Author Archives: 2konbla

Thirdniversary

Moonshine: A Homemade Music Show, 13th November 2008, at Laundry Bar. This also happened to be the 3rd Anniversary of Moonshine, so more bright colorful lights were turned on!

This is Rendra Zanawi (featuring Alda the long-time-no-see-band-slut hehe.)

And this is Stephanie who played in 2 bands that night. Gotta love the translucent orange snare drum (and how it projects orange onto the carpet!)

Adil Johan saxing.

“I’ll play my part, and you’ll play yours.”

But really, this was an awesome, awesome battle between the sax and guitar.

Then it was Reza Salleh.

I love it whenever I catch the rare triangular light on cheekbones.

Melina also played for Tempered Mental, who was heavier than ever! Jack was let loose and yet sounded very composed ripping away metal solos.

At gigs I always bring my Minolta 50mm F1.4; the other lens is often a quandary. That night I picked the Sigma 17-35mm F2.8-4 EX and I love how it scales and distorts. This is a crop from my Sony A900!

Jimmy, who is probably the only drummer who is not a band slut around. Jack and Melina each play in other bands.

Why so serious?

Yeah, this was a severely underexposed F1.4 ISO6400 image which I attempted to pull up. It’s a severe crop, too.

And then the trumpets blared and the saxophones returned on stage – big ska band 40 Winks was on!

He’s not Adlin Rosli, he claims.

Delayed Loop

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Feedback Open Mic at Cloth & Clef, a certain 8th November 2008.

R.I.P. (Rock In Peace) Gene Simmons!

Yes, they were still in the mood for Halloween. If you saw how much they decked out the place, you wouldn’t want to take them down, either.

This man waits, nevertheless.

The Theory Of Change. They had an angry song, Killing Anna. Wow.

George, meanwhile, was emo with a capital E.

Steph has been drumming for a very, very long time.

Reza Salleh, Melina William, and their FANS!

Oh look mom I can do diptychs too!

Boohoo, I used to do diptychs before I even knew they were called diptychs. Left, Nick Davis with some angry acoustica; right, Wani Ardy with some mellow acoustica.

Ferns, who has a really nifty CD cover. Go check it out.

Left, guitarist; right, his effects cheat sheet.

Left, Haziq; right, Anuar. Anuar asked us what we wanted – another sad song, or the blues. I voted for the blues and was the majority.

Left, Tom; right, his delay/loop pedal.

I love it when white singer-songwriter dudes come and they play with delay/loop pedals! A few examplary one-man-band bands I have witnessed and enjoyed were Jamie Woon, David Knight and Tom I-don’t-know-his-surname.

Videographers!

Petrina was doing a hilarious ~~petwalk~~ catwalk.

Darren Ashley rips out a soulful rockin’ tune and wakes everybody-the-f-up to get up and jive. He is that cool. Gotta dig the beat-boxing skills, yo!

He got some white people to dance to Sweet Home Alabama. I think. But then, white guys (and girls) dance to anything. That’s why they call it the white guy dance. Because they don’t have to listen to cool music to dance. Not that Lynyrd Skynyrd is not cool. After years of shouting FREEBIRD! at every performer who takes a pause between songs, I still have not seen it happen.

And whoa, he has long fingers. I tried to replicate the same position. What a stretch!

Ending the night were crowd-shakers The Ramanados. What a refreshing gig that was!

Downstairs, Downtown

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This is Wani Ardy. She looks very student-like, yes?

She’s a lecturer.

Moonshine: A Homemade Acoustic Show, October 18th 2008!

These are some camwhores.

Reza Salleh, organizer.

This time around, it was downstairs at The Apartment Downtown, KLCC.

Soft Touch, long time no see! Songs about peace and the polar bear never get old.

Man, was metering tricky! Gotta push DRO+ the next time; the frames behind keep getting blown out. But the lights look like wings.

The aforementioned polar bear.

Szetoo is the real gangster, yo!

Azmyl Yunor practices outside.

He’s a lecturer, too!

With Reza on one of his classic folk singalongs!

I just wish Azmyl would make his students come to see his shows, as he did back then. They were quite a bunch!

Szetoo doesn’t look as funny as some people do when she looks through the viewfinder and closes the other eye.

Feeler

Time Out, No?

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Apologies for the hiatus, I’ve been busy. Here’s Time Out KL’s On The Up, one 15th of October 2008 at No Black Tie.

Kokokaina spotted in the audience!

Tony Leo Selvaraj. Usually I do not fancy tilted pictures unless there is an element that is grounded to the 90 degree angles of the picture (in this case, the microphone.)

Crowd stalkin’.

Thing One, fantastic instrumental band. Expect no less from ICOM!

More crowd stalkin’!

Nish on keyboards with an expression pedal makes funky Keytar-like sounds!

The crowd is amused!

Four Letter Story, modern rock. The music sounds uncannily like Broken Scar‘s! The vocalist even sings like him and has the same slightly gruff voice!

They covered Mariah Carey – Always Be My Baby.

And finally, the amazing Adil Johan ~~Quartet~~ Quintet.

