Peter Hoflich

Great weekend!!!

Friday night I had a jam with my band, we really ROCKED! After that I headed out to Boat Quay to check out my friend Razi’s event Identite, with local electronic types playing weird blasted Nine Inch Nails-like bass-driven weird mixup stuff. It was pretty loud, pretty fun. Hung out with my friend Joe Ng a bit, and then headed home. Got back by midnight and did some computer stuff until late, then went to sleep.

Woke up after a blissful seven hours of rest,  had breakfast, got going on a few things I needed to do. Pooh. Before I knew it, it was time to head off to my gig at the Chocolate Bar at Tanglin Community Centre. It was good fun – I wore my new Electric Wizard t-shirt and my shades and my crazy hair, and rocked out. The beer was cheap, and there were lots of Malay kids around. Some of the bands were pretty rudimentary, and many of them had a certain kind of not-so-great sound that was a bit derivative of recent nu metal genres, but a few of the bands had some great musicians and really rocked out. We were pretty much the only band that had anything significantly different – Chinese and foreign musicians, and that stoned ’70s sound, plus a bit of theatre – but it was a great afternoon. I only saw five of the bands, but there were 18 slated to play, including (maybe) Ricky Hendrix (cousin of Jimi). I swapped stuff with my band – I gave a copy of “Anvil! The Movie” to my guitarist, and a copy of the Led Zeppelin Bio Hammer of the Gods to my drummer. Someone passed the drummer back his copy of I Am Ozzy. Great.

After the gig I went off to the Substation to see five bands that would be playing from 5:00 to 11:00, including Abang Guard, a unit that my friend Joe Kidd from KL plays with when he’s not in his usual unit, Carburetor Dung. Nobody was playing yet, but there were a lot of hardcore kids hanging around; I chilled out for a while and talked to Mark, who is setting up a label in Singapore for local avant garde and experimental labels called tadalafil 5mg generic. Nice guy. I bought two of the CDs that he was selling: ARCN TEMPL’s “Emanations of a New World” and “[stones beneath your feet]” by amino acid orchestra. Nice guy, we talked a lot about music and other fun stuff.  I also bought a zine from someone else for $3, Shock and Awe Issue #3, from KL, which has one of Joe’s columns in it, which is about the recording of the MyConstitution support CD, which I reviewed recently. Nice. Nothing was happening, even at 7:00, so I went for a plate of sour and spicy pork salad, Myanmar style, and also a bit of accessory shopping. I need some sort of a prop for my stage act, like a cowboy hat or something. Don’t know what. Cowboy boots?

Got back, the first band had already played (grindcore), so I saw the second band. One drummer, one guitarist, playing great crazy metal noise. Then my colleague Oliver came. We went back for more food, saw Joe, talked for a while, listened to the other bands. The third band was a turntablist and a guitarist and a drummer, very avant guard. Finally, out came Abang Guard, and they really rocked. The first number they did was with Zai Kuning, who had set up a gallery display that was very political – it was basically about his battle in the Substation for the garden that has been leased out to Timbre, a vulpine capitalist outfit of cover band imperialists that wouldn’t consider art. Or so it seems from his letters. Mr Zai came out and did a song with Abang Guard, which was like droney Bob Dylan, and then Abang Guard did their thing, which was about bassist and drummer Joe and Bullet (both from Carburetor Dung) providing the rhythm for the show, while the guitarist layered feedback over the whole show. Marvellous in a very Rallizes Denudes way!!  The show ended, I had a chat with Joe and Oliver, and then I ran off late before 11:26 and managed to get on a bus that deposited me back at Kismis View only around midnight. Wonderful! I did music and picture stuff and got to sleep not-too-late.

Sunday I woke up, did some work, threw the ball with Zen and went swimming; while we were swimming, one family came down and we made friends with the mum and the kids. I think Zen will enjoy playing with those kids from time to time going forward. After lunch we went for a haircut. Here is another before-and-after pic from our haircut:

After we got back, there was some hanging around, then our friends came over for our poolside potluck. It was good fun. Zen played for most of the time in the pool with the two young boys, and the parents had a great time catching up (two Canadian dads, two Japanese mums – perfect). There were a few moments when it started to rain, but the weather held up. And just as the sun dipped between the low cloud cover and the horizon, we got a blast of dying sun and a perfect rainbow arching from one end to the other (and a double rainbow on the northern edge, perfect). I got a good shot of the whole rainbow, but had to split it up between two photos. Here’s a shot of the northern edge of it:

