Peter Hoflich

I had two long distance flights recently and I caught up on my recent releases; nearly none of them were any good…

tt

Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse – Yes, I saw that I had the opportunity to get all of the Twilight movies that have been released so far out of the way in one sitting, so I took it! I had read the first book and couldn’t stomach any more (Bella is… annoying), but I thought that if the movies were as boring as the books I’d at least get some sleep. As it turns out, the film is well-cast and there is some chemistry between the kids, which is good, so the films are not as icky as the good. Kristen Stewart is quite appealing, despite her slack-jawedness (blame the director, not the actor), and the James Deanedness of Robert Pattinson is sort of okay. What bugged me the most is the Cullens, these perfect posers who are like the X-Men in the comic books (who had superpowers, but always seemed to feel the need to pose) but a sort of live action version of them. Naturally, none of the characters were interesting. There is one single shot that is any good – that is the tourist group being led into the Volturi vault to feed their hunger, all while a ceremony to celebrate the victory of human over vampire. Not bad. But it still all boils down to three things: posers, posers, posers!

But of course, the involvement of the Volturi, an uber-powerful clan of ancient vampires, is all about the stupidity of Edward Cullen, and his miserable love for Bella Swan. It’s really weird. This is just delayed in the third movie, which is about fighting junior vampires in Oregon. Whooo…

KA

Kick-Ass – A silly and ultra-violent film that is totally pointless and insane. And kinda-sorta good fun to watch. Best thing about it is seeing McLovin again, except this time as a stuffed-nose anarchist. Nicholas Cage was pretty good, even if he was acting like a robot. The appearance of bottled rage, perhaps? The mafia boss was not really that dangerous-looking, at least not until he shot that kid in cold blood in the middle of the street. Yuck.

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Wolverine – I heard that this movie was terrible, but I couldn’t believe it. “Hey, it’s Hugh Jackman, it’s Wolverine, how bad could it be?” Well, it was pretty bad. The best thing about it was the opening sequence and the credits, and it just went downhill from there. What was anybody’s motive for doing anything at all? It just didn’t make any sense. What’s all this nonsense about having a battle on the narrow concrete ledge on the top of a nuclear power plant cooling tower? Why does Scott Summers need to show up? Horrible on all counts. They are already talking about a “reboot” of the “series” only a few years in. Awful.

NANIP

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist – I wanted to see this because it was about music, but I wish I hadn’t. Nick and Norah are the uber-cool high society wise-cracking casual detectives who are the lead characters of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Thin Man”, but the title characters of this film have only a sliver of their coolness. Nick is a loser who obsesses about the girl who broke up with him, Norah is part of that girl’s social group at school. Nick and Norah are into music, and Nick meets Norah after his band plays a gig and Norah is in the audience. They are nice to each other, they are not nie to each other, then they realise that they are in love, ho hum. There is a drunk friend to look after, and there is a quest to find an indie band “Where’s Fluffy” that likes to tease its fans with “secret gigs”. Woo hoo. Pale and immature.

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Inception – About 15 years ago, maybe more, I wrote a short story called “Language Surfing.” It was about a gang of semi-criminals and cyber-punks who engage in language surfing. I’m not even really sure what language surfing is, but it’s a bit like entering the Matrix and seeing what’s going to happen. I wrote it to be a preposterous as possible and I wrapped it up neat and nice, even if not everything made sense.

The film Inception uses the same logic, and I think that the director is taking the piss out of all of us with a preposterous tale of entering people’s dreams and influencing their thinking. I thought that this was one of the stupidest films I’ve ever seen, and the plot was so totally preposterous I simply could not suspend my disbelief any longer. Architects who create dream worlds! Dreamers who go under for 50 years! Car chases inside a man’s brain! Executives that can buy off justice! Ambushes in Tangiers! Cities that fold like slices of pizza! Wowee!!

The way it was all neatly wrapped up in a happy ending in the last two minutes, with the ironic twist of the spinning top thingy, was also hard to take. What did we just sit through for two hours? People take this film really seriously and think about what it means. I guess they’re a lot deeper than me…

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Boy – Probably the best movie/only good movie I saw on my flights. Boy lives in New Zealand with his grandmother and his demented brother Rocky. When his good-for-nothing dad drifts back into his life, Boy’s happy-go-lucky life becomes a bit more complicated, and you see him become a troubled adolescent; this troubles the viewer, to see the loss of innocence. The acting is fantastic, and the story is full of wonderful scenes of life in a rural New Zealand community, about young love, about broken families, about schooling and fantasy and Michael Jackson. If I’d taken notes I would have described more of the wonderful scenes in the film, but I’ll just have to go with the little that I can remember about what a great film this was.

GHTHG

Get Him To The Greek – This should have been a funny film, instead it was a f ilm about people you don’t really care about. If it had been an over-the-top rock ‘n’ roll fantasy it would have been fine, but instead we get all sorts of mush, like Aldous Snow’s reconciliation with his dad, with his ex-wife, and Aaron Green getting the courage to stand up to his boss and to break up with his emotionally manipulative and boring girlfriend. Wooo… aaaaahhh… Some funny bits, like the pretentious “African Child” stuff, and Sean Combs was surprisingly good as a corrupt record executive (then again, maybe he was just playing himself). But I wouldn’t recommend this film to anyone, really (the MMF threesome scene, for example, is particularly unpleasant). Oh, wait, maybe I would – the cameo with Lars Ulrich is pretty funny, especially because the filmmakers are particularly unflattering, making Lars look like the dork that he is.

I went to Bejing for 25 hours.  I took an afternoon flight from Singapore and got there at 11:00 at night on Thursday.  I flew out Friday at midnight, arriving at 7:00 AM in Singapore on two hours sleep, with the opportunity to spend the whole day trying to keep awake (took a three-hour nap, did a bunch of work, went swimming with Zen, watched some Space:1999 episodes – it was a full day). Got nine hours of uninterrupted sleep, so I can finally say that Sunday I’m quite back to normal (whatever normal is).

