October | 2023 | Glaring Notebook

6th May 2016: Urbanscapes 2016 returned to the center of Kuala Lumpur, in the beautiful Art Deco building that used to host OCBC Bank, now known as 2 Hang Kasturi, and perhaps Urbanscapes House.

Graffiti in the basement floor.

I’m guessing this was the former bank’s storage area.

I’d heard of an underground bicycle parking area, but I would not be able to tell.

Annoying magenta light, the bane of concert photographers everywhere.

Makes for difficult white balance.

Urbanscapes’ first ever event was at Grappa Soho, Bukit Bintang, as an offshoot of KLue Magazine that covered the Kuala Lumpur scene; I bought that magazine and on it was a sleeve with a ticket.

I was there, and I’ve been to Urbanscapes every year since then.

Of those who went to the first, I guess not many people can claim to keep this streak.

The festival happened in many sites in Kuala Lumpur, but none as near to the origins of where Kuala Lumpur got its name as this.

The building, on the intersection of Jalan Hang Kasturi and Leboh Pasar Besar, was just a 2 minute walk from the Klang River bridge on Leboh Pasar Besar that overlooks the intersection of the Klang river and Gombak river, where a muddy estuary formed; “muddy estuary” is translated to Malay as Kuala Lumpur, and that is where it got its name, and is the zero point, or exact center, of Kuala Lumpur.

I wondered if this ever flooded.

My ticket into this venue was Hey Orang Kita (screening + live gig), which was happening on the ground floor. We got to see a short bit of the movie; after that, the cast talked about their experiences. Left to right: Raja Syahiran, Christian Palencia, Takahara Suiko, Talitha Tan.