The Red Room, located on the second storey of a chic bar and restaurant called Little Havana in the Bukit Bintang area of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, usually provides a dance floor for party revelers to jive the night away to such Latin rhythms as the salsa, merengue and Tango Argentino. On a Saturday night in February this year, however, the local Shakiras or Ricky Martins were nowhere in sight. Instead, the venue was host to a multi-genre gig called Locos Furioso, or, “Raging Lunatics”, that would feature, among others, a cross-dressing grindcore act. The headliners were Modar, an old school doom metal band whose 1992 release, Inferior Symphony, was an underground classic in a country where the many subterranean variants of metal have enjoyed a dedicated underground following since the eighties. Clearly looking like an intense night of heavy music, most fans were still not exactly prepared for the opening act. Calling themselves Klangmutationen, the unassuming five-man band clambered on stage and without so much as eye contact, began unleashing an unholy racquet: the stocky guitarist, with his back turned in a corner, communed with his amplifier to generate a high droning feedback while thrashing a low detuned guitar; the lanky drummer was a study in textured chaos of fine strokes and ritualistic flourishes; the bassist provided the only semblance of melody with angular runs around the fretboard; and the raw power section of two skronk saxophonists skritched and skratched integral pathways to the skull.

With a name like Klangmutationen, literally “sound mutations” in German, it was no surprise that the quintet made occasional nods to the primal surge of Krautrock, although also invoking the Japanese free jazz/avant rock figures of the seventies such as Takayanagi Masayuki/Abe Kaoru. The band’s name is also a play on the Klang Valley in KL, where most members reside, and headquarters of the Experimental Musicians and Artists Co-Operative Malaysia (EMACM), an artist-run collective dedicated to the facilitation and creation of experimental works of art. Their primary activities are in music and sound, but they also support work in the visual and kinetic arts, encouraging a cross-pollination of all forms. Their blog is frequently updated with announcements of their numerous gigs, talks and film screenings held all year round, usually in their studio in the industrial town of Cheras, KL.

The EMACM’s big breakthrough came in 2004 when it began a label, Xing-Wu, to release experimental music. Xing-Wu’s first project was the release of a double-disc compilation, Insight, that received fanfare in international experimental circles for its excellent curatorship, especially since few had even been aware of the existence of an experimental music scene in this part of the world. The compilation slotted Malaysian artists Yandsen, Tham Kar Mun, Yeoh Yin Pin, Goh Lee Kwang and Zai De (an improvised performance comprising Yandsen, Tham, Yeoh and Alex Lam) within an international lineup featuring some of the finest lights in today’s experimental/avant garde scene of electroacoustic improvisation, found sound and lowercase, including Taku Sugimoto, Volcano the Bear, Oren Ambarchi and Janek Schaefer. What was significant was how well the Malaysian acts stood up to their more established international contemporaries. The compilation was eventually voted one of the top twenty compilation albums of 2004 by the well-regarded British experimental music publication, The Wire.

Most of the Malaysian artists on Insight are the prime movers of experimental music in Malaysia. Goh Lee Kwang, for example, has toured Europe widely with his “no-input” instruments; his latest CD, self-released on his Herbal Records, contains selected improvisations with a no-input stereo DJ mixer. Goh connects the inputs directly to the outputs on his mixer to generate a feedback loop which he proceeds to modulate in texture and microtone. Goh’s skittering analogue electronics range from meditative whirr to overwhelming rush, invoking very direct and raw emotions from the listener. The second Xing-Wu release, Shang (“up”, or “going forwards”) is a wholly Malaysian affair with Tham, Yeoh and Yandsen making a re-appearance with three solo compositions. A standout is Yeoh’s found sound piece of a Chinese-Taoist funeral in Klang, edited to tease out the emotional overtones in the wailing horns of the ritual. It is a haunting and immersive piece that revels in an aspect of Malaysia few outside truly understand.

The EMACM’s latest initiative is Klangmutationen’s second album, Weiße Messe. The band’s first album, Session Zero, was released on drummer Tan Kok Hui’s Lam’i-nal Records, to a small CDR run. The new album has been released on vinyl on the Holy Mountain label from Portland, Oregon, a seminal underground label home to free folks Six Organs of Admittance, trance-metallers Om, and Daniel Higgs, formerly from the post-hardcore Lungfish. Touted as “organic free metal from Malaysia!”, Weiße Messe contains cuts from the Little Havana gig and is slowly winning international kudos and hopefully getting a global audience interested again in the febrile Malaysian experimental music scene, after the lull that hit after the first two Xing-Wu releases.

