I'm happy.
It has been a rather musical rich the past few weeks - as I seem to finally find a mate to just blurting out all the long-meant intention on exploring music in a much more cerebral way, moving far beyond the mainstream (read: MTV and the likes). I always meant to do it - especially in the last two years - but felt that I never got it right. In late 2002, I encountered a really passionate music geek on this theme, but looking back, I kind of wasted those precious chance. As he walked by off my life - with all the knowledge still very much encassed in his head - it left me with a huge void, a realisation of having such a loose ends on what could be that rare chance to significantly alter my musical knowledge.
I, for example, did not manage to move beyond the first few pages of Simon Reynolds's Energy Flash: Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture nor Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, the two bibles he brought for me. This exceptional encounter exposed me to what Oi! music is [don't laugh], to the fact that voila! there's actually such scene in the capital, in addition to what I've known for long as the punk scene and the ever so mobile indie's.
Anyway, this year's encounter (or last year's to be precise) started with me meeting this young lad from Berlin who was tailing his cool parents doing a stage design workshop in Yogyakarta. He said he plays in a band, and before too long I gave him a first glimpse of what's going on in the local scene, in forms of some CDs (courtesy of the foundation I work for, hiha) and some cheapo cassettes we found to sample during one of those last rounds in the so laid-back city. He then paid a surprise trip two months later, now with his (remains) cool mother, and a trip to Bandung soon drew him to the familiar sound of Teenage Death Star. He wanted to release TDS, but they were still recording, and by the time he's back to Berlin, the band disbanded. Ouch.
Now, proceed to a string of sped-up few emails - from and to my capital and his - which have been pooling some names, old and new. He introduced me first to The Monks, a punk band of the 60s, whose members were the American GIs stationed in Berlin. This is really tickles me, the phenomenon of obscure bands who are resurrected to life online, forty years after their split-up. The wonder of 2000s. I described him this Japanese band with a french name (which I forgot the exact name) from the 70s, who once hijacked an aeroplane and then joined all those legends in the Hall of Fame of Obscure bands after the frontmant mysteriously gone missing. This little story sent him off to a quest of identifying the band, cos I am totally hopeless at remembering, enacting those one-mentioning in the past of someone's passionate blabbering on the subject. I miss it - his blabbering - and him at the same time.
Then, it's the young lad's turn to tell or send me some strange sound. He fast-forwarded to the 2004's Wolfmother, a newcomer (founded in 2004) from Sydney (argh). That'ts where I decided to really read the backdated Wire I've got at home. I just proposed him to do this 'genealogy' study (sort of) together, tracing those influences (the band's version) of other's bands from what they claimed themselves. Wolfmother claimed they are influenced (among others) by Boards of Canada (which was the cover story of October 2005's Wire). From the article, I learnt that the two Scottish brothers love Cocteau Twins, really a gem sound soundbites I had experienced for the first time sometimes in August 2005 (more than two decades late!).
From my office's humble PC, I could only captured the fractured seconds of Wolfmother's Mind's Eye, but listening to their White Unicorn (playing looping on their website), for sure, he's right. Whatever influences the band claimed (BOC or Beck), their music clearly is rooted in those sounds of Black Sabbath, White Stripes or Led Zeppelin. I think, one of my 'eternal shame' is for some reasons, I always seemed to postpone the urge to start knowing at the very least, one of those three. Time to do my homework.......
No comments:
Post a Comment