Beijing was not too bad – I did my work stuff in the morning and part of the afternoon, then from 5:30 onwards some colleagues and I set out for some food and drink.  First stop was near Sanlitun (三里屯), an entertainment district where locals hang out (compared to Houhai [後海], where the tourists hang out). The taxi ride there was excruciating – we were stuck in traffic for most of the 45 minutes, and on the radio the taxi driver had some freaky talk show guy who sounded like he was insane, shouting, barking, and making weird sounds.  I speak Chinese, but I had no idea what he was talking about. About 20 minutes into the ride he finished his freakout and we all breathed a sigh of relief. When we finally got there. We went to a german microbrewery for Drei Kronen 1308, where we had big mugs of beer and tons of sausages.  We left just as the Philippine musicians in the oompah band were setting up, I wonder how that would have been.  I saw a Chinese waiter there come out wearing full Bavarian regalia (Lederhosen, etc), and I said to him in my best Bayrisch “jo Franzl, wie geht es dia denn suou?” I think he was even more than my colleagues were.

Here are some pics of the pub:

Beijing beer

Beijing Wurstchen

After that we jumped in a cab and went to a place called Jianghu Bar (江湖酒吧) on one of the hutong alleys around the city. The place was an old Qing dynasty house that had been converted into a pub. Great stuff. Here are a few pictures of the evening:

Jianghu pub Bar - 江湖酒吧

Jianghu pub Bar - 江湖酒吧

Jianghu pub Bar - 江湖酒吧

Here is a bit of video that I took of the soundcheck. Too bad I had to leave just as the night was starting, but two of my friends stayed behind, I’ll have to ask them how it was. Click here for a sample of what a concert at Jianghu Jiuba is like.

On the flight I got a chance to see a bunch of movies. On the way over I watched “Inception” (why does Christopher Nolan need to re-make Memento?) and “Boy” (great coming-of-age flick from New Zealand. On the way back I watched The Simpsons, as well as three samples of TV shows I’d never seen before: “Glee” (the Madonna episode), “Entourage” (cameo by Nick Cassavetes) and “The Big Bang Theory”. Not impressed.

Here’s a pic from my arrival in Singapore:

Singapore sunrise

Today was Zen’s birthday, he’s so happy to finally be able to celebrate his big day. His true birthday is today, but because we had a softball tournament today we held his party on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday we spend the morning tidying and preparing for the party, we also went for a lovely swim and made some new friends. At 1:00 the first guest came, and before 2:00 the second guests came, a family with two boys (one of whom is Zen’s classmate, and his younger brother) and their mum, who’s also Japanese. Then some more kids and parents came, and by 4:30 we had nine kids and seven adults, including Naoko and Zen and I. The kids played outside for a while, kicking a ball around, then came back upstairs to play here some more. At around 5:30 we did our charades game, which was good fun. Each kid got one snack and one Playmobil figure, and we had five prizes left over so the mums ‘n’ dads took part. It was fun. Zen was a very good host, looking after the kids well, making sure that everybody was having a good time, and he went to the door to say goodbye. He was also a good MC for charades. We chilled out and wound down the evening, and everyone went to sleep eventually, while I stayed up late doing stuff on the computer.

This morning I was the first to wake up, at 7:17 AM. I woke up Zen, and he realised that his big day was finally here, we gave him his presents – there were two Tintin books from Naoko and I, and a fun Playmobil submarine from Oma and Opa. Naoko and Zen took a taxi to the softball place from around 9:15, while I stayed behind doing work. I joined them at noon when the first game was about to start.

Zen’s team, the Coconuts, have had a very long losing streak, but this time they were doing well. In the first inning the other team got two points, and Zen’s team didn’t get any. But in the second inning, the other team got no points, while Zen’s team got seven points!! Zen himself was at bat, he walked to first, and then made it around the bases to score a point. After that, the other team got two more points, but it was not enough to diminish the Coconuts’ lead, so they won 7:4. Everybody was so excited, it was the first time that the team had won in tournament play, and it was a wonderful birthday present for Zen.

The second game started well – the first batter got a home run! Unfortunately, the team didn’t get any more runs after that, and the other team managed to squeeze in two runs over the course of the game, so they won. But the Coconuts had good pitching and good fielding, so no complaints at all.

After that we went home and had a lovely swim in the pool with the new Playmobil toys – Zen now has three boats/submersibles from Playmobil. There were three kids at the pool, all around Zen’s age, so he had fun playing with them, playing withe me, or playing with his toys. After that, we went home, gave Japan a call, and then had a lovely dinner – pizza and beer, my favourite! Tonight we’re still going to call Oma and Opa.

What a fun weekend!

The Lake of Sharks

Tintin and Alph-Art

Playmobil submarine, a present from Oma and Opa

Tonight I went to a mini-concert and Q&A session with a local musician in a local bookstore. This was a first for me, but not the first time to meet the artist in question – Leslie Low, who started his career with Singapore indie band Humpback Oak, and is now in the internationally-acclaimed art rock band The Observatory.

I had met Leslie last September when he played a great show with The Observatory, so when I walked in I went up and said my hello, then sat down for the show. Leslie played about 45 minutes of solo acoustic songs, mostly from his Humpback Oak era, and then he answered questions like “is there a God”, and “what is a day like for Leslie Low”. I asked him about his ex-Singapore performances, and his guitar tunings. He admitted to a penchant for Neil Young and Nick Drake.

On being Leslie Low

On being Leslie Low, still

It was a fun night, I ended up buying a CD-R of Humpback Oak songs re-recorded specially for that evening (I later found out that it’s an exclusive), and I also bought his Oasksongs box set of four CDs, which cover the three official Humpback Oak CDs (1994, 1997, 1998), as well as rarities from 1991 to 1996. I have number 185 of 500. It was the lowest-numbered there; I would have bought a different number  had I come across one that resonated with me, but I didn’t, so this is the one that I bought – maybe it was unpopular because it was more beat-up than others, but hey… this box set was clearly born to look beat-up! I wish I had heard about this earlier – my friend Flo has number 70… and her friend has number 69.  I think number 69 would be cooler than 185.  But, then again, no mere number is as cool as the box itself. Here’s what they look like:

The Humpback Oak "Oaksongs" box

Inside the Humpback Oak "Oaksongs" box

The four CDs inside the Humpback Oak "Oaksongs" box and their packaging.

