felt less urgency to visit it before other places on our Southeast Asian travel priority list. But once we’d seen Siem Reap, Hanoi, the Mekong Delta, Luang Prabang, Sabah and Sarawak (and I realize I failed to write about ANY of them here!), we finally decided to give Bali a try.

Our trip was a revelation of sorts. Perhaps because we were travelling at low season and completely avoided the southern part of the island apart from visiting Tanah Lot and Uluwatu, it felt about a tenth as touristy as I had expected it to be. Our driver/guide would warn us about persistent and annoying vendors at certain spots, and then they would be nothing like what we had encountered in Thailand or Cambodia. At more than a few temples we were the only visitors, and when we snorkelled straight off the beach in Amed into coral reefs several times more gorgeous than the crowded ones we had explored in Sabah, we had those to ourselves for at least half an hour as well.

The most memorable aspect of the trip, however, was the glimpse we got into the vibrancy of Balinese culture and how strongly committed the Balinese are to their community life. The ridiculous ease of our unplanned encounters with temple festivals, local dance performances and even a cremation procession (!) felt like nothing we had experienced before in our previous travels. While we have chanced upon local cultural events several times before, it always felt like a lucky coincidence that our tendency for indiscriminate wandering had just happened to present us with. In Bali, such encounters became so routine for us that talk of coincidences was no longer relevant – it felt like there simply was so much going on that you would need to be a particularly uninterested visitor in order to avoid witnessing something fascinating.

History suggests that expecting myself to do a full travelogue here is foolish, so I’ll try a different strategy of (a) writing about the places that moved me most first, regardless of where they were in the itinerary and (b) summarizing said itinerary for anyone who might possibly find it a useful framework for planning their own trip. I would honestly recommend every single thing mentioned below because we enjoyed our trip so thoroughly, but feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.  

Day 1: Arrived late in Ubud, immediately stumbled upon temple festival a stone’s throw from our awesome hotel (Junjungan Ubud Hotel and Spa). Found ourselves standing on road next to paddy fields at midnight, watching costumed beasts process past us.

Day 2: Easy day laughing at stupid tourists in the Monkey Forest and looking around Ubud town streets, then borrowed bikes from hotel and cycled to Petulu village to see the white herons come in to roost. Cheap and fantastic dinner in Warung Pulau Kelapa.

Day 3: Day tour to Tegallalang, Tirta Empul, Mount Batur, Pura Ulan Danau Batur, Besakih and the Sideman Valley with our driver/guide Putu Arnawa, who we would highly recommend. Chalongnayan dance performances by night in Ubud town.

Day 4: Day tour to Gunung Kawi, Taman Ayun, Tanah Lot and Uluwatu with Putu’s associate Wayan, who we would also highly recommend.

Day 5: Transferred to Munduk, again with Putu Arnawa. On the way, we watched a cremation and visited Jatiluwih, Lake Beratan and its temple, the twin-lake viewpoint for Lake Buyan and Lake Tamblingan, a village on the banks of Lake Tamblingan (a trip highlight), and finally arrived at Munduk to spend the night in a converted rice granary (Puri Lumbung).

Day 6: Easy day in Munduk, doing a simple hike to a waterfall, exploring Munduk village, and enjoying the incredible views from the balcony of our cottage. Cheap and fantastic lunch at Aditya Homestay.

Day 7: Transferred to Amed, again with Putu Arnawa. On the way, we visited one of the Gitgit waterfalls, Pura Beji, Lempuyang temple, and Tirta Gangga. In Amed, we stayed at Bayu Cottages.

Day 8: Easy day in Amed. Snorkelled first at Lipah Beach, then at the Japanese shipwreck at Banyuning, explored the village, enjoyable dinner at Sails.

Day 9: Drove through stunning views of the Karangasem Regency on the way to the airport, a perfect last glimpse of beauty before returning to Singapore.

March 24, 2012 | Travel | 1 Comment
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Tropic Thunder Roasted Chickpeas

Although roasted chickpeas are a foodblogger staple by now (not that this is a food blog) and I always intended to give them a try, the imminent meltdown of our freezer – which had about two cans’ worth of frozen chickpeas in it, among other things – was what eventually forced my hand. There are plenty of recipes out there already but I wanted to write a little about what worked for me and what didn’t, because I have a hunch that getting a roasted chickpea crispy and keeping it that way is tougher in the wretched humidity of Singapore than in drier climes.

I started off by following the method outlined in this recipe, which differs from many others I saw in that it has you dry-roasting the chickpeas for the first twenty minutes rather than chucking the oil in with them right at the start. Also, it uses a slightly higher temperature than other recipes I’ve seen. As I said, my hunch is that these measures are helpful for Singapore’s humidity, so if you are trying this out in Singapore (or anywhere else where the air is similarly sodden) I suggest you bear them in mind. In light of this, and the torrential rain that was pouring down when I roasted my first batch, I shall call them Tropic Thunder Chickpeas.

