An update on wonderful Vietnam is on the way, faster than a speeding bullet speeding motorcycle clapped-out but valiantly struggling made-in-China death trap of a moped with no side mirrors!
(Thanks for being so patient, everybody. But um, yeah, I still need a little more time.)
Okay, these days I try not to bore you all with my latest music purchase details as often as I used to (well, also I’ve been trying my best to cut down on my purchasing until I can sell off some stuff and clear the shelf space), but today I just have to share that after having Califone’s Heron King Blues and Neu!’s Neu! 75 on my Django notify list for two and three freaking YEARS respectively, I finally managed to snag them. For the princely sum of about S$15 each after postage and handling. Rock!
Tee hee. I suppose the UK powers that be can’t be expected to run the names of all new agencies through the “unintentionally amusing” filter, but Soca (the new Serious and Organised Crime Agency) is delightful. Fighting crime…WITH RIDDIM!
The Guardian article where I read about it makes me giggle a bit, especially when you take some of the sentences out of context. “Sir Stephen admitted that the formation of Soca had been ‘quite a bumpy time’.”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Dave Pajo gig for so long. To me it was the first and only indie gig in Singapore this year that I’d been excited about, and in hindsight I wish I’d bothered to promote it in advance on this blog. I guess I took it for granted that he’d draw a crowd, especially with the rapturous reception that the Tortoise gig got last year, but I was completely wrong. The turnout was abysmal, even worse than the Analog Girl / Konki Duet / Lovers gig the previous night. This upset me, as it always does. I almost wish I were jaded enough to be resigned and indifferent to it.
Darren Hanlon opened, and was pretty great in his own right. Being a good “guy-with-guitar” act is damn hard. First, you have to have good songs with good music and good lyrics, which approximately 98.5% of such acts do not. Second, you have to be able to communicate those songs to your audience, which for present purposes we shall assume are not rabid fans who have already spent hours listening to your album and memorizing the lyrics so that they can sing along conspicuously at your gig. Clear enunciation and lyrics that don’t read like pseudo-poetic stream-of-consciousness burbling really help in this, but personality zing and lack of pretension also tend to be a huge plus. Darren Hanlon has all of these.
Despite having to start off “cold” in a big, barely populated room, he managed to command everyone’s attention quite effortlessly, simply through sheer force of likability. He was good at introducing his songs in a way that got the audience interested in them, and then at performing the songs well. I realize this sounds like a no-brainer but it’s amazing how many acts I’ve seen that are incapable of this. It’s hard to really describe the songs themselves because they ultimately just sound like a guy playing his guitar and singing in a cafe. It’s just that if you were in the cafe where he was playing, you’d stop your conversation, listen until he was done, and even if you didn’t buy his album at the end of it, your day would be that much better for having listened to him. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like lavish praise but hey, there are bands who sell millions of albums that I couldn’t say the same for.
Then Dave Pajo started, and proved that almost everything I just said about “guy-with-guitar” acts was a load of bullshit. He gave so little acknowledgement to the presence of the audience beyond an occasional muttered “thank you” that he might as well have been performing in his bedroom. He had that sort of overly emo indie guy look that turns me off straight away. I had and still have no idea what any of his songs are about even though I’ve listened to them so many times. And yet I was transfixed.
One spotlight, everything else dark, the performer almost motionless except for his hands on the guitar. No introductions, no banter. Quiet songs for a quiet room, sung without the harmonies or other studio gloss of the recording (his solo album). He’d laid out about ten bells on the floor, and played them by tapping the handles with his feet. It wasn’t a gig for all people or all moods, but it suited me and mine just fine.
After the gig there was time for teh ping and catch-up with Benny, who happened to be in Singapore for the weekend to attend a friend’s wedding, and had come along with us to the gig. Even though the gig had been great, this was probably the best part of the evening for me.
Even though I attend lots of music events in Singapore and have gotten to know some of the people in the scene over time, I somehow never talk uninhibitedly with them about the music I’m into because I don’t know how my conversation will be received. With Benny I know that nothing I say will be taken as affected, snobbish or reactionary even though our tastes clash far more often than they coincide. I can struggle inarticulately to explain how something I’m listening to fills me with wide-eyed wonder, or line up all the pejoratives in my vocabulary and fire them at something that fills me with disdain, and even if he completely disagrees with me in either aspect, it’s all good. We discuss it, argue about it, level snarky insults at each other, but ultimately part ways with no less respect for each other’s music taste or knowledge than before. (Except the bit where he likes Serena Maneesh.)
Thanks for a good evening, Benny, and please come to Singapore more often – I miss you.
