Art Of The Mix

On Alec’s previous visits here, failing to take him to a performance at the Esplanade was my most glaring omission out of many, but I finally remedied that on Friday. The SSO was doing Beethoven’s 6th, Schubert’s 2nd, and Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave from The Hebrides, and for the princely sum of $21.75 (that’s total, not each), we enjoyed sound so divine from the third circle that even a sub-par SSO sounded great.

[I don’t mean the SSO is generally a sub-par orchestra, I just mean they weren’t really on fire on Friday. There were little timing hiccups here and there; perhaps they didn’t gel with the guest conductor as well as they normally do with Lan Shui. Some harshness in the violins, and I think there was one clarinet screwup. Also the Allegro ma non troppo which starts the Beethoven felt a little too non troppo for my liking, but perhaps I was just too impatient to get to the rollicking third movement.]

My Esplanade bliss is nothing new, but being able to share the place that makes me happiest in Singapore with the person who makes me happiest in Singapore was rather lovely.

* * *

Chinese New Year reunion dinner on Sunday at Chef Kang’s Canton Wok confirmed the fact that not only my mother but my entire extended family seems determined to make my boyfriend fat by forcing multiple servings of everything on him.

I’m not convinced that Canton Wok is “the best cze char in Singapore” as the newspaper articles claim, because I don’t think I saw it at its best on Sunday night. I didn’t have a problem with the ambience – eating on a cramped walkway in the depths of a Hougang HDB estate (a public housing estate) is fine by me – but the service was pretty poor. We waited for more than half an hour to be seated despite having made a reservation far in advance. When the first dish arrived we had plates but no chopsticks or spoons to eat with, cue exaggerated pawing motions at red wine chicken until the staff got the hint. Neither moist towelettes nor lemon water accompanied the crab, so anyone who wanted the rest of their meal to be non-sticky had to venture inside in search of a rather grotty basin.

Food-wise, some dishes were great (red wine chicken, crab with glutinous rice, coffee pork ribs, abalone and spinach), and others were pleasant but forgettable (steamed motherfucking big cod, those brown noodles which I think are called yu fu noodles). I’d like to go back there again to try dishes which were featured in the food reviews and looked really interesting, but weren’t on the festive set menu. But anyway, Alec wasn’t complaining. His mouth was too full.

* * *

And now Saturday. Toxic Jungle Saturday.

The party started off quite normal. True, the birthday boy had chosen to interpret the theme (The Beast Within) by wearing a snake in his crotch, but apart from that everything was fairly civilized.

Jacob and his snake
Jacob’s trouser snake

I hadn’t bothered to tell people other than East-dwellers about the party, but was pleasantly surprised when Kelly and Patrick decided it sounded like an interesting change from Zouk and came along. Karen, who I’d never met, turned up too, en route to Thumper with Ken. Then Ida and David. Then Mayee and Shao and Hwee Yee and Evan.

Since I’ve never been much of a “Circulate, darling!” type, this would have been more than enough people to keep me happily and drunkenly and uneventfully chatting the night away. But Jacob had other plans. Soon after twelve he unveiled karaoke hour, as well as the girls he’d hired to be back-up dancers for the karaokers.

I think the plan had been for karaokers to stand on the small stage in the middle of the bar while singing their songs, and for the girls to then do their thang around the singer. Unfortunately, a problem soon emerged – people were singing soppy ballads instead of songs conducive to girls shaking boo-tay in knee-high stiletto boots. I was equally complicit in this bloody waste, having put my name down earlier for Nothing Compares To You. The girls managed some lesbian slow-dance action to this, but it still wasn’t playing to their real strengths, and I felt guilty.

So when Jacob came round again saying they needed more songs to finish up the karaoke hour, I decided to revisit Toxic. I had expected to sing the song comfortably from my seat, while watching the girls shake boo-tay on stage. But the girls had other plans, and I didn’t feel like forcefully resisting two girls wearing little more than knee-high stiletto boots and little strips of cloth covering their naughty bits. Who knows what may have given way in the course of a struggle.


Forgive me, Britney, for I have sinned

I certainly don’t think of myself as an exhibitionist (at least insofar as anyone who keeps a blog can be said to not be an exhibitionist), but I like to be a good sport. Frankly I’d do it again. The girls were great.

The party went on for a couple of hours more after that. I had fun comparing childhood objects of lust with Mayee and Shao. Got beaten at pool by Alec, fuck! Continued on to Jacob’s place after the bar closed for a prata and champagne supper. Then finally staggered home.