Oh well, I lost count. Here are guest vocalists Otam and Melissa Suciato.

Le fans.

Le drummer, a long missing Alex (who we hear has gone to his roots for a hiatus…)

One of…

Doze 2. Again, guest rapping. But Adil does good rapping himself!

I doze 2! (Or at least look emo.)

Sax-y.

I didn’t catch his name.

I Saw Death

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It came for some pussy.

Yesterday night I headed to a nearby mamak. I saw a tiny ginger baby cat, slightly scrawny, but with its ears pointing out in triangles, cross the road to some motorbikes parked there.

A father and son got on one of the motorbikes. It stood behind the exhaust, curious. The father turned around, and he spotted it. He avoided it as he rolled his motorbike out. It had no sense of danger or alertness as it stood there looking curiously.

A man was about to cross the road, when he walked into it, pushing it. It fell and lay there, probably distraught. I have no idea what kind of scale would a human foot’s walking impact would be. I didn’t hear it meow.

A Proton Wira approached. I flinched and turned away! I could not bear to look. I don’t even know if the car stopped or not… but when I turned to look, I saw it lying there and it was in a different position than it was before. Not a good one.

As if fate could not get any worse, a lorry approached.

The next time I turned… I saw something out of Happy Tree Friends.

I obviously didn’t take a picture but the image was stuck in my head, like it was my brain’s wallpaper.

I wondered how the young survive by themselves. Or do they? How do they learn what danger is? How do they know how to become street smart? How do they know of impending doom?

I didn’t even hear it. I don’t know if it was in shock from being walked into.

And then I thought of children. Human children. If they start crying… they stay immobilized in that one place. Even if they were crossing the road and they dropped ice-cream… they’d probably cry there and stand in one place!

At that point I felt annoyed at adults who do that. As in, if they’re in trouble, they get immobilized. They get stuck. They don’t get out of the dangerous situation.

I felt annoyed at Hong Kong dramas. Elderly husband and wife quarrel. Husband crosses road. A van approaches. Wife sees this, runs to his body, and cries. That’s fine really but moving the body out of danger should be in the sequence somewhere!

I felt annoyed that I have friends who are silly like that. Who get themselves deeper in shit. If you have such a friend, tell him or her off.

I wonder if Death was following me. Or, in some twisted Sixth Sense way, I was Death. Well I wouldn’t mind if Death came as Angelina Jolie (no, not Jennifer Aniston). Please don’t take my dad (though, he really does bear a striking malevolent resemblance to Anthony Hopkins.) Yeah that was a Meet Joe Black reference.

The next morning, I wanted to take a cab. It was raining. I saw a gray patch on the curb, just as I was about to open the door. Took a while to realize that it was a dead rat… with all its hair gone. I would not have recognized it it not for a solitary fly on it.

I told the cabbie my destination.

“My meter is dead.” The elderly cab driver told me.

“Okay, then it’s usually RM3 anyway.”

“No, where can, RM4 lah.”

RM4? CHOI!!! That’s an unlucky number! 4 means death in Cantonese!

No thanks, I told him.

Was the elderly cabbie Death? If so… Was Death trying to cheat me? Instead of me cheating Death?

Then I remembered who else Death could’ve brushed. My paternal grandmother is in the hospital because she got another stroke. I hope she gets well. I hope she wayyy outlives her husband who passed away in the 90’s in his 80’s. I miss him. I deeply regret that his last healthy years were spent bringing me to the KFC in Central Market. He was old and he wanted something strong in flavor; his sense of taste was diminishing already.

So I walked to my RM3 destination, puddles and motorbikes whizzing by. At that point I just had this premonition of limited mortality.

I reached the station anyway. I looked at the life line of my palms, in case it would animatedly erase away like what happened to Marty McFly in Back To The Future (in the movie, it was him disappearing from a picture). What a memorable scene, that was!

The last time I felt like this, I wrote an unofficial will. The feeling is very… inspiring.

Ze Karma Sutra

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Once you�ve been tagged, you have to write a note with 16 random things, shortcomings, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose 16 people to be tagged, listing their names and why you chose them. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

Ze Great (Random) 16 According to Ze Great Albert
1. I have a wah pedal but no electric guitar
2. I can sing 3 solos or riffs from whatever favorite music I list on Facebook (that’s how I quantify if they’re favorite enough or not)
3. I have athletic legs but nobody knows this because I wear long trousers all the time
4. My secret to long, wavy, lustrous hair is to reduce on oil-cleaning substances like shampoo
5. I programmed my own blog system which is in use now, as well as the first incarnation of the Xfresh blog, based on it
6. I was doing AJAX before it was called AJAX and before there was Firefox
7. Gmail never works for me, it tends to fail to load
8. Firefox before 2.0 never worked for me either
9. MSN Messenger stopped working for me and it lags like nothing I’ve ever seen before
10. I practically don’t use the F-word
11. I still have not figured out the right ratio of coffee to creamer to sugar
12. Some people think I’m an artist or deejay
13. The artist bit is true somewhat, I tended to doodle a lot in school and some meetings
14. I miss my old office where we could see chicks walk in and out of the elevator in front of us everyday
15. I don’t watch any contemporary series e.g. Heroes or Lost
16. I often don’t follow the format… for example here, I didn’t tag anybody! I’m even kind enough not to tag Jolin back!