Erlend Oye was playing interesting stuff when we arrived at the Mosaic Club, but many people weren’t dancing. I have a feeling the vast majority of his audience were Erlend Oye fans rather than house music fans so perhaps that’s why they weren’t really in the groove but honestly, at some points I felt like yelling “DUDES, ERLEND WANTS YOU TO DANCE, NOT STAND THERE STOCK STILL GAWKING AT HIM!” After all, as he demonstrated several times himself, no one needed to actually dance dance, just jumping around happily would have been fine too.
On the whole he played about one and a quarter hours’ worth of music I found interesting (including remixes of Kings of Convenience songs which I generally much prefer to the originals), and forty-five minutes of boring indie/pop standards eg. The Cure’s Close To Me, Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark. I found these fairly dull.
What I did find enjoyable and endearing was his personality. He interacted pleasantly with the crowd, and dealt extremely well with technical problems that twice brought his set to a complete halt – the second time, as a Kings of Convenience remix suddenly just stopped playing, he continued singing the vocal a capella while looking for a new song, finally substituting “I think I found a good song” for the lyrics he was singing. Quite charming.
Ultimately though, this gig wouldn’t have been worth $30 and missing the America’s Next Top Model finale for me if not for one moment right at the end.
He announced the last song, put it on, and came down to the dancefloor, a ring of ecstatic fans forming around him almost instantly. Although originally in this ring by sheer coincidence of location, I stepped out of it, figuring that it would be nicer to make room for people who were bigger fans than I – essentially, almost everyone else in the room.
At this point I spotted Dominique trying to physically drag a struggling, protesting Han (huge Erlend fan) in his direction. Being no stranger to the paralysis of extreme starry-eyed admiration I bounded up to assist, knowing that friends who refuse to let you wuss out are necessary in such situations. (Lifelong mortification is still better than lifelong regret.) Unfortunately, Han was putting up quite a fight and after a while I decided it probably wasn’t best for her first meeting with Erlend to involve being hurled at him like a human cannonball.
So I took another tack. Given that I only get star-struck by people I actually admire, I had absolutely no qualms about approaching him myself. I danced into his little bit of Erlend ring-space, yelled that I had a friend who loved him but was too shy to say hello, and pointed at Han. Upon which he plucked her from Dom’s arms, wrapped her in his, and started dancing with her.
That was when it finally felt worthwhile. And if you don’t understand why, you’ve never been a teenage girl.
We each had about 20 minutes on the decks at Ci’en’s Pah-ti. This was obviously not a whole lot of time with which to reprazent, but therein lay the challenge! Here’s what I did with mine:
Emulsified (Yo La Tengo): Because I was playing something later which sounds quite similar to Griselda, because The Whole Of The Law isn’t really a party track, and because Blue Line Swinger would have taken up almost all of my allotted time. And because Emulsified is lovely.
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel): Because I have lived in every moment of this album for the past 8 years, and it still transports me the same way it did the day I brought it home.
Baby Got Back (cover by Jonathan Coulton): Because this is just self-evidently awesome, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate it is an enemy of joy. And big butts.
Home Sweet Home (Kano): Okay, I knew this one and the next would pretty much go down like lead balloons among most of the crowd there, but I have to admit I didn’t care. The Amoy Street concrete just needed to hear this, okay?
Dancingbox (Modeselektor featuring TTC): I was somehow really in the mood to play some TTC, but Leguman just loses so much when you don’t get to see it performed live by a guy with a big legume for a head. This track had been rocking my commute for a couple of months, so I used it instead.
Darling Nikki (Prince): Because every set needs some Prince. Who else is gonna rhyme “sex fiend” with “masturbating with a magazine”?
‘Cross The Breeze (Sonic Youth): Because you knew I’d get this in somewhere. :)
I only wish I’d been able to get there earlier, stay longer, and hear more of what other people played, but I didn’t dare to risk missing any of Gang Starr and left around midnight. Cheers to everyone I met, if you read this – I arrived feeling alone and awkward and weird but that quickly evaporated with your good company. And cheers, obviously, to Ci’en for organizing. Please do so again, I promise to stay and get trashed with all of you the next time!
Annie Proulx writes at The Guardian about “how her Brokeback Oscar hopes were dashed by Crash”, and is in general a bitter, pontificating, reductionist cow. It’s rather pathetic.
“Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline.”
Thanks for the newsflash Annie, but I kind of abandoned the idea that award shows like the Oscars or Grammies actually reflected what I thought was good at around the age of fourteen. For your reference, that was also about nine years after I stopped doing kindergarten-level snarks like the one you just did about Crash. Here’s a tip for when you become a big girl – decide whether or not you care about Hollywood’s approval before it hands you a result you don’t like, and maybe then your bitching and whining might be worth something.
“There came an atrocious act from Hustle and Flow, Three 6 Mafia’s violent rendition of “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”, a favourite with the audience who knew what it knew and liked. This was a big winner, a bushel of the magic gold-coated gelded godlings going to the rap group.”