More stuff that is inside the Humpback Oak "Oaksongs" box.

Leslie Low is a cool dude.  I’ve seen him live twice, and after each gig I’ve gone up and chatted with him for a while. We always seem to end up talking about all the obscure (or not) bands that inspire us, like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Electric Wizard, the mighty Black Sabbath, and especially Talk Talk and Mark Ellis.  He also happens to know Tim Olive, an eccentric Canadian musician who lives in Osaka who has also drifted into his musical scene on some visit to Singapore over the years.  Always great to meet a local legend.  And besides all this, there’s the fact that playing a gig in a bookstore is really very, very cool, especially when that bookstore stocks Charles Bukowski, Jorge Luis Borges and Hubert Selby Jr.

For the evening, Leslie had recorded and burned an exclusive special edition CD of songs by Humpback Oak somewhat re-interpreted, called “Triangular”.  Here are a few pics of the edition:

Leslie Low "Triangular"

Leslie Low "Triangular"

CD reviews:

Humpback Oak, “Oakbox”: I’m a fan of career retrospective sets, and the set is one of the best I’ve seen for a band with such a limited output (of course, nothing beats the Neil Young Archive series, or the Sandy Denny Box, but those are both in a different league, and from major record labels to boot). It is a black box, made to look like it’s worn and torn, and when you open it up you see a room, with its ceiling fan, its four walls (with posters of Neil Young, CSNY, and the Hypgnosis Dark Side of the Moon poster that came with the early releases of the LP, which shows the pyramids at Giza), and of course its bed – with Sony walkman, which was used to record many of the band’s early demos, in plain sight – where it seems that most of the Humpback Oak songs got written; surprising, however, considering that it is a musical retrospective, is the lack of visible CDs, booklets, liner notes or other stuff.

That secret is soon revealed, however, for a bit of digging around shows that these valuable contents are buried underneath the false “floor” of the “room”, and soon we find four CDs wrapped in paper; then we also open up the matchbox-sized “bed” to find four mini books of lyrics, a guitar pick, and a bundle of personal notes about the band. Amazing. And, after popping the CDs into my computer, I took a look on the internet to figure out how to re-fold the paper folders for the CDs that came with the set (TheObservatory has put up an instruction video on YouTube just in case you get lost).

The contents of the “bed”, with its Ikea shower curtain-patterned bedsheets, are four booklets (one for each CD), a wad of paper tied up with a hemp rope, a 0.46mm pick that says “oak songs”, and four photos. One of them is a black and white pic of the band walking along railroad tracks, it is a bit blurry; there are three colour pics, one a mid-distance shot of the band lining a sidewalk, another of the band squatting in the garden, and a final one of their heads arranged in a cluster somehow, with a schooner mast in the background. There’s also a letter to “Dear      ”, which reveals that the idea for a box set came from years of email requests from fans, who wanted copies of the albums, which had gone out of print. Errr… maybe I should just reprint it all here:

The idea for a boxset came about after years of email requests from fans who wanted copies of our album releases, then already out of print. In time, I was rummaging through my store-room and uncovered so many things – old cassette recordings, demos, lots of photos, radio interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, even mouldy S-VHS tapes I doubt would still play today. Three years ago and with much hesitation, I began this tedious and emotional process of excavating old shit and archiving them. Bought a cheap scanner and dumped all the photos onto the computer. I digitized old recordings that I found interesting and thought fans would too. After many months I handed a bunch of rare tracks for mastering to Justin Seah, whose valuable input eventually became Rarities, the enhanced CD in Oaksongs. He also remastered “Ghostfather”, sonically the least consistent of the lot.

Somewhere along the line, I felt it was necessary to include our early indie cassette releases, all three of them. And, boy, was it difficult to track them down. Thanks, luckily, to Chang Kang for his copy of Moths & Bagpipes. Vincent managed to unearth two old CR-Rs containing our first two cassette albums, already digitized and given to us by Joe Ng many years ago, I vaguely remember. Thanks also to Patrick Chng & Ben Harrison for pointing me in the right direction and providing necessary info on things long forgotten. The cassettte albums & some live recordings have been included in the enhanced section of Rarities.

The next step was the design. The concept was thought up by Pann (Concave Scream) from Kinetic. He wanted to show all the little details – the handwritten lyric sheets, press pix, gig photos, and do it in such a way that would involve the listener in this uncovering process.  We agreed it’d be fun to put the listener right there in our bedrooms where many songs were written, rehearsed and recorded, along with the mischief that teenagers get up to. That’s how we remember those days. And this bedroom in your hands is a visual representation of Humpback Oak’s consciousness and probably yours too.

Thanks to Sean (Concave Scream) who originally designed the first Oak website, Felons United. That was a mammoth undertaking. Pity the band broke up shortly thereafter. And we never made that double album with Conacave. Anyway, he is back to help up on our memorial site. For the occasional lazy afternoon reminiscing, or if you suffer from insomnia, stop by www.humpbackoak.net.

Thank you to all whom we’ve met during this hazy period of our lives. Thanks for the memories, good and bad.

Leslie

On behalf of Humpback Oak

PS Special thanks to a few good people who have sonically and visually documented our ‘musical’ journey. Some of you were hard to locate, othes we have trouble recalling, but we’d like to thank all of you

Frank Lee
Shah Tahir
Randolf Arriola
Avril Peh
Li Fen Fen
Adrian Tan
Aung Mying Kyaw
Ho Keen Fi

Bound in hemp string is a clutch of 12 small 8.5cm x 12cm sheets of paper, double-sided and made to look like vari-coloured notebook sheets or foolscap, with varied head stock, like “St. Joseph’s Institution” and Familie Schunke’s “Waldhaus Reinbek” in Reinbek (near Hamburg, Germany). The parts are broken down to “The Context”, “The Music”, “The Band”, “The Approach”, “The Friends”, “Notes on Rarities 1991-1996″, “Timeline”, a random sheet of lyrics, and various band memoirs and testimonials. The set seems to include the writing of six authors, and the notes reproduce what appears to be the authors’ original handwriting (in miniature, of course). Band members Leslie Low, Stanley Teo and Daniel Wee (a.k.a. Asid) provide words, as does Lim Cheng Tju, X’Ho, and one unidentified writer of an unsigned report (perhaps band member Vincent Chin?).