Tropic Thunder Chickpeas

Ingredients

  • 1 can chickpeas, drained, rinsed and patted dry with a paper towel
  • 1 teaspoon olive oil
  • Your choice of seasoning. Here’s what I used, but just use your intuition and go by your own taste:
    • Batch 1: Soya sauce (about 1 teaspoon, possibly a little more) and dried chilli flakes (liberal sprinkling)
    • Batch 2: Jerk seasoning (about 1 tablespoon)
    • In future batches, I might try curry powder or garam masala. This honey-miso combination looks great too.

Method

  1. See that source recipe uses Fahrenheit. Say “Convert 425 Fahrenheit to Celsius” into Google Search app. Obtain gibberish as response. Consider, given your unfortunate history with this app, that you may have been suffering from an undiagnosed speech defect all these years. Realize that constant construction noise in background which you have become inured to is probably confusing Google. Type in conversion query instead. Preheat oven to 220C.

  2. Place chickpeas in one layer on baking tray. Roast for 10 minutes, then shake tray around (some will be sticking to it, fiddle as necessary with spoon to unstick them) and roast for another 10 minutes.

  3. Pour chickpeas from baking tray into bowl comfortably sized for tossing oily chickpeas. Depending on shape of baking tray, avoid thinking your kitchen ninja skillz are sufficiently advanced that you will not spill any. If in doubt, fiddle as necessary with spoon to get them all safely in. Sprinkle with oil and your choice of seasoning, to taste. Toss to get them all nicely coated with flava.

  4. Pour chickpeas back onto baking tray. Intend to follow source recipe’s instructions to continue roasting 5-15 minutes more at the same temperature. Instead, get distracted by trying to supervise freezer repairman (who arrived somewhere during step 2) in Mandarin. Realize eventually that chickpeas have been in there for nearly 20 minutes. Extract them hurriedly from oven, pop one into mouth, and realize they are perfect. Upon attempting batch 2 on a different day, follow original instructions and end up with less crispy chickpeas. Shake fists at tropical sky.

  5. Allow chickpeas to cool, then store in glass jar which formerly held pasta sauce, and which you saved because you have become your mother. Refrigerate. Battle spiralling chickpea addiction over next few days, which is an important battle to wage, because at the end of the day they are still beans with beanly consequences, ahem ahem. Settle on portion control strategy of only eating one jar lid’s worth at a time. Resolve to buy bigger jars of pasta sauce in future.

Roasted Chickpeas with Jerk Seasoning

Lastly, out of sympathy for long-suffering readers who just want a damn copy-and-pastable recipe, condense method as follows:

  1. Preheat oven to 220C.
  2. Roast chickpeas, in one layer on baking tray, for 10 minutes. Shake tray to dislodge any chickpeas sticking to it, then roast 10 minutes more.
  3. Remove chickpeas from oven and transfer to bowl. Add oil and seasoning to taste, toss.
  4. Transfer chickpeas back to baking tray, continue roasting at 220C until browned and crispy. In Singapore, in my oven, this was 20 minutes.
  5. Allow to cool before storing in airtight container. Refrigerate.
March 16, 2012 | Food | 6 Comments
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Goodness Bodacious Me

Good: A husband who comes to find you where you’re running errands so that he can have dinner with you before he goes out with his boys.

Bad: A husband who says this as you’re sitting down to dinner –

Alec: Your jeans are nice. I was checking out your ass from the back before I realized it was you.

Me: ……

Alec: That sounded way better in my head than when it came out from my mouth.

Yes, I realize my life is a Goodness Gracious Me skit. I would have responded with the customary "Check please!", except that we were in McDonalds.

February 23, 2012 | Alecdotes | 1 Comment
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2011 Music: Song List

In keeping with my tradition of only managing to say anything about a year’s worth of music once the year in question is already over, here are my songs of note from 2011. As usual, a song doesn’t have to have been released as a single in order to get into this list, and I only feature a song in this list if it isn’t already from one of my favourite albums of the year.

In last year’s list I included some honourable mentions, which were songs that stood out to me but didn’t quite merit being described as my “best of” the year for various reasons. I like the idea so will continue it this year, with:

  • Look At Me Now (Chris Brown feat. Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Wayne): A lot of this song is a frustrating waste of a great beat, but Busta’s verse (starting 1.30) is one of those glorious virtuoso performances which you enjoy first for itself and then for the entertainment value of the million Youtube cover attempts it launched, such as Mac Lethal’s Cook With Me Now "pancakes” version.

  • I Will (Danny Brown): I don’t want to spoil it. Just listen to it. But not out loud unless you are in a rather permissive environment.