I like weekends.

Gil Shaham: Tchaikovsky/Butterfly Lovers Violin Concertos (Esplanade Concert Hall)

My God. I don’t care what sort of music you like, I dare anyone to suggest a better place (in Singapore) to have been earlier tonight than the Esplanade concert hall listening to Gil Shaham’s Stradivarius sing.

I have a tendency to drift off during classical music performances (including my own, back in the day) but tonight I was transfixed. I have never heard such wonderful sound while sitting in such cheap seats. I have never heard the Singapore Symphony Orchestra sound so good. I have never seen anyone play two violin concertos (Butterfly Lovers, and the Tchaikovsky) in the same concert, or any performance as virtuosic as this was. I’ve never even been in the same concert hall as a Stradivarius, which is a fucking cool first all by itself.

I want to write more, but I honestly can’t describe how amazing it always feels to hear notes I have loved for years, mostly on old Naxos recordings, suddenly reborn in the expanse of this beautiful concert hall, in the capable hands of a master performer.

Over the past year, the Esplanade music venues have basically become my favourite places in Singapore, period. Every event I have attended has delivered top quality music for an affordable price, and more importantly if you know me, every event I have attended has been two or three hours where Singapore is beautiful and I love Singapore. Then, of course, I get horned unnecessarily by some twat while driving out of the Esplanade car park, and I hate this place again. But then I go home and my kitten comes running out mewing and overwhelming my ankles with fuzzy friction until I pick it up. And Alec will be here in a month. And everything is okay and will be okay.

Baybeats 2004, Esplanade Riverside, Singapore

The Observatory, complete with great view
The Observatory, complete with great view

The BayBeats festival was a fairly endearing example of the classic Singaporean maxim: If it’s free, they will come. The samfu-clad grandma seemed to have enjoyed The Observatory, but the 50something couple in one of the first few rows left at some point during Force Vomit.

Fleeting thoughts on the bands I saw/heard:

  • Telebury: Quite pleasant. Like the child of The Shins and Coldplay if The Shins were British and Coldplay weren’t shit.
  • The Observatory: This band has an odd tendency to be present at my rare “Actually, Singapore isn’t so bad!” moments, one of which was the first time I saw them, and the second of which was the sun setting on the bay as they sang their very pretty new song Sea Of Doubts. A class act.
  • Surreal: The same And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead song for half an hour.
  • Furniture: The same Mogwai song for half an hour, frequently employing the same chord progressions as in Aereogramme’s The Black Path.
  • Force Vomit: Not really my thing. I like my punk less catchy and more abrasive. Less smiling guys with indie hair and black plastic specs, more bald sweaty guys in huge singlets bawling out rants against corporate oppression. You get my drift. (Please come to Singapore, Fugazi!) But I can still see why this band has such a loyal following here, and why Paul Zach and Chris Ho have championed them so much. They were pretty fun. I’d see them again.
  • Whence He Came: The same bad emo song for half an hour.

[In the not-so-impossible likelihood that a Googling band member comes across these words and feels slighted, these are the (very brief, and admittedly flippant) impressions I formed while listening to half-hour-long sets. I realize your albums may be quite different. If you feel I’ve misrepresented your musical vision, feel free to disagree. For what it’s worth, I actually love Trail Of Dead and Mogwai, although I can’t say I’m much of an emo fan. Also, if I ever give any gigs you will be fully entitled to write “The same complete silence for half an hour” in your review, because I’d chicken out before even going on stage. All power to you, and I hope you had a good time at Baybeats.]

The Tiger Lillies, Esplanade Recital Studio, Singapore, 12 June 2004

In hindsight, I suppose the best way to persuade people to accompany me to the Tiger Lillies gig was probably not to tell them “This band is so incredibly weird that even I find it weird!” I’d been assuming people would jump at the opportunity to see something so bizarre, but instead they generally smiled politely and invented other plans. But not all was lost; after a brief argument with Ida about who would be weirder, this band or the singer from Uzbekistan performing earlier that night (Ida: But she’s from Uzbekistan, how more fringe can it get?), Ida relented and came along.

I might well be wrong about this, but I believe the first song of the gig was about going down on a diseased whore. This was just to ease us in gently. The band went on to regale us with songs fantasizing about crucifying Christ (Bang In The Nails), wanting a hamster up your rectum (Hamster), and sex with flies (Flies, natch). The lead singer does everything, by the way, in an operatic falsetto, because, well, because he can.