9-11, Moonshine!

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Moonshine September 11th 2008, Laundry Bar!

And that was the return of the Qings & Kueens, one of the most melodic hard rock bands out there.

Onto something brilliant and vastly technical – Tokyo Blue!

I would like to hereby declare them “dramatic jazz”. You heard it here first!

They are the shadows of other great bands before them, which each member came from.

Ywenna! I first knew her as one half of Rhapsody. What a classic duo that was.

Poova! Poova-ful voice. She brings the band into verse-chorus-verse sensibility.

So how do you make a post-rock band? First, you place a few pedals on the floor. Don’t bother connecting them, let the static jump between pedals, causing an ad hoc wireless connection. So you don’t have to go through all the trouble to make the white noise – it will all come to you naturally.

Then, you get a diverse drummer.

Oh and a prerequisite is a Fender Jaguar, Mustang or Jagstang. Those switches add to post-rockingness!

But seriously man, I like Furniture.

And then, there was the Stoned Revivals.

Vandal popped by to drop a line.

Netto @ Latte @ 8

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The answer to my question as to who is being watched, is of course Andrew Netto!

For some reason, I like this shot of him the most. It’s as if the stars fell into place.

Rewind to when he had shorter hair…

…and the college girl skit.

One staple is of course, the dance skit. Someday when he has all his stuff up on Youtube I’ll be able to reference it.

He is joined by the Ramanados for a song!

This is one of his many politician skits, I’m sure.

This is his rempit skit. Gotta love the voice he puts on for this!

As of late I find I am unable to ‘put on voices’. This saddens me.

Seeing the difference in tie and suit made me realize that I don’t actually have any suits. This also saddens me.

Don’t mind this shot, he’s actually generally acknowledged as Malaysia’s youngest stand-up comedian. (Does that mean that other stand-ups only get into stand-up later in their lives, as a sideline to their thespian activities? Perhaps. But Andrew wasn’t a thespian as far as I knew.)

Sometime 24th October 2008, I caught Latte@8 (you mean they still show this?)

Jason Lo himself does a stand-up routine before his show.

Audience impressions.

Well I laughed! So I must have an advanced sense of humor, as he does. Catch him on Actorlympics and his jokes are some of the sharper ones!

Al Jazeera reporters know how to cycle their face to different cameras every few seconds. I kid you not.

Then it was Mr. Netto’s turn to be on the show, giving a stand-up routine before that.

He uncovers what’s under his jacket…

…before his interview with Jason the Chelsea fan.

Gotcha!^TM

Interestingly, in an earlier part of the interview with the reporter, Jason blurted out his radio station affiliation, which is in a competitor company to the company which produces Latte@8… on live TV. I know if he did the reverse, the competitor company would freak out and go all out on damage control.

“Eh come back la.”

It’s no longer the Tak Nak guy or the Drummer Boy or the Estranged drummer Azwin Andy – it’s now DJ Nas-T, or Abu of KAMI. KAMI was a great movie, by the way…

It had been a long time since I’d seen him. I told him what I thought about the movie. He asked, “Did you cry when I died?”

“Oh shit, I don’t remember if I did.”

Oh shit, I just gave out a spoiler.

But now that I think about it, yes I did cry. And ironically Winamp’s randomizer picked Johnny Cash – Cry Cry Cry.

And then, it was Laila’s Lounge to end the set.

These boys will be up on Fat Boys Records’ annual (well, almost, forgoing 2007) rock festival, Rock The World 8.

Say what?

What: Rock The World 8
When: 12 noon to 12 midnight, 20th December 2008
Where: The Secret Garden, Merdeka Stadium (in other words, the parking lot)
How Much: RM25. Tickets are available at Extreme outlets, Music Valley, Rock Corner, Maju Junction Mall and at the event itself.
Who: Butterfingers, Estranged, One Buck Short, OAG, Koffin Kanser, Pure Vibracions, The Times, Bunkface, Republic Of Brickfields, They Will Kill Us All, Zip Zieller, Upon Arrival, Komplot, Laila’s Lounge, The Otherside Orchestra, Revenge

Yes you’re probably thinking the same thing, haven’t we seen most of these bands before? Heck who cares man, it’s the one festival to bump into all your rocker buddies and have a good headbang!

Oh and then there’s Moonshine: A Homemade Acoustic Show this weekend.

What: Moonshine: A Homemade Acoustic Show
When: 9:30pm to 12:30am, 22nd November 2008
Where: The Apartment Downtown, KLCC
How Much: Free, but buy one of them funky drinks
Who: Mia Palencia (jazz/soul diva!), Melina William, Zalila Lee and Slowjaxx

Melina on acoustic! This is a rare show, where this progressive guitar hero plays tunes meant for an entire band with all the riffs and parts all crammed into one guitar while she sings.

Glaring Notebook

Pressed For Words