To get a better sense of this exciting but somewhat confounding music, one might perhaps like to try seeking out the EMACM’s free net label, < sudut, which offers three downloadable tracks by the collective's members. Sudut is Malay for “corner”, “angle”, “aspect” or “point of view” and sound enthusiasts looking to expand their listening horizons could do no worse than seek out the experimental sound revolution that’s occurring in Kuala Lumpur.

The budding popularity of what has been labelled “post-rock” in the Malaysian and Singaporean indie music circles in the last half decade, gives impetus for a closer look at the music behind the genre, its historical progenitors, local instigators and musical milestones in the two states.

Suitably ambiguous, the term post-rock gained popularity during the nineties to describe various experimental strands of music seeking to go beyond the confines and excesses of what had, over the decades, become an over-bearing and over-boring rock convention. As British music scribe Simon Reynolds wrote in his definitive mapping of the nascent post-rock landscape in 1994, one of the genre’s key features was that it “hijacked elements of rock for non-rock purposes”. Influenced by a diverse range of music including kraut-rock, ambient, jazz, minimalism, avant garde and IDM, bands as disparate as Slint, Tortoise, June of 44, Stereolab, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Rós shared an aesthetic preference for textures over riffs, dynamics over verse-chorus-versus structures, loosely signalling a shift in emphasis from dominant melody lines to the blissed out sonic plateaus of atmosphere and mood.

It is important, however, to remember that this is very much a retrospective categorisation and that many pioneering post-rock bands tended to develop mainly out of their respective local scenes with their own musical traditions and not with any grand international agenda in mind. Thus bands like Tortoise, Sea and Cake and Chicago Underground grew out of the roster of bands from Chicago’s Thrill Jockey label that mixed new electronic sounds with the city’s lively jazz traditions. Another scene such as the one centred around Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Constellation records had a strong “outsider” cultural-geographic flavour owing to the city’s rich and proud French-Canadian history. The nine-person collective blended their classical music and hardcore punk roots to create a moving orchestral rock music that explored the possibilities of communal action in a context of global hegemonic politics. While there were no “lyrics” or “vocals” as we know in the traditional rock context, Godspeed! popularised the use of field recordings such as environmental sounds or eschatological samples in independent music circles (even while such techniques were already common in avant garde or hip hop circles).

Meanwhile, the nineties in Malaysia and Singapore was a time when underground DIY scenes that kick-started in the eighties were still finding their footing. While the post-rock experiments and genre explosions were taking place in indie scenes in Europe and America, bands in Malaysia and Singapore were still grappling with finding venues to play, financial difficulties of recording or getting local interest from a mainstream audience with a bias towards indigenous creative products. Even as the underground scenes in both countries did build up some momentum in the early to middle of the decade, a stagnation was reached by the end of the nineties. Many bands formed by youths at the start of the decade broke up or went on indefinite hiatuses by the end as band members reached adulthood and decided to focus on families or careers. In Singapore, the departure of Japanese label Pony Canyon, which had originally set up a local office to nurture local talent, put a damper on hopes to develop a sustainable local music industry.

Moreover, punk, hardcore, rock and metal variants were the musical expressions of the day, largely influenced by American and British bands of the eighties and nineties, and most bands were more interested in achieving the sounds of their idols rather than charting their own musical course. By the turn of the century, the ubiquity of youth-oriented music television and hits radio stations promoting alternative rock forms such as emo and nu-metal created thousands of local spin-offs worldwide, including Malaysia and Singapore. At the same time, however, the burgeoning Internet and mp3 revolution was facilitating the exchange of music and ideas like never before. Musicians tired of traditional rock forms were finding inspiration in diverse musical expressions across the globe. As Damn Dirty Apes’ leader Pedram Djavadkhani remarked in 2005 on his band’s breakthrough in 2002: “It was all pure dumb luck. A classic case of the right time at the right place. The music scene was starting to get stale really. It was an era of emo and nu-metal bands. My God, people were ready for change!”