Lim Cheng Tju’s “The Context” starts off the pack, writing about perestroika, glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, etc (yeah yeah, I was there too). In Singapore, there was fear of the communist insurgency led by Catholics and social workers, and I suppose this meant something to the Humpback Oak boys, who were (are?) all Catholic and went to Catholic schools, and there’s also a word about the brief resurgence of opposition politicians during the Lee Kuan Yew handover to Goh Chock Tong. Some pretentious mention of Francis “End of History” Fukuyama and Samuel “Clash of Civilisations” Huntington. The Asian Financial Crisis, Singapore’s booming economy, cheap holidays in Bangkok after the collapse of the Baht, all are described, as well as the burst of the dotcom bubble. Lim continues with “The Music”, talking about the rise of indie music in Singapore, with bands like the Oddfellows emerging, and he references secret gigs at Marine Parade and the Botanic Garden, and talks about the vulnerability of Humpback Oak and the friendship of the kids who were born in 1972. He closes with the words “For those of you who are listening to these songs for the first time, I envy you. I hope they will mean as much to you as they did for me.”

In “The Band”, Daniel Wee talks about a weekend party when a bunch of kids who were inspired by Echo and the Bunneymen, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Jesus and Mary Chain got together; and the events preceded by chatting with “bus buddy” Vincent Chan; and the party organised by David Yeoh, “the man who couldn’t sing, but never gave a fuck” and singing anyway, about stupid things like dolphins; and to hear Daniel tell the tale, you’d think that this was the starting point of the band. And maybe it was.

Leslie then puts in an untitled piece about the songwriting and practicing process, describing how they got to recording acoustic tracks in his bedroom (or Vincent’s living room), using a tambourine and drumsticks in the absence of a drumkit if they had to, and how they got to recording electric tracks. A bit of history here, – they sold the cassettes that they produced out of the now-defunct Skoob Books at Bras Basah Complex and Dada Records in Funan Centre. The first album exposed them to professional recording practices, at a time when the young men were particularly challenged by their schedules – either in school, in the armed forces, or studying abroad. Produced by Reggie Verghese, former lead guitarist of the Quests, a veteran local band from the ’60s, at his studio in Serangoon Gardens, the rhythm section was deemed too “loose-limbed, pitchy and raw”, and sessions musicians were used in their place (?!?!). Leslie admits that “our debut album made us sound better than we actually were.” Huh! Daniel, studying in Australia for three years, missed most of these sessions, as did Stanley, who was doing army duty. Leslie notes that it was this time that they started to play with alternate tunings, such as on “No Finer Time To Be Alive” (EADGBB), and “Deep Door Down” (GGDDBB). With Daniel away, the band was a three-piece with Leslie (second guitarist) on drums, Stanley (the drummer) on bass and guitarist Vince doing his regular duty on guitar, and it is in this formation that some tracks on the Rarities disc such as “Medium” and “Eject” were recorded with. Some of the Rarities songs were recorded by third-year students during Leslie’s days at Ngee Ann Polytechnic when he was a first- or second-year student. But then again, later on he also recorded the band’s second album “Ghostfather” there as a school project (the experience is bittersweet – Leslie cites Ghostfather as a fine example of “bad drum sound”). Leslie cites some of the technology that they used back then, and studio recording processes; he also explains that the first side of the band’s third album “Side A Side B” was rush-recorded by himself solo when he was presented with a block of un-booked studio time while the other guys were unavailable. “This would fuel the tension and unhappiness that was already brewing since Pain-Stained Morning” he says for the record, which he admits was “a fault on my part.” Sad. He calls Side A of “Side A Side B” “‘studio’ songs enhanced during the mixing process with outboard effects.” The band had a hand in crafting Side B of “Side A Side B”, and he calls it “a very happy collaborative experience that was missing since our ealy cassette days.” “In my mind, Side B is the real Humpback Oak. Unfortunately, it took so long to surface.” Right.

A three-page untitled piece by Stanley on the Waldhaus Reinbek stationery talks about the moods and feelings of making music, with some thought about emotions, and performing, and being asked to be happier and look cheerful in televised performances, forced emotions. Okay. “If Robert Allen Zimmerman killed pop music by giving it brains, Humpback Oak could have buried it by tempting it to think.” Okay.

An unsigned piece on “The Approach” (by Vincent?) starts off with “I was approached by Leslie to write about my perspective on the band, anything on the band at all, no holds barred.” Okay, so what he mentions is that there was “boredom, verbal fights, deceit, distrusts, threats and jealousy.” Wow! “Obviously, I still don’t know what to write about.” Okay, now there’s no doubt that it’s written by Vincent, who describes Humpback Oak as “a certain intriguing activity that Les, Acid, Stan and myself participated together for almost 12 years.” Victor goes the furthest back, admitting that he and Leslie were friends at the age of 14, already sharing the same taste in music (“Duran Duran, Howard Jones, Depeche Mode, Alphaville and other ‘romantics’”), while also attempting “DJ-ing” (?!?!?). But he notes that Acid, however, was already into The The, That Petrol Emotion, U2 and REM. Cool. Vincent does a great job of painting a picture, and in some ways he’s the most gifted writer of the bunch. After a great deal of noodling and quasi-psychedelic setup, he gives us the goods nearly at the end: “The early days were totally laid back. We would gather and sit at Leslie’s house to listen to music, trade guitar tips and to to play a few Dylan, Beatles, and U2 songs.”

