The “International Sounds” of Singapore

Play some music. These clips comes directly off Noise Singapore, which was zhiwei’s baby 🙂

Make no mistake, I’m hardly “mainstream” in my music life. I pay $27 of radio license a year for my car to blare static-ridden Symphony 92.4. I can memorize a large repertoire of Chinese/Canto pop melodies with no idea what their lyrics is about. When I’m fed-up, I bang Sonatinas by Kuhlau or Clementi like I’m doing a Mahler Symphony. Sunday nights are for Philwinds. And, since you read this blog, you might sometimes get to indulge in preposterous MIDI playbacks of short “masterpieces” (only if you installed Sibelius Scorch).

So last weekend was really a blast, firstly to endure out of tune singers who can’t enunciate English, extreme use of cymbals as a way to keep time, and failed, and as many grassroot-ish shows, watching event organizers having to “stand in the crowd” to “make up the numbers”. Some strict KPI your sponsors/bosses gave?

I don’t remember the lyrics anyway, but I can tell you which bar the bass guitar played the wrong note for the chord. And most importantly, most of these local bands have a tendency to just “go through the motion” when they are on stage – stage fright? I mean dude, you’re SINGING – where’s the phrase? Where’s climax in your song? At least the body language was masked by the smoke machines.

But the evening that started with Daniel Ong‘s workshop had a good ending when I finally got to see Ian’s band King Kong Jane performing their 30 minute set. And Botak Jones. KKJ (which I finally learned today about its relation with male body parts) was a Noise Apprentice 2 years ago. I don’t know how they sound in the past, but they were really singing that night. Everyone in the band was singing.

In a way, I agree with what Daniel said in his workshop – you have to, unfortunately, be “international” in your music to be international. I hope Noise in this case is not trying to explicitly promote that, because there might be cases where the local character of the music guarantees it to remain local (go listen to the Lao Zha Bor rap for an extreme example). But that’s not the concern for the evening – all of them wanted to be international, and try hard to sound international, uses instruments that are international, dressed international, etc.

I asked zhiwei the pointed question: What happens next? Why hasn’t a label signed up with KKJ? He sold me probably the same tagline that he was selling for the past year – it’s just a platform to uncover new bands. Same goes to Daniel’s efforts of giving them airtime on radio. Many of them will continue into their adulthood without getting anywhere. That sounds familiar. I haven’t entered a recoding studio since 阿牛与阿花的故事 14 years ago. But I have never stop learning about new music, new sounds, new styles and new ways to touch people’s lives.

If you’re making music, all the best to you. Learn to make music first, before getting your noise out there. But even if you fail to make it “internationally”, don’t stop making music.