The Second International Conference of the Subcultures Network (Reading University, UK)
Organised by Matt Worley and his team of tireless colleagues, it was a blast. I presented a cultural history paper on the Singapore underground music scenes and had the chance to talk about subcultural musics in their political, socio-economic and cultural scope during the two day event. It was great catching Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs there too. Having read and following their work in both The Wire and their various book form publications, meeting them and hearing them in person was both inspiring and encouraging.
My presentation was entitled 'A Tale of Two Histories of Underground Musics in Singapore - National Narrative versus Subterranean Missive'. My abstract for the paper below:
'This paper hopes to surface and assess the critical tensions of historicising
the experimental and underground musics in Singapore from the seemingly
diverging agendas of a state sanctioned national narrative with that of a more
personal/ethnographical account from the aggregated views of a
practitioner/musicking individual (Small, 1998). As an independent chronicler
of the underground and especially the small experimental music scene of
Singapore due to the author’s involvement in musical production, event
organisation and record shop management for various periods of time for the
past two decades, the charting of local music provided one perspective from the
ground. However, when the author was commissioned to contribute a chapter in a
nationally funded publication to trace the various musical developments
historically of the island republic, many interesting issues and questions
emerged. With a national English medium music scene which has gone through state
wide censorship throughout its critical years of growth in the 1970s and 1980s,
there was hardly any mainstream music scene to speak of for documentation.
However, there have been bubblings of sub-cultural musical activities coming up
from the mid-1980s onwards which provided the youths, iconoclasts, outsiders
and refuseniks some creative and countercultural rallying points. What is the
role of underground music in Singapore for the past three decades then? How
should the history of the underground be documented here? Where does the
underground fit into a national narrative where the mainstream culture is
anemic and divergent due to the island’s multiplicities of cultures, races and
languages? The paper aims to open up some of these chasms and discusses the
crucial notions of writing about the musics of the underground, and how much
literary and historical license one is allowed to navigate in a case study of
an anomalous context like Singapore.'
Cultural Typhoon 2019: [Alt] + [CS]=? Toward Alternative Cultural Studies (Keio University, Japan)
The recent conference I went to was held in Japan. In the previous conference, I was looking backward. For this one, I attempted a looking forward. My paper is called
'The Musical Cyberspace as Anti-Globalisation: A Case of Regional Underground Music versus the Globalising Hegemony of the West'.
The abstract below should give you some ideas on my rather convoluted title above:
'The channeling of globalisation through the cyberspace as a cultural phenomenon has provided the continued perpetuation of a glorified historical and future meta-narrative from the vantage point of the West, despite all the hullabaloo about cyberspace’s purported role on the democratization of the world in the 21st century. Having nearly all digital/social media platforms being founded and situated in the developed West, the rest of the world has been relegated to provide raw human input into the data-driven moneyed analytics and contents on Facebook, Twitter or Bandcamp. However various pockets around the globe have been valiantly putting up counterpoints to seize back the autonomy of authorship and nodes of influence, and place them back in the local and regional spheres. This paper seeks to highlight two Southeast Asian case studies to emphasise the fact that the rest of the world beyond the developed North can and should provide alternative narratives and rightful epicentres of cultural renewal and insurgency. Case study 1: Ujikaji Records, a Singapore-based record label cum event organizer cum online record shop has been providing a Pan-Asian centric curatorial perspective in terms of its releases and events organized. Case study 2: Senyawa, an Indonesian duo which synthesise indigenous art forms with prominent elements of extreme metal and improvised music which in recent years went on to shock and capture the ears and hearts of many music fans around the world. The two case studies exemplify the opposing trend of the globalising West dictating the cultural zeitgeist of the moment as they actively take the cultural bull by its horns and create musical ricochets despite basing themselves in one of the secondary geopolitical power bases of today via the cyberspace and underground musics. They thus serve as possible models for the deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation of the notion of globalisation.'
More information on the conference can be found here.
Let us hope the modernist enterprise of the Singaporean and Southeast experimental/underground musics continue unabated ahead. I sure to continue to document and help in the narrativisation of them.
Watch this space? Let us keep our fingers cross...
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