The final piece is by X’Ho, a.k.a. Chris Ho, a radio host and author and generally tattooed and pierced Singapore hipster dude. Tough guy though he may be, he gets emotional writing about Humpback Oak, starting with a memory of Leslie’s press event for the release of his second solo release “Worm” in 2006; he’s the man, admitting that he’d never seen Humpback Oak live, preferring the recordings, for whatever excuse, especially songs like “Daddy In A Lift” and “No Finer Time To Be Alive”.

As a bookend to the set, there are notes on the Rarities disc, and a timeline, both by Leslie. The Rarities notes go song-by-song, and of note is the point about “Normanton Park”, which is a song that should have been on the band’s Ghostfather release but had “timing issues” (he re-recorded it as “Portsdown Road” for the Triangular release in 2010). Leslie wrote about the place he lived (where a lot of the Humpback Oak songs were recorded, I suppose) at a time when they had to downgrade their living accommodations. For “No Finer Time To Be Alive” he notes the taxi honks and kids playing downstairs. The “Ghostfather” demo is the band’s first experiment with a faster tempo, Leslie notes that the pager going off during the vocal take is his (I’ve listened to it a few times, and I can’t hear it). Leslie notes that “Cucumber” was written in 1989/1990 and he recorded it in school: “Not really a Humpback song but it was from that period and could have been one.” Most of the notes on this page are archival, mentioning recording in the sense of when and where and who played what.

The timeline note is important, it says:

1988 – The idea of Humpback Oak was formed between Daniel, Vincent & Leslie
1989 – First year in college. Daniel and Leslie were in the same college while Vincent was in the polytechnic. Started jamming and performing at school gigs playing cover versions of popular songs. There was Simon Cheong on guitar and Charles Cheo on lead vocals during the early days. Leslie and Simon would also join up with Don Bosco to form Twang Bar Kings the same year.
1990 – Second year in college. More jamming. Stanley joins the band. Carles & Simon leaves.
1991 – Mojo Sessions was released in June. The Songs Will Always Be There… was released in October.
1992 – In February, Chris Ho features the band in his Straits Times’ Pop Life column after hearing the band’s first two demos. Moths & Bagpipes was released in June. Jimmy Wee of Pony Canyon signs the band with the help of Chris Ho.
1993 – Recordings for first album began and continued sporadically throughout the year. Finer Life and Fear included on Pony Canyon compilation Red, Hot and Skin.
1994 – Pain-Stained Morning was released in June.
1995 – Received the Perfect Ten awards for Favourite Local Act and Critics’ Choice in February.
1996 – Ghostfather recordings began in September.
1997 – Ghostfather recordings continued in January. Ghostfather was completed in March. In August, Side A was recorded. Ghostfather released in October.
1998 – Mixed Side A around August. Recorded Side B in September
1999 – Side A Side B was released in April.
2000 – Limbo.
2001 – End of the year, Humpback Oak breaks up.
2007 – Humpback Oak reunites to play the Rock for Wayne concert in memory of Wayne Thunder of The Suns.

The final page of the booklet shows a two-sided page of lyrics; the front page of mine shows “Like a Dove” by The Disciples (with what looks like a picture of the imagined album cover), and “Wishes of the Imagination” on the reverse side. Booklet credits at the bottom of the page.

The first CD is the 14 songs that make up “Pain Stained Morning”, the first Humpback Oak release of 1994. The first song “Void” comes up, and it sounds very much like strummin’ REM, and Leslie’s voice sounds a lot like Michael Stipe’s here. “Void” is a bit dull-ish; better by far is “Deep Door Down”, which jangles and grooves, and “Lucifer”, which has some sophisticated songwriting, spooky symbolism, great melodies, and a gutsy solo. “Finer Life” is a bit sweet, but has great production. “Cretin 1″ (and, later on, “Cretin 2″) is a 30-second fragments of songs, sung in a very broad American voice, that isn’t really that interesting. “Swan Song” is a fine guitar pop song, “Fear” has a strong Cat Stevens feel to it, while “Circling Square” is sweetly acoustic. “Web” is crunchy and distorted, with great guitar interplay, and funky droning lyrics. “Lower Girl” is a choppy rocker that owes a bit to Tom Petty, maybe, and it’s smooth and funky, with swift basslines. The fleeting “Father Floyd” does that groovy folk gathering/Bob Dylan thing, while “Crow” is a beautiful, moody tune that swings and sways with funky Cure-like plucking grooves, and goes out with a whisp of the James Bond theme. Righteous! Final track “Bull” is a great old scorcher of a rock song that starts off with funky guitar sounds, and then great verses, before it smashes out into a very big chorus and some cool guitar soloing and other inventiveness; that goes out with some stoned mutterings, like what you’d find on Led Zeppelin III, and there’s a long acoustic refrain (or is it a unique song?). Either way, it’s a great track, and a great closer. The first album is generally bright, cheerful, but also a bit basic in its production values.

Disc two, the band’s second release “Ghostfather”, from 1997, starts off with wanky backwards stuff a la the Stone Roses, called “Dream Country One” (there’s also a “Dream Country Two” later on; this first “song” is only half a minute long or so, but the second one goes on for an unbearable 3:30; the band didn’t stop their experimentation,”Ghost” is another backwards piece, but at least it’s only 1:13; note: the full forward “Dream Country” is to be found on this box’s Rarities disc, although I’m not sure what became of the original “Ghost”). The first real song is “Scared Scarred”, a full and mature song with great Leslie Low lyrics, some acoustic guitar, and spare drumming. Wow! “Christ In Black” is smooth, acoustic with prominent Leslie Low vocals, that goes through a verse before the slight drumming comes in, and it builds up in to a rock song. “Balm” is more of a rocker, while “Home” is a nice, steady groovy little number about the Singaporean dream – sombre, smooth, jazzy, with a bit of dissonance and some moaning – “No country can hold me.” The solo is intertwining and effortless. Beautiful. “If I Go Wrong” is a Beatles-like rocker of sorts, or something else – it has lots of “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-baaaa”s in it. “I Am A Jug” has funky organ, with the usual acoustic pluckings and some great, lazy singing. “If I Am Weak” is even sparser, starting out with just ukelele-like guitar and vocal, but like all the others it eventually gets going into a more Talk Talk-like production, with snazzy drums, swirling organ and all sorts of other adornments, including ambient noise. Wow! “Curse” starts off with crunch acoustics and some sense of dread, the verses begin quickly, and then we are swiftly treated to a flute solo! “Stressed Out” has a country feel to it that sort of meanders, while “Bridge” has a sort of acoustic-goth feel to it. “Ghostfather” starts off as a sort of country/Neil Young tune; it’s one of Leslie Low’s most personal songs and addresses the death of his father. “I live with my mother/ I live with my ghost… father.” Wow; again… wow. The passages are pure Neil Young, in Leslie’s unique voice, and very powerful. “Drop of Soul” is groovy folk with a spark, while “Oh The Load Heavy Don’t Float” is very lo-fi country strumming and singing. Oh, and it also spurts into big old country rock explosions. Jeff Buckley? Fantastic stuff. Final track “Pain” is the longest on the album, it’s a regular and sweet acoustic track that plinks and plonks a meandering path across the end of the album, it’s strong and confident and represents the musicians we now know.

