Anger! Damnation. Self-preservation.
Fear of tiny spaces.
Aggression.
Violence.
Sweat glands break loose.
Take off your shirt. Dammit.
The only barriers are people like you. Coming in like waves.
PUSH SHOVE GRAB PULL KICK PUNCH JUMP. Super combo move of the century.
ASTRO rocks. They take care of their employees. I got one of these for free:
Now I can stand behind express buses and go, “you can’t hurt me!” Now I can go to the smoking section of ASTRO and hang out with the cool people.
Drat. The Rock Around The Clock gig was postponed till further notice. So says the man woman, Irene. What about Cosmic Funk Express at the Mont Kiara Jazz Fest? Alda hopes that it rains before the show or there might not be one.
The lack of rain is just the lack of bad singers. If anyone has ever told you to stop singing, now is your turn to shine! Maybe, just maybe, if I could sneak one of my songs onto Xfresh FM and get it played nationwide, it just might work.
So I was at Paul’s Place, and Paul was playing the CD he usually played in between bands. Some fancy shredder rock stuff.
Me: Who is this?
He: Oh! This is Jerry Felix.
Me: The Yamaha-endorsed professional drummer?
He: Yeah. Did you know that Jaclyn Victor of Malaysian Idol used to sing for him?
Me: Really? But it’s a guy singing this.
He: Oh, it’s one of the other band members. She sings on some other tracks. We might play it later if this band isn’t done doing their soundcheck.
Turns out I have that album! It’s Jerry Felix – … At Last! and Jaclyn sings in 3 of 14 songs. Ever wondered why her rendition of Sweet Child Of Mine was so sweet? Go get the album. She used to sing with these shredders (and drum-soloers or whatever you call drummer versions of flashy guitarists.)
Turns out Paul plays the CD in order. Those of you regulars will recognize the one with the aeroplane takeoff intro as Cherry Blossom, followed by Jaclyn’s Circles and Look, Don’t Touch, the hard rocking song I heard when the revealing conversation took place.
So yeah, now you know Jaclyn wasn’t just a pub singer with an album.
P.S. The title does not imply that she played guitar. It’s just yet another pun.
I went to the Macam Macam Ada gig last Saturday. Here’s to more pictures!
From left to right, then down a line:
Eddy is finally a true blue green rock star. Incredible! Plus he plays mean harmonica with the new cast of Triple 6 Poser (whatever happened to the name change, people?)
Well yeah end of story. Not.
It’s the end of the world! The haze came down for a visit on Tuesday. I couldn’t stop myself from taking loads of pictures. It was like Genting, but smelling of smoke instead.
What: Uh, a Hartamas Square gig?
When: 8pm Thursday August 4th 2005
Where: Hartamas Square
Who: Broken Scar, Soft Touch, Flatline
How much: Free I suppose, just buy a drink and plop yourself in one of those seats
What: Acoustic guitar workshop with Az Samad and vocal workshop with Shelley Leong
When: 2-4pm Sunday 7th August 2005
Where: The Music Hut, Bandar Damansara Perdana; call 03-77109198 or 012-6510445 for bookings.
Who: Az Samad and Shelley Leong
How much: RM10
What: Spirit Of Independence
When: 4pm Sunday 7th August 2005
Where: Paul’s New Place
Who: Dragon Red, NAO, Furniture, Shelley Leong, Soft Touch, Tempered Mental, Y2K, Cosmic Funk Express, Jasemaine and X-cited Screamers
How much: RM12 and you get a free wristband while stocks last
What: Rock Around The Clock (or Poseidon’s album launch. Kickass shredding!)
When: 6pm Friday 12th August 2005
Where: Paul’s New Place
Who: Borange, Inverted Coma, Vineyard, Fuselage, Stonebay, Warve, Poseidon, Frequency Cannon, Vespertine, Cosmic Funk Express, Beat The System, Infiltrated
How much: RM15 and you get one free drink
What: Mont Kiara Jazz Fest
When: 10pm Friday 12th August 2005
Where: Sunrise Plaza Mont Kiara
Who: Cosmic Funk Express, Outrageous
How much: You can sit in front for free or buy an expensive alcoholic drink and have a seat.
