Better Butters

What? Butters & Friends at Zouk KL, 13th January 2007.


Damn Dirty Apes have turned… reggae! Pedram thankfully is still on sound-effect guitar. (Shot at F1.4.)


Guess whose style this reminds me of!


C’mon man, gimme the Jaguar. You know I want it.


No color tweaking on this one. I love how it turned out so film-like on my Sony A100.

Thankfully, after a few reggae-singalong songs (with DDA background music) they went back to their classic shoegazing, with lush soundscapes, beautiful arpeggios, haunting basslines and intense walls of noise. Space-rock/post-rock never sounded this good.

Now if only these guys would come down from Penang more often. Worth the RM35 entrance fee alone.

(They were also the only band to play new songs. Their new non-reggae stuff rocked as much as the day I first heard them, falling into a hypnotic trance, then enjoying the roaring volume-11 feedback.)


Republic Of Brickfields! (I went in as media since Xfresh FM was part of the event anyway.)

They’re finally coming up with an album after years of otai-ness. Ganja-ran, they call it.


Another vantage point (which would’ve been awesome with a telephoto lens.)


OAG‘s guitarist. Focused on it by accident. At F1.7 the out-of-focus spots were still bright-lined bokeh (which, some people say, is displeasing) so I used the Blur Tool in Adobe Photoshop, with the Mode set to Darken, to give the circles less donut-like borders.


Despite being mostly out-of-focus, I like this.


OAG played their English stuff! Yes, I must admit that I liked their English songs more, because they had a simpler pop rock sound.


As you can tell, it got harder with more photographers creeping in to the sides. The exclusivity of media tags had been lost!


Radhi was a boom mike operator in a past life.


The Minolta 50mm at F2.0 really sparkles. I loved it when I captured other photographers’ flashes, illuminating the fog.


This, at F2.5. I love having a 50mm F1.4 not just for the F1.4, but for all the apertures in between that and F4.


Butterfingers are on! Loque tries to locate his pedals with the sudden influx of people.


They played their classics. Again, I prefer their English grunge rock with Malay-or-Celtic-traditional-riff (I don’t mean A-minor glam rock) stuff, before they went Malay and added Radiohead influences.

…I don’t like Radiohead much.


Many songs I didn’t know the titles to, I found out that day. Fire Is A Curse? E! Stolen! Skew! Love! Delirium! Garden City Of Lights! (Okay, so I had Butter Worth Pushful sitting on Winamp, but I never committed the song titles to memory.)

Emmett can still scream like he came out of his momma’s womb in Seattle.


There you go. This would probably be grabbed by a fan.


Loque, for the synth-y bits.


Needless to say, they blew me away. I haven’t felt such a fresh rush of grunge since… 2002?

On a side note, I figured out a Celtic version of Vio-pipe for guitar using E-A-C#-G#-B-E tuning. Yeeeaaahhh!


Moshpit in Zouk. You’d better believe it.


I spotted Xfresh FM DJ Rex crowdsurfing! Congratulations man, you’ve kept it real and have transcended beyond your socializing days in Laundry Bar. You now really rock after getting kicked in the face a few times and coming out of the crowd smelling like a thousand Mat Rockers.


Emmett ends his set neck-to-guitar-neck.


He jumps, and is met with a most supportive crowd.

To think, I only came because I heard that Damn Dirty Apes were playing. I forgot what a national treasure Butterfingers were. Plus, for RM35, all four bands played one-hour-long sets! Usual gigs only have half-hour sets at most.


Outside, I bumped into Linda Onn! (I’d link you babe but where?)

After the gig, I bumped into Ahmad Saiful, a friendly photographer. I got to play with his Olympus E-500. His Zuiko Digital 14-45mm F3.5-5.6 in particular, had very cool flare, with an obvious double-line outline, a quarter-circle filling up half the frame. I think it’s a characteristic of having such wide focal lengths (despite the view crop.)


This shot was to demonstrate black-and-white with high contrast color mode on my camera; I just stretched out my arm without aiming and got this random shot. Some people like it for some reason. I just find the bokeh reflected in the window to be rather odd for its position.

15 thoughts on “Better Butters

  1. Syakir Khalid Post author

    Great show. Butter is definitely a national treasure, right up there with the M Nasirs and Searchs of Malaysia.

    Link for Linda Onn? anywhere but her Nasi Ayam restaurant. 🙂

    Reply
  2. punkstereo Post author

    super nice with f1.4.. wish i have them too.. eh u sure that’s linda onn ah? looks different la..

    Reply
  3. Tan Yee Wei Post author

    Regarding your comment regarding focusing on very near objects, i do not have any answers; only some general thoughts that will hopefully trigger further interesting ideas in you.

    Will write it as a post tonight or sunday night, depending on how busy things get.

    Reply
  4. Kevin Broken Scar Post author

    Dude, it’s cool how the Butters divided the set list into sections according the to key of the songs. Or it could have been tuning for guitar changes?

    It’s also cool, that if the setlist was indeed divided according to the keys that the songs were in, coz this means they only have songs in two keys! Eb and C#. hehe.

    Pretty impressive setlist anyway and I’m assuming "girl" was girl friday. the good ol’ butters days.

    Reply
  5. ayu Post author

    linda onn my foot.

    sheeshh…

    when you going out with me ah?! went to laundry twice never ajak me also. like this la…

    Reply
  6. Albert Ng Post author

    It was for guitar changes, but they don’t break for that. Yep, Girl Fridayyy!

    I suppose it makes sense to change keys every few songs, maybe so Emmett can rest his voice from going too low or too high.

    Reply

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