The third disc, which represents the “Side A Side B” release of 1998, seems to be very playful, experimenting with several techniques, and in some ways anticipating the sounds of The Observatory, Leslie’s next band. The first half was more or less the solo sounds of Leslie, as he recorded it when a batch of studio time became available but the rest of Humpback Oak were not, meaning that only the second half of the disc was a full band project. The CD starts off with “Kingdom” (Leslie seems to like mono-word titles, many of them are a single word – void, lucifer, fear, web, crow, cretin, bull, balm, home, curse, bridge, ghost, pain, eject) is a very Jeff Buckley song, with its elastic howling and strange beat changes, heavy use of the acoustic guitar, and lots of zany drumming that hits into fits and starts. Yeah! “Judas and I” has American accents on the vocals, but the vocal manipulation is sweet and spooky, as is the echoey vocalizing on a beautiful song full of powerful lyrics. “The Mist” is strumming folk with weird vocal noise effects and scary female vocals. “Game For Blues” is simple, sweet and gloomy with weird electronic swirls, while “One Hell of a Country” chugs along with a rapping lilt and sarcastic lyrics over acid acoustic guitar strumming. “The Last Homegrown Lost Boy” is another sweet wailer, with Leslie using his voice well to surge and swell, the song is augmented with echoes and noise, strings and other strange effects, with backwards lyrics rounding it off. “Interlude: Lost Boy or Girl” starts off like a real song, upbeat and swingy, but then dissolves into a weird tape slowdown trick; too bad, it sounded like it was shaping into a nice song, but quickly becomes a one-star studio experiment. They quickly do it right with the next song, “Lost Boy or Girl”, which shortens the musical introduction to the song to 15 seconds, rather than 50 seconds like the chopped-up “interlude” version.  The song is jazzy and jumpy, and ends with a slew of la-la-la-las. Nice. “The Recycler” is rather electrical, opening up with a semi-rock feel and big electric guitar chords as well as some quiet-loud dynamics, it is the most “standard Humpback Oak” track on Side A Side B. “Technohuman” is the first real rocker of the release (and when did Humpback Oak begin doing rock?), starting off with moody guitar sounds, washed-out guitar chords that chug along punk-like, then zooms into big rock sound with a full-on drum beat, chopped up from time to time with quiet Leslie Low vocal bridges. “Modelcitizen” is even punkier – it starts off with sweet keyboard swells, then gets into regular moods singing and electric swing, before zooming up into near-punk territory, with a jazzy bridge. This song has everything, folks! It goes out with a lot of noise and other freakouts. “I would like to be sexual” and “Sure, I like to be sexual.” “Any Last Words” starts off nice and quiet and sweet, it’s a long, slow soul healer. “One Big Happy Family” is a grungy rocker with big, fat sounds (very big, very fat), but also the requisite “quiet verse” for Leslie’s voice. I guess Leslie doesn’t like to compete with electric guitars. The last 2:45 of the 7:00 song is a weird zone-out, with strange guitar shifts, backwards singing and swirly distrortion, and a sweet little acoustic demo stapled on to the end.

The last CD is a disc of rarities, with 11 songs, eight of which are unique to the disc, with the only repeats being a demo for “Ghostfather” from 1996, “No Finer Time To Be Alive 1991″, being an early version of 1994′s “Finer Life”, and something called “Dream Country 1996″, which the original source material for “Dream Country 1″ and Dream Country 2″, backwards songs which appears on the “Ghostfather” release of 1997. The band put out albums in 1994, 1997 an 1998, and of the songs here, three are from 1991, one is from 1993, and seven of them are from 1996.

“Normanton Park 1996″, which starts off the set, is a very nice, simple electric folk tune that sort of has a lot of emphasis on Leslie’s great voice, not sure why it was left off of the band’s later releases. Too simple, perhaps. The next three songs are from 1991 and all sound like they were recorded at the same live session, with Leslie’s acoustic guitar and voice accompanied by another acoustic guitar and some male backup voices. “No Finer Time To Be Alive 1991 (early version of Finer Life)” is from the band’s 1994 debut, this time done with Leslie’s voice and an acoustic guitar, it was recorded at a live performance and you can hear the voices of kids playing nearby. “To Run 1991″ is a jaunty song that sweeps along happily, “Bury Bury 1991″ is another acoustic folk song that is not wholly engaging, with Leslie’s vocals going down deep. “Trip To My Neighborhood 1993″ is full song that is Beatles-esque (or maybe it is just Teenage Fanclub-esque) with full-fledged production and sweet melodies with a hard guitar sound. “Dream Country 1996″ is hard, grungy and nasal, with dramatic chord progressions. It’s loud and sloppy and good fun. Much better, anyway, than the two backwards “versions” of the song that appear on the band’s second album “Ghostfather” of 1997, which are full of studio manipulation and you can’t make hide nor hair of them. “Ghostfather (Demo) 1996″ sounds very much like the album version, but is shorter and maybe a bit rougher. “Medium 1996″ is an upbeat song with jangly guitars that shoves along at a good pace and has a slight bit of a Sonic Youth jangling dissonance to it in parts. “Eject 1996″ is a jangling rocker with a full band that growls with a bit of goth or new wave gloom, and none of that Humpback Oak sunshine. “Summer Island 1996″ is a breezy beach rocker with surf-like guitars and a strong bass line, it’s good fun. Final song “Cucumber 1996″ is a pleasant little acoustic song with smooth, broad singing. It’s wonderful.