What: The Fretboard Menace
When: 8pm Friday 26th August 2005
Where: KL JamAsia, No. 19-1, Jalan 22A/70A, Plaza Crystalville, Desa Sri Hartamas
Who: Az Samad, Cosmic Funk Express, Deja Voodoo Spells (and they’ll do a G3-style bit at the end! I wonder who the bassist and drummer will be, though…)
How much: RM15 with a free drink; first 20 females get in free.
The reason why I advertise these gigs is because that might actually help instead of telling people how they missed a great performance. And yes, I’m going for all of them. I’ve also been roped in to take pictures for Irene (who will then pass it to the New Straits Times newspaper) so if you wanna appear in the newspaper, look for me and I’ll make you famous. It might help if you looked like you were rocking out. Yes I admit that my digital camera’s picture quality isn’t that great but it was used to take that big mugshot of Frequency Cannon in NST. (Well the photographer ran out of batteries so he borrowed mine…)
The only shaky plans are the acoustic guitar workshop (until I master the art of teleportation) and the jazz fest (since I’ve already seen Cosmic Funk Express and have to take pictures…) Why can’t they have the jazz fest clumped up into a nice Friday night like last year’s, when all the bands I wanted to see all played the same night?
I was on the LRT to Bangsar when I saw this:
Goodbye, red sky. The end of the world is near.
Into tripods we fly. Black void of death we fear.
We satisfy the thirst like our blood was beer.
But you choke and you die and we live to cheer.
This effect was done with Vivid color settings, +2 EV, and ISO 400 sensitivity. There was no color or brightness adjustment; only resize and sharpen! Interestingly, the pillars look like they were negative; this is because of the moss on top that made it look inverted.
I received a ringtone last night, at 9pm. I accidentally pressed the right soft key of my Nokia 3350 and it was gone! I frantically searched my Tones menu for a way to retrieve it, and at least thank whoever it is who sent it for the ringtone. Unfortunately it was nowhere to be found.
I went to sleep wondering who this mystery ringtone sender was. Was she my secret admirer?
I woke up the next morning, and I received another ringtone. It was titled “Beautiful“. I saved it, but there was no way to know who my secret admirer was!
Ah well, some of you with good old Nokias might be able to reconstruct it and find out what song this is:
Tempo: 180 bpm
Yes, it’s monophonic. None of that fancy polyphonic stuff.
Originally written back in March 2005. I felt like blogging some filler.
I woke up this morning with a bad bad cold
I woke up this morning and boy was I feeling old
I woke up this morning or so I was told
I carried a shotgun to blow off his pale face skin
It took more than his skin, it blew his skull within
Forgive me oh please pa, I didn’t wanna sin
I’d been more than keen to have seen what you’ve seen in him
Obscene he’s not clean, the sheen on his spleen was dim
I should’ve just slapped him, for telling a lie
I should’ve just slapped him, for saying no in reply
I should’ve just slapped him, for it’s a big mess when you die
4th June 2005
Oh come on you’ve seen enough pictures of Azmyl Yunor and Broken Scar. So it was Rafil of 360 Degree Head Rotation‘s flash gig. Yes I have not done picture-full blogs in a while.
I will blog about the pictures from left to right, top to bottom.
Alex Ang of Soft Touch, Naked Breed, Indka and zillions of other bands more famous than these; some Chinese dude whose name I forgot; Paul cemented all three of his mike stands to the stage; 360 Degree Head Rotation’s son shreds with Paul Millot improvising drums (for some reason Alex did not drum this time, but sang!); Kevin and I went to Alexis again for Shelley‘s gig day 2 and passed by the Sultan Abdul Samad building; Great Eastern Mall’s escalators.