This is quite amusing. One, the last sentence is hilariously, Bulwer-Lyttonesquely, bad. Two, the entire excerpt sounds like the sort of statement that would come from, say, someone living a cloistered life behind wrought-iron gates or in a deluxe rest-home, out of touch with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days.
A little background, for non-Singaporeans and Singaporeans who weren’t there, is that 1 + 1 Not Equals II was a free event on the Arts House lawn, featuring local bands Astreal, Lunarin, Electrico and Local Bar Boy and local dance troupes Ah Hock and Peng Yu and Moving Arts. The premise of the event was that while the bands played, the dancers would perform interpretive dances to the music. (Yes, I know it sounds like a recipe for awkward hilarity but it was free, so I went.)
Now that’s been explained, perhaps someone more knowledgeable about contemporary dance than I can explain how going on stage, slowly taking off one’s jeans, eating a takeaway meal from its styrofoam container, drinking from a plastic bottle, occasionally swinging one’s legs while eating, slowly putting one’s jeans back on, and leaving the stage, constitutes an interpretive “dance” to any music?
I must admit, one reason this aggrieved me was that it was done while my favourite local band Astreal was playing the best gig I’ve ever heard it do. For once you could hear Ginette’s vocals loud and clear over the mic instead of just snatches of them through the crashing guitars, and they did some new material I really enjoyed as well. It certainly seemed to me like music to which one could quite conceivably perform dance-like movements to.
I must also admit, if this had been done for Electrico’s performance instead of Astreal’s I’d have been fairly amused, given that the performer’s complete obliviousness to the music being played does rather capture my usual reaction to Electrico’s ho-hum music. But even then, I’d still feel it was rather taking the piss.
It was pretty shocking how badly attended the 2 gigs we attended at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival were. I guess in a two month period where Franz Ferdinand, Oasis and Kings of Convenience were performing here, most local “indie” music fans chose to spend their money there instead. I’m not saying it’s wrong to like those bands, and when I was 14 I’d probably have been ecstatic about such gigs, but I do wish people in Singapore were a little more willing to take a chance on something less established or radio-friendly. Call me a bleeding heart if you like but it always really upsets me to see a good band performing to an embarrassingly empty room.
Having said that, my heart remained resolutely unbloodied during Analog Girl’s performance, if one could even call it that. I’m having difficulty writing about this because I don’t want to be needlessly unkind about someone who is trying to do something different, even if I don’t personally think she succeeds at all. Let me just say that as someone who has a fairly high threshhold for abstract noodly electronica (anyone here like Fennesz?), I was bored stiff by the music, and watching her essentially press buttons on devices for half an hour didn’t exactly make for compelling viewing either. There’s more I could say, but let’s leave it at that.
The Konki Duet are three girls who make pretty, slightly melancholic, chamber pop with two of the girls harmonizing over a guitar, dinky keyboard, violin and occasional trumpet. It’s a simple setup, but what they achieve with it is a good reminder that you don’t always need an Elephant Six-esque panoply of obscure instruments to make interesting indie pop. They’re a little raw – they were sometimes out of time with each other, and the violin is far too obtrusive in the mix – but they have a lovely little collection of songs which managed to have a distinct identity and style about them without all sounding the same. I enjoyed them far more than I’d expected to, and although they do need a little more polish at the moment, I think they deserve to do well with this in time to come.
If you’re a stark raving Francophile you might love The Lovers. They started their gig with the “I’m French! Why do you theenk I havv zis outrrragyuss akksent?” sound clip from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail and sang a number of impish bossa nova songs about French grammar genders and French wine and French kisses and…you get the drift. All this shtick would put them firmly in novelty band territory for me if not for their rather charming stage persona. I’m not sure if it’s part of their act or if they’re genuinely besotted with one another, but I found myself buying into their affectionate, coquettish chemistry. Sometimes it’s nice to watch a gig where the performers hold each other closely and exchange seductive looks. It’s certainly a change from shoegazing.
(Review of the 2nd gig forthcoming in a future post.)
Delfos Contemporary Dance’s In Memoriam presentation at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival was aimed at “broaching the topic of death through literary images”. I have not quoted this description of it as a preface to my exhaustive and learned analysis of the various literary images employed, but have simply co-opted it as adequate setup to say that despite my worst fears, this performance thankfully didn’t end up as a tale of two shitties.
The first half was fairly abstract, with few props used apart from paper boats, a tiny red fluttery bird thing, and mist. It relied mostly on the considerable skill of its dancers and the passionate dynamism of its choreography, and was really quite captivating.
The second half involved a man wearing nothing except a tiny G-string being guided towards a huge animated butterfly on a screen by two women wearing butterfly headdresses.
Guess which half was shitty.