  • Edge Of Glory (Lady Gaga): There’s no way of explaining how I ended up following Lady Gaga’s career because I’m madly in love with her gay backup dancer without coming off as insane, is there? Perhaps in some other post. For present purposes, just believe me when I say I’m totally emotionally invested in the career of Mark Kanemura, former So You Think You Can Dance contestant, current Lady Gaga principal dancer, FOREVAH HOTTIE. He’s gone from “normal” backup dancer to someone Gaga obviously favours, and when she premiered the single on the American Idol finale featuring him prominently as the only dancer to appear and dance with her my heart nearly BURST WITH JOY, although I will admit that his lack of clothing might also have contributed to that feeling of imminent pulmonary failure. Every subsequent live performance of the song has also featured him dirty dancing with Gaga in various states of undress, which is why I have 19 Edge Of Glory performance videos saved on my hard drive. The earlier link is to the American Idol performance for sentimentality’s sake (skip to 2:40 to see Mark), but to get a better idea of why I am insane I recommend you watch this lovely compilation instead.

And now the songs proper:

  • Do It Like A Dude (Jessie J): If you commanded me to dissolve and reconstruct myself as a pop star, and gave me the requisite magical powers with which to do so, this would be my debut single and video. (I know the song is borderline 2010/2011 but I only heard it in 2011 and love it too much not to feature it here somewhere.)

 

  • Try To Sleep (Low): The album this came from felt like a retread of the most accessible bits of Low’s past work, which I found disappointing after the curveball of righteous electronic anger that was Drums And Guns (my favourite Low album, which would also have been featured here as my favourite album of 2007 if I’d ever got round to writing that list). But at least when a band like Low decides to do "accessible", they sometimes end up giving you the prettiest little bit of twinkly harmonized accessibility you could ever imagine.

  • The Other Shoe (Fucked Up): You don’t really expect an established hardcore punk band to decide all of a sudden to feature pretty girly harmonies in their songs, or for a song with chief lyrical takeaway of "DYING ON THE INSIDE! DYING ON THE INSIDE!" to be so damn catchy, but Fucked Up is kinda special that way. (The album this is from is hands-down the best guitar album of the year but it’s so intense that I can’t actually handle listening to it all in one go, so it won’t feature on my album list.)

  • Lose Yourself (Astro): Far and away the best contestant from the inaugural season of X-Factor USA, 15 year old rapper Astro first caught my attention with his ballsy audition but truly gained my admiration once the live rounds started by using each song he was supposed to "cover" as little more than a sonic template upon which to perform his own rap verses – essentially writing his own new material each week. America likes its reality show hamsters meek, humble and preferably with a sob story, so I suppose this swaggerific performance (my favourite of the whole season) explains why he didn’t make it as far as he deserved in the competition.

  • Love Out Of Lust (Lykke Li): I agonized over whether to feature this or the near-perfect Ronettes revivalism of Sadness Is A Blessing, but in the end my choice was emotional – Russ introduced Love Out Of Lust to me on our roadtrip through New England, I loved it immediately, and I love the memory of listening to it in the rental car, our little space of moody poignant beauty racing forward on a vast sunny American highway.

  • No Church In The Wild (Kanye West & Jay-Z): In the same strange way that last year’s Kanye album went from underwhelming me to blindsiding me as my favourite album of the year, I found this unremarkable until I suddenly found its propulsive beat and enigmatic lyrics utterly compelling. The production is reminiscent of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, especially in the use of the vocal samples, which is to say it is distinctive and unexpected in a way no one else is doing quite as well as Kanye.

  • A Thousand Years (Christina Perri): Yes, I seriously like this. No, I’m not into Twilight. What can I say, I enjoy West Coast Swinging to this song and find its lyrics rather romantic. I suppose I am a bit of a sap for this idea of love that makes the passage of time feel like an afterthought – I did start welling up on the bus the first time I heard Magnetic Fields’ It’s Only Time, which had a somewhat similar idea.

  • Skyscraper (Demi Lovato): Yes, I seriously like this. No, I haven’t lost my edge. Yes, I’ve totally lost my edge. Let’s move on.

  • Snowflake (Kate Bush): Kate took over a decade’s break from music to raise her son Bertie, and he duets with her here at age 13. It was worth the wait. Bertie’s lines are those of the titular snowflake falling from the sky, his unbroken voice taking on the high, pure notes we might have expected to hear issuing from his mother years ago. Meanwhile, Kate whispers and wheedles from the waiting earth: "The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you". Perhaps this sounds twee. It is not. It is bloody beautiful, and like nothing you would ever hear from anyone that wasn’t Kate Bush.

  • Marka (Dub Phizix and Skeptical feat. Strategy): This song is what you would get if you analyzed my brain and wrote an instruction manual for how to press every single one of my dance music buttons. Also, I rarely bother watching music videos but with this one I’m transfixed every time.

February 8, 2012 | Music Geekery | 8 Comments
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