5th June 2005
The Troubadours debut gig featured Mei Chern (the number one downloaded artiste on MusicCanteen; 100 bottles of beer on the wall ceiling; Melina of Tempered Mental; Prozac Nation doing covers of Stereophonics and Placebo; the Bomba energy drink they gave out; La Bodega, through the mirror behind the bar.
I didn’t pay attention to the gig because I came late and went for dinner, but uh Reza and Jerome Kugan and Alex Ang and Saer Ze and Izzy Mohd played.
And now, for unrelated pictures:
A sexy red Mazda RX-8; Azira does not know that you should eat a chocolate-filled donut from the side with the hole first to avoid ejecting the filling out on the other side; my attempt to make fake dreadlocks by twirling hair and then pushing it upwards; you can’t really see it, but… yeah I guess you can’t really see the little dreads dammit. 🙁 And finally, my collection of Transformers Alternators in half transformation mode, from left to right: Meister, Decepticharge (I sold him to YK so I could get Windcharger, a red Honda S2000 instead), Sideswipe, Tracks and the new superstar, Hound.
The new Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre seems to go on forever; inside, it goes on forever too; there are two phrases that effectively divert the path of a female – SALE and Last Day; KLCC buskers have resonator guitars, how cool is that; a “Mitsubishi Lancer” with sunroof that looks suspiciously like a Proton Wira; yet another attempt to mess up my hair.
Then there’s the new unreleased range of Sony Ericssons which Xfresh TV got to review (with 3 current phones tumpang glamor (trying to steal the limelight)); and a Mazda RX-8 again. Yummy blue.
17th June 2005
Now back to the Starbucks Music Series week 1:
Fergus Ong has the innocent church guitar voice (go read his blog it’s Seinfeld-like funny); Reza has some new numbers with him rapping ala Jason Mraz; Azmyl Yunor, you know; and the dashboard of a Perodua MyVi has buttons so big you just wanna press them, plus the inside is so big!
18th June 2005
And now, for the Fete De La Musique on Saturday at One Utama:
I got there and caught Jenifur taking pictures of the rainforest; the beauty of the Fete is that if you are bored, you can walk about and shop; turns out The Rebel Scum were carrying bags because they had posters inside to give throw away; Stone Free sounded promising as it was a name of a Jimi Hendrix song, and they covered BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone; Naked Breed (I like this picture’s perspective); and Zack of Cosmic Funk Express… with Tempered Mental! That was interesting indeed since his effects are different, he did not do his regular fretboard gymnastics and he swayed about with a grin in his usual manner.
I didn’t include pictures of the other bands because there was nothing memorable about them not knowing how to balance their sound. Most bands that afternoon (pardon me if I was there only half the time) were amateur un-gigged unseasoned bands, plus some hitz.tv Blast Off hip-hop/R&B washouts.
Poor Davina shouting because they stole her mike – no she does not suck; it’s been a hard day’s night; turns out they were turning the stage to face the highway instead of the rainforest; apparently the professionalism of the sound crew said that the sound monitors should be so far from the stage.
I pity the stage prop for Inside A Whale; Borange had super fuzzy, piercing guitar that soon blew the amp; Gloomhida played good funk; Nephotetix played Killswitch Engage covers and provided a good time to headbang.
I seem to have forgotten to take shots of Function Z, a young church band who seems to have gotten loads better (minus the missed cues, possibly lack of rehearsing) than the last time I saw them at the Hoobastank Battle Of The Bands. They had loads of female groupies!
19th June 2005
Fete De La Musique, Bintang Walk, where it was meant to be, so you can walk from one stage to another in indecision:
Crawford’s Ball, doing Incubus covers; Seven, a funky band; Sicksociety, jumping into Sepultura; some posing buskers (I don’t know if they were part of the show); all of Berjaya Times Square in one photo; the Berjaya Times Square stage, so small, you’d have to sit down to make the stage look big.