Towards the end of one of the songs, the drummer substituted his drumsticks for two huge inflated plastic mallets and started banging away at his drums with them. This got wilder and wilder until, bit by bit, the entire drum set was collapsing onto the floor under the fury of this onslaught. He then proceeded to play on this drum set, collapsed in disarray onto the floor, until the intermission many songs later.

During a song about suicide, the drummer climbed up onto his stool with a bottle of pills and tipped them all into his mouth. He then started spitting them out rhythmically onto his (reassembled) drum set, thus playing his drum part in the song.

From what I’ve said so far it would be fairly easy to dismiss this band as a one trick pony, but there was actually much more to the gig than its novelty/shock value. The jazz standard Autumn Leaves was delivered completely straight, and although it might be difficult to imagine how a man singing it in an operatic falsetto could still bring out all the longing and pathos of the song, this was certainly achieved.

The same could be said of their encore song, Alone With The Moon, which was, very simply, as lovely and evocative a ballad as I have ever heard anywhere else. Despite the debauched hijinks that took place earlier, I think this song will actually be my abiding memory of the gig – Martyn Jaques in his mime-style make-up, bowler hat, and shirt braces, under a cold smoky spotlight, singing a note so high and clean and true I could have lived in it forever.

I’ve seen a lot of gigs, but I can’t think of any other gig I’ve seen that delivered on so many levels – music, comedy, theatre, pure showmanship – and where the performers were so inimitably unique. Whoever in the Esplanade decided to risk bringing the Tiger Lillies to staid old Singapore, I salute you and thank you from the bottom of my deviant heart.

Observatory/Kreidler (Esplanade Studios, 11 October 2003)

Well, whaddya know? After writing the previous post, I resigned myself to a quiet Saturday night in. No big deal. I’d divide my time between good movies on HBO and the ton of work I have for next week. Then Ida called, the first time we’d talked for a year (I was there, she was here, we’re both lousy at keeping in touch). In the midst of catch-up conversation she asked if, by any chance, I’d be interested in going to see some German group at the Esplanade tonight. She read about them in the papers and it sounded interesting. WAHOO!

We were both somewhat discouraged by the opening guy. He was hard to describe. He reminded me of the time I was at a David Grubbs gig and couldn’t figure out whether a particular “song” had begun, ended, or gone horribly wrong, except that compared to this guy David Grubbs’s song was a catchy pop gem. We decided it wasn’t our thang and popped out for a drink.

Observatory was next. I haven’t been around for four years and know nothing about the local music scene, but the quality of their performance suggests it’ll be well worth exploring. Again, they’re hard to describe, and in saying some songs were kind of like Air remixed by Thievery Corporation with immensely pleasant male vocals sort of like Calexico and jazzy flourishes on the keyboard, and others were like REM at their best with the occasional harmonica and journeys into shoegazy guitar, I’m not doing the band justice at all. Truly impressive, and a huge incentive for this prodigal daughter to find out more about what her own people are doing rather than buying expensive US indie imports all the time.

Kreidler continued my long-running streak of never being disappointed by anything German. (I clarify: obviously I wasn’t alive during the World Wars.) Interesting sounds that evolved rather than doof!doof!doof!ing on for ages the way some electronica does, endearing crowd manner, and although I was too comfy sprawling on the floor for most of the gig to dance, it certainly kept me bobbing my head and tapping my toes.

But as good as all the acts were, the star of the gig, for me, was the venue. It’s not going to be very difficult to convince me to attend anything at the Esplanade Studios in future, because I have never heard such amazing sound in a gig in all my born days. Crystal clear, wonderfully-balanced, loud enough to dominate the room and send reverberations through the floor, yet not so loud that conversations had to be screamed. A floor so clean you could sprawl on it without having to coat yourself in spilled booze or cigarette ash. Recent letters to the papers here in Singapore have asked if the building of such an expensive concert venue was really worthwhile, and whether it actually makes the arts accessible to the masses or only caters to a certain wealthy elite. I paid $21 (about 8 pounds) for a great gig, with the best sound I’ve ever heard, in beautiful surroundings, and the price even included a drink. All I can say is that I’m an incredibly satisfied customer (mad props to the Government!), I think it really is a world-class venue we should all be proud of, and I’m going to be throwing my money at it fairly regularly from now on.