But wait, there’s more! On the fourth disc we suddenly wake up to find that there’s enhanced CD features. Since they are not available for the Mac, I have to take them to work to check out what’s on there. Turns out, it’s nothing but a few more songs from the band’s three early demos (while I’m not complaining to get this great archival stuff, I’d have thought that “enhanced” would mean things like video, pictures, things that you wouldn’t normally have access to on a regular CD… and it made me wonder why they didn’t just burn them onto a fifth and sixth CD). There are eight “Live Performances”, recorded between 2001 and 2009, as well as the cassette tape demo “Moths & Bagpipes” (13 songs) and “The Songs Will Always Be There” (12 songs) and the 10 songs of “Mojo Sessions.” All told, the digitized songs from these four tapes cover nine of the 14 songs on “Pain Stained Morning” (with two versions of “Bull”), two covers that I can identify (booth of them by Bob Dylan, but there may be more covers I don’t recognise, by Dylan or anyone else), and there are 18 songs that can’t be found anywhere else (19 if you discount that “I Just Can’t Seem To Live” appears twice). The CD contains cassette inlay art for three of the releases, as well as a one-off song, “Daddy In The Lift”, which is credited here to Twang Bar Kings, even though the exact same recording also appears on Leslie’s Jug project release “Brownblink” (not quite sure why it’s even on this release, since it’s not a Humpback Oak song, other than the fact that it’s also not readily available, and that X’Ho mentions it in his essay on the band as one of his two favorite Humpback Oak songs (the other one is “Finer Life”).

There’s not a lot of information about the band or the recordings on these tape inlays, although we do get an address at Block 408 Clementi Avenue 1, which means that the guys are from the part of Singapore I now live in (Toh Tuck). The rare songs contained on these demos and live recordings are “The Bootleg Bob” (chugging Bob Dylan mumblings), “Boy Caught” (sweet guitar rock), “Can You Find The Time” (drum machine-driven singalong folk madness), “Earthquake” (riffy, zoomy), “Eject” (electrified, rocky), “Hey Little Boy” (folky, structured, spooky), “Homer” (rockin’ electric), “Humpback Oak” (“Not Fade Away”), “I Live My Life Dangerously” (great groovy moody pop rock), “Insides” (somber folk), “It Takes a Lot To Laugh A Train To Cry” (chugging sweet rock), “Just Can’t Seem To Live” (two versions of this fast-paced pop folk, one with helium lyrics, and one lo-fi live recording with normal vocals), a cover of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and “If Not For You”, “Mathilda Noodle” (just that – noodling), “Moth” (groovy folky harmonising), “My Friend” (shamboling mumbling), “Oval” (sweet, beautiful strumming – “oval, never want to be a circle”, repeat 20 times”), “Pay to Find Girl in Mind” (zooming rock/pop), “River And The Seas Run Dry” (Biblical and groovy, Dylanesque), “Stanley Says” (brief brittle instrumental), “Story of Sanity” (Gram Parsons-eque), “Susie” (Velvet Underground-esque), “To Be High (Up In The Sky)” (REM-esque), “Working Men’s Song” (harmonica-driven protest folk about miners) and “Yesterday’s Child” (choppy chunky harmonising folk). Many of the songs are very demo-y, with many of the earliest tunes either sounding like Woodie Guthrie, a very young Bob Dylan, or very raw Velvet Underground demos. For some reason, the set includes, “Daddy in the Lift”, a song attributed to Twang Bar Kings but can actually be downloaded from Leslie’s website’s MP3 downloads page as part of his Jug unit.

Of the recordings, the live shows seem to have the better quality, and are the most familiar. No real surprises here. There are, of course, songs that don’t appear elsewhere, like “Boy Caught”, “Just Can’t Seem To Live”. “If I Am Weak” was done in 2002, and sounds like a very polished song with great production. “Technohuman” is a cool, noisy track, very sweet.

The band’s first demo, “Mojo Sessions” of 1991 is a collection of folk songs that sound very Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground-ish. “Working Men’s Song” sounds like its title, and “Just Can’t Seem To Live” has a quick Humpback Oak vibe, with somewhat helium-ish vocals. “Rivers And The Seas Run Dry” is very folky, while “Susie” sounds like an old Velvet Underground song. One of the coolest songs on the release is “Humpback Oak”, a jiggedy, driving song with the offbeat lyric “If you were to look around, people just don’t understand.” “Story of Sanity” is a song about a gunslinger, it’s very nice and dark and has great guitar work. “Yesterday’s Child” is one of those folk songs with all sorts of harmonising voices. You can just picture a group of 20-year-olds harmonising around a Sony Walkman recorder and having fun in a sorta studious way. “Father Floyd” is a big old harmonica folk song that goes groovy and happy. The last song on the demo tape is a well-known one, a shamoling version of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”.

The band’s second demo from 1991, “The Song Will Always Be There”, starts off with “To Be High (Up In The Sky), sort of a Gordon Lightfoot/REM rocker, while “The Bootleg Bob” is blacked out ramblings with nice guitar work. Lovely. “Insides” is a rambling blues-influenced trip, kind of like an early Pink Floyd soundtrack job (i.e. More, Obscured by Clouds, Zabriskie Point, etc), while “Fear”, “No Finer Time To Be Alive” and “Void” are chunky full versions of the band’s well-known songs. “Hey Little Boy” is some sort of a folksy string of questions from an adult to a child that is a bit sinister. “My Friend” is shamboling droning guitar folk, yay. “If Not For You” is a Bob Dylan cover that tries to have that Beatles with Eric Clapton feel to it, which it would if it were not so lo-fi. “To Run” is another version of one of the Disc 4 rarities, it’s very nice and should have been on one of the albums. You can hear that “banging-drumsticks-together” sound that the guys used because they didn’t have/couldn’t afford a drum kit. Nice. “Bury Bury” is a full version of the Humpback Oak classic. The set also contains a full version of “Cretin” – at nearly two minutes long, it is over three times as long as those 30-second bits that appear on “Pain Stained Morning” (those versions may be shorter, but they are also much jauntier).