I reached Borders and finally got my chance to take a picture of the typo; Shelley and Az were playing at 3pm; after geeking with them (where they found out how much their old Transformers would have cost in the Time Machine, an antique toy shop) I ran back to Low Yat to catch Wwanao; they had a massive conga line; Inverted Coma’s hothothot bassist shows more rocking energy here when playing a Metallica cover than with Dragon Red; One Buck Short is the reason why I did not have dinner because there was a moshpit full of girls.
Ooh and when I was at Borders, there were a few people taking pictures, most notably one Borders staff. For some reason, my eyes were drawn to his name tag, and it said Ho Yi Jian. OMG! Oh My Goats! It was the Yi Jian! Of many many years ago! He used to comment in my blog, and he had a kickass blog on http://www.subsushi.com/sanityhills. Yeah I’m not linking it because it doesn’t exist anymore. His blog was one of my inspirations.
Cute T-shirt; Frequency Cannon, dude; lack of amps did not deter the Tugu Drum Circle from banging on drums and bonging; the Sungei Wang crowd; Juwita Suwito and Liang asking, “Where is the love?“; Jayaram is a rapper now, with Seventh Redemption!
Lurks, sounding a bit like Prodigy (so the emcees say); Crawford’s Ball play again, sans vocalist, and a dancer hops on stage!
Excuse me while I break the paragraph to go, “WAHAHAHA it’s Professor Amil of Dragon Red, playing bass!” Those of you who know him will understand why it’s so hilarious. Also in the picture is Shakir of Warve trying to steal the show back from him. Yes, Amil was posing front center, as he would when he had a shiny yellow guitar.
Finally, I retired to La Bodega for another Troubadours session, to catch Saiful of Y2K playing power chords on nylon strings.
Sadly, the Bukit Bintang, Lot 10, Piccolo Mondo, and KL Plaza stages were nonexistent. No amps, no stage… no music. The Sungei Wang stage was decent but the bands were a lot less established (and frequently gigging) than the ones at Low Yat.
The ever lickable, superduperfunny Jay. I’d lick like to lick this googly eyed “shine like stars“-eyed whack emcee Davina; her the day before. See I finally have proof that she can look very very different on different days!
24h June 2005
I was walking to KLCC when I saw these buskers, most notably the one without the Thundercats T-shirt doing some jazzy stuff, so I paused and stood there for an hour transfixed. He was skilled. The guy with the Thundercats T-shirt’s voice wasn’t that good but anyway this should disprove Fazri‘s notion that Thundercats T-shirts are hard to find. I asked the skilled dude, “korang boleh main blues tak?” and he went, “There’s a red house over yonder…” He even did a jazzy cover of Modjo – Lady!
Oh, right. How about the rest of the pictures? It was Khai‘s birthday, and he celebrated it in The Loft, Zouk when Twilight Action Girl was playing… so Eddy jumped about hugging everybody. Scary. YK and Tech came too, and I discovered that electro was a cool genre. Yes I was the only person there who did not listen to The Cure. Shelley and Az were there too!
25th June 2005
So the next day I headed to Bintang Walk and met up YK and Hannna. We then went to squander discounts from blog-inspiring Yi Jian, and after his shift we walked to Music Exchange to look for his second-hand Limp Bizkit album. On the way, we passed the Tenaga Nasional building that was on fire behind Lot 10! The sign shouldn’t say “This station has been operating without accidents for 930 days, last accident on 2-5-1998“. The bottom-right picture shows the damage.
Ah well, Music Exchange was closed, so YK left on the monorail and we headed to The Curve for the second week of the Starbucks Music Series. Top: Ariff Akhir heads The Sofa Sessions; left is Lucy In The Loo and right is Telebury.
Yeah yeah so I went for the PPS Bash on the 23rd of June, but are you sure you want more pictures? I shall procrastinate on that.