CD reviews

amino acid orchestra, “[stones beneath your feet]“ – An “experimental” release, amino acid orchestra starts off with ambient sounds and acoustic guitars playing sitar-like, in “Clouds Gathering For Rain.”  ”Construction Worker Rock” has more ambient sounds, and moaning and groaning and some funky drumming, and later on some loud buzzing feedback.  It just builds in intensity and is really fun. At just over eight minutes in length, this is just a bit short of being the longest song on the record. Wow. “Dirty Floor” starts out with weird scratchy/buzzing noises that sound like an electrical fire in the making, and there’s other noise coming in too. “Hunting for the Oily Man” is all percussion, and a bit of ambient drone, very soft and mellow. It plays, it fades. “SolarRape” sounds nutty, and it’s a melange of spacy guitar strummings with hard percussive noises. “Swim Molasses” starts off, again, with folk guitar mutterings, it plinks and plonks along. “The Coming of Null” is noise and scratchings. Is it about KK Null? It has groovy buzzings and other minimalist sono-storms, perched somehow between radio stations.  Yee-haw. “These Shores Are Damned” showcases cool distorted guitar, ambient noise, and weird percussion.  It’s trippy, and it’s the longest track on the release! “Watch Out For That Fire” is the shortest track on the CD, at less than two minutes, and it’s largely about percussion, with a bit of ambient noise thrown in. At the end we hear the first real spoken words on the album – “it’s almost five.”  What does this mean?  What?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?

The cover has a picture that seems to be the Malaysia train line, who knows whether it was taken in Singapore or Malaysia. Not much information on the back, and the disc itself is blank except for a circle with two drops icon that reminds of the marks on the Boredoms’ “Vision Creation Newsun” project.

ARCN TEMPL, “Emanations of a New World” – This is something that Leslie Low and Vivian Wang of The Observatory have cooked up. It was released in May 2010 on this drone and noise label Utech from the US. There was very little press on it at the time in Singapore, where The Observatory probably has its biggest fan base, but it seems like it’s been quietly winning people over. The cover is a photo of military brass from the army of the Monkey King, as part of an exhibit at Tiger Balm Gardens (Haw Par Villa) in Singapore, and the essay inside is about the beauty, malaise, and nostalgia of Singapore’s hidden tourist attraction. There are two very nice pictures of a young Leslie and a young Vivian, both around four years old, with their moms at the place. Leslie is especially precious with a t-shirt that says “Leslie” across the chest, with a picture of a bunny (or something). How amazing; it makes me want to dig up my own pictures of my first visit to Singapore in 1985 when I was 16 (I grew up in Canada, so I wasn’t able to visit this wonderful place as a four-year-old on an outing with my mom). The CD seems very “Chinese”, with its cover full of ideograms, and its titles dragging up concepts from Chinese mythology and spiritualism, which is a bit different from other Leslie Low/Observatory stuff. One enthusiastic friend told me that “The songs remind me of Debussy actually. The sheerness of texture matched with very oriental-ness.”

The first song, “Innocence and Ignorance” is like a lost track from the Betty Blue soundtrack, with seashore sounds, guitar arpeggios and some xylophone-like sounds, thumb cymbals, and accordion-like sounds. Pure meditation. I love music like this so much. The second track, “Three Realms” is weird and spooky, lush and layered, with  freaky atmospherics, as well as a later passage of bright and bold accordion sounds. There are ambient sounds at the end of the track. “Wandering in an Empty Forest” starts off with Tangerine Dream-like keyboard swirls, adding in a repetitive acoustic theme. The guitar drones on and changes subtly, and then the keyboard shifts too; every sound is shifty, the keyboard more so. It’s an interplay. The guitar phases out, and the Tangerine Dream keyboards stay behind to build a strong mood and gorgeous zone-out. Wow. “Four Rivers of Melancholy”, the longest track on the CD, starts off with frantic flamenco guitar that is eternally groovy, which becomes bizarrely ambient, before breaking into wistful Leslie Low vocal atmospherics. The flamenco continues endless, but with added weirdo noises. Then there’s a carnival bit that goes crazy. “Eighteen Steps of Evil”  is spooky and industrial, with a freaky electronic vibe, sauntering percussion, and then also some freaked-out guitar plonkings. There’s a lot happening here, and it’s all good, even the weird freaky ambient sounds at the end that raise tension tremendously. “The Looming of Nothing” is sombre and quiet, with bells and guitar. It’s the shortest track on the release. “Dread Mountain” starts off with spooky organ, then gets into scratchy, slow guitar chipping and odd little percussion bits (tambourine). Throw in the odd horn blast and ambient noise, and it’s a song that dredges up the deepest parts of Mark Hollis’ psyche as it dissolves momentarily into chaos, then recovers its step with some nice flute. “A Thousand Arms of Mercy” starts off with a man rambling in Cantonese, then gets into spacey organ and spare acoustic guitar plonking, which then picks up into a real song, with piano repetitions and cool guitar interplay.

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