“Moths and Bagpipes”, the band’s demo from 1992, starts off with “Bull”, a classic song that showed up on the debut. The recording of the song is a bit more advanced than tunes on “The Song Will Always Be There”, with its drum machine, but the song sounds way better on the “Pain Stained Morning” version (there is a second demo later on the tape as well, that has more atmospheric guitars to intro the piece, and it has no drum machine). “Can You Find The Time” is a rare track that is cheerful and warm, almost Chrismassy, but still shamboling in the harmonisation department. Nice lyrics: “Can you find the time to find the time” and “Every time you killed a man you killed 10,000 with your hand.” I’ve read these latter words of wisdom before, I think they are part of Jewish teachings/Judaism. “Deep Door Down” is a nice demo of the classic tune, “Moth” is a harmonizing hit machine. “Mathilda Noodle” is a lazy morning song, dreamy and droopy. “Stanley Says” is a rare instrumental track, and it grooves for less than a minute. “Lower Girl” and “Circling Square” are other demos of tracks from the first album, they sounds relatively fleshed-out and nice, while “Trip To My Neighbourhood” is a nice, jangly early version of one of the rarities tracks. “Pay to Find Girl in Mind” is one of those weird, raw early tracks, as is “Oval”, a beautiful song that seems to have a female backup (not too sure, though). Great guitar work on this one. “Earthquake” is another one of those groovy nearly-finished songs that never made it onto an album. Too bad, but glad we can hear it in its demo form anyway.

Humpback Oak also has a great website. This is where the pictures and the scans of original lyrics sheets (together with original doodles) that I expected to be on the “enhanced CD” ended up!!!

Leslie Low, “Triangular” – This lovely CD-R is an exclusive limited release, and it was for sale only at the “On Being Leslie Low” book store event that I went to. The disc comprises re-recorded songs that Leslie Low has written and performed in Humpback Oak, with The Observatory, and in his solo career, and all of the songs are acoustic numbers with Leslie’s haunting voice zapped with vocal effects to purify his voice and give it monstrous clarity. Great great great. Songs like “Drop of Soul” are so slowed down from the original punky/new wave versions that they’re barely recognisable, but they are all beautiful. Some of the songs are not from Low’s more-recognisable Humpback Oak collection of songs, recorded 1991-1998, but from solo works like Worm (“The People”, 2006) and The Observatory (Dark Folke’s “Mind Roots”, 2009) and other sources (“Portsdown Road” and “Triangular”).

Aiming to get to the heart of the mystery, I asked Leslie about “Portsdown Road” and “Triangular”, and he says that “Portsdown Road” is a re-do of Humpback Oak’s “Normanton Park 1996″, which appears on the Rarities disc in the Oaksongs box. It is full of arpeggiated guitar, while the original is chordy and strummy. He also mentioned that “Triangular”, a doleful strummer, is a demo appearing here for the first time (Leslie seems to be fond of shapes – other songs are called “Oval”, “Circling Square”, and The Observatory website has a new logo that is dominated by triangular shapes.

The songs are the same basic songs, but they are all very different from the originals. “Deep Door Down” in 1994 was a groovy folk-rock song, starting off with guitars, drum coming in later. “Deep Door Down” in 2010 became very sparse and sombre, with sad guitars and a high-ish lullaby voice. “Drop of Soul” in 1997 was bold and strummy, albeit drumless, while in 2010 it had become long, drawn out and spooky. “Finer Life” 1994 was about singing and picking at the guitar, but by 2010 it was about taking out notes and slowing everything down. “The Last Homegrown Lost Boy” of 1998 showed a band already starting to experiment and sound freaky, with odd backwards voices drifting in and out and some orchestration, but by 2010 it was more breathy, with barely a strum, and a few spare, spacy sound effects. “Lucifer” 1994 was jaunty and strummy, with both acoustic and electric guitars, and eventually also drums and Michael Stipe vocals, but by 2010 it was much more chilled out and “normal”. “Mind Roots” 2009 is a song by The Observatory (it’s the final track of Dark Folke) that sort of drones on and on, with vocal harmonies and some creepy keyboards, as well as theremin later on in, while the acoustic version of just one year later is slowed down, with only a single guitar chord at the end of each line. There are major chords and some hope, not all gloom. “Model Citizen” 1998 starts out with icy keyboards and some some quasi-gothic “I’m a product of the experiment” angst that is near-Tool punky, while the 2010 update is monotonal and arpeggiated. “Portsdown Road” is a very chilly acoustic arpeggiated reinvention of “Normanton Park”, which glooms along nicely with jazzy drumming and some cool arpeggios. “The People” is a sort-of “Hotel California”-ish tune (at first), which then becomes a protest song (or a Nick Drake song?) of sorts, done in a style not dissimilar to the mood of Triangular. The 2010 version has a shorter intro and much busier arpeggios. “Scared Scarred”, in its 1997 version has military drumming and zoomy guitar stuff, while the 2010 update is sleepy and hypnotic, with just the barest hint of keyboard (viola?) accompaniment. I never noticed this in other songs.

All together, there is some irony in the monotonous production and tone of the new versions of these songs on Triangular, in comparison with the varied and experimental efforts heard across the six releases that provide their source material. Perhaps Leslie, who started off in a stripped-down folk guitar band and then moved through art rock and avant garde has come full circle and is coming back to his roots with a “pure” version of songs from all phases of his life; still, while it may seem monotonous and droney at times, the sound and tone and dreamy, relaxed atmosphere of the 2010 update makes it a real winner.