Sutcliffe Jugend in Singapore

Beginning with the signature WASP synthesizer wail, the two greying gentlemen (depending on your viewpoint on their political/cultural alignment via their lyrical content) began slowly swaying their bodies and regularly checking on their intstruments (from what I could see, a sampler, guitar, assorted electronic implements) and additively, layering of more and more sounds and tones. I was thinking in my head that finally, power electronics live on this island republic which is usually NOT associated with more extreme forms of musical expressions. The rest of the set was simply assault on the ears and the body as well as the audience could feel the low ends and high pitch tones wrapping around everyone there. It was so all-embracing that you had to give them their full attention and nothing less.

I spoke to the organisers behind the gig and they gleefully informed me that they might be bringing more Industrial/Noise/experimental acts like Sutcliffe Jugend to Singapore, like perhaps, Colin Potter or even Nurse With Wound? Well let's keep our fingers crossed and that  it all comes through. It is high time that this island republic is witnessing some righteous noise!

Vomir New Release!

One of the key acts of the Wall Noise/HNW sub-genre, Vomir, has just released a CD, entitled, Apllication à Aphistemi. Unlike his last release on Crucial Blast's subsidiary label, Crucial Blaze, it is a proper CD release. Apparently the second track of the album sees a stylistic departure of Vomir's usual "wall-of-noise"/HNW sonic assault on the listeners. Good news, as it will be interesting to hear how it sounds like. HNW reminds me of extreme end of minimalism of Tony Conrad and Arnold Dreyblatt and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Immersive and engulfing the listeners, HNW, though most likely a creative dead end soon, but it is an interesting sub-genre which has its unique appeal to drone fans too. I hear traces of my favourite drone artiste, Andrew Chalk, in Vomir most sublime moments (I could be wrong as I could be so deep into it that I was drawing invisible music similarity which might not be there, but nonetheless). Check it out...

Revolution, Free Jazz & FMP

I have been listening to some releases by Peter Brotzmann and the record label that he has been most associated with - FMP, or Free Music Production. Be it free jazz, fire music or ecstatic music, the descriptors are not able to convey the history, the energy and the context behind the entire canon of albums, artistes and record labels which first started in the late 1950s with the release of iconoclastic albums by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and later on Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. The close link between these artistes and albums with the Black civil rights movement has been documented many times across dozens of publications throughout the years. BUT the parallel movement which sprang in the 1960s in Europe, inspired by these great Black artists across the Atlantic, has been a lesser known proponent, even though the Europeans were pushing the envelope of the genre as well as putting into practice the radical politics in the way they operate and run their activities, gigs and record labels. They were DIY, staunchly ideologically-driven and passionate about their music and the socio-political context/rationale behind the sounds they were creating.

The pockets of such Hakim Bey coined TAZ or even PAZ (hopefully, permanent autonomous zones) , I hope, are role models and should be beacons for us to follow today: the CDs in the retrospective set of FMP (FMP In Retrospect) are powerhouses of musical free playing and collective music making, demonstrating to us that even before the rise of punk which supposedly flushed out the bloated corporate major label run music industry, alternative ways of doing stuff by the musicians and artistes themselves were already well in place (besides FMP, Incus and the various labels formed by the Dutch jazz scene are just some of the many examples which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s; today we have Eremite, Ayler, Okkadisk and many more).

In the increasingly bland and hegemonic cultural and social giant corporate-run world of today, such independent and collective endeavours should serve as signposts for the current and future generations of thinking youths to emulate and to carry the torch forward in their own ways.