The movement towards some kind of a “post-rock” thus emerged from this backdrop. Damn Dirty Apes are considered a pioneer in beginning post-rock in Malaysia. Formed in 1999 and hailing from Penang, the band amassed greater interest in their work when they travelled to Kuala Lumpur to perform in 2002. That same year the Apes released an EP, Valve State Dreams, that ignited the post-rock fantasies of the Malaysian music scene. Wearing their My Bloody Valentine and Mogwai influences openly on their sleeves, the Apes’ debut release was alternately calm like a glide through warm chambers of dreamy echoes and intermittently met by rapturous bouts of distorted turbulence. With high production values, the release was met with critical and popular approval, as was their full length album, Ape Kill Ape, released two years later.

In contrast to the more serious and pensive moods created by Damn Dirty Apes and other post-rock bands in general, Cyberjaya’s Sgt. Weener Arms were always marked by a gleeful fun from the get go. Blatant, loose and sprawling, their songs were usually upbeat and optimistic, laser-guided by melodic synth lines. Although well-loved in many quarters, the band retired in 2006 without a release to its name.

Furniture, on the other hand, released their debut album, Twilight Chases the Sun, in 2005 to near universal praise from both sides of the causeway. Characterised by tight structures, lush arrangements and bright melodies, Furniture are arguably the most accessible amongst their peers. Even as the band uses more conventional pop elements and lyrics, the frail voice of multi-instrumentalist/maverick producer Ronnie Khoo, an acquired taste for many, becomes just another sonic effect in the band’s library of sounds. Delightfully grandiose and diverse, Furniture even explores IDM elements on some tracks, placing the band somewhere on the musical spectrum beween Björk and Tortoise.

The appearance of Malaysians Furniture and Sgt. Weener Arms at Singapore’s Baybeats 2004, an annual three-day outdoor music festival, was a key occasion in the rich dialogue that has since taken place between Malaysia and Singapore post-rock. Backed by strong support from friends and fans from Malaysia, Furniture and Sgt. Weener Arms thrilled Singaporeans with their effects-wracked sonic excursions, a huge contrast to the Singapore contingent playing largely emo rock music.

Curiously, it was a year before, in 2003, that a Singapore band with post-rock influences made their first and only Baybeats appearance. Hearing Hill, a Godspeed!-styled collective with at least seven key members played long haunting passages featuring a brass section, toy piano and various objects such as pincers, scratching out tiny tremors from electric guitars. Just weeks before, they played at an event called Cacophony Healing Movement, where their drunken vocalist yelped like Yoko Ono as the band tottered on (and occasionally toppled over) a knife’s edge between pure melody and utter dissonance. The band, presently inactive, is usually classified as an avant garde act, but their project of sonic experimentation within a more regular rhythm section follows the pathways laid by bands like Tortoise and Godspeed! and qualifies them as early Singapore post-rockers, even as most audiences never did catch on to their discordant project.

Sharing the bill with Hearing Hill at Cacophony Healing Movement was I am David Sparkle. Formed in 2001 and acknowledged as forerunners to post-rock in Singapore, the band was made up from former members of such indie rock bands as Stroll and Return to Fall. For a four-piece band with no vocalist, I am David Sparkle are named after an eighties Malay disco singer in jest, but there are few traces of similar humour (or even if there were, they were so wry that they’d gone from depressing to wry and back to depressing again) in the music. I am David Sparkle chug repetitious melodic and harmonic lines that build into bursting emotional climaxes with equally moody song titles such as “Apocalypse of Your Heart”. This was also the title track from their debut EP, which was released last year to some criticism that post-rock bands from Singapore and Malaysia were becoming poor imitators of post-rock bands from the west such as Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky—bands that were themselves being criticised for codifying and making formulaic a music that originally showed the promise of musical experimentation and movements away from rock gestures but was now at its worst, repeating cheap tricks of loud-soft-loud dynamics to stimulate a response from audiences: from post-rock to pose-rock, it seems.

Controversially, one such harsh review of I am David Sparkle was published in Think Online and written by Furniture’s bassist Adrian Yap, sparking a cross-border skirmish in the popular Malaysian Webzine’s comments boxes. Yap concluded in his review: “It is […] arguable that post-rock was always set up to fail. A genre built on repetition hardly ever looked able to sustain the interest of attention-deficient indie kids with hardworking P2P programs.” Importantly, Furniture themselves have always led the way in encouraging a critical self-reflexivity in the music scenes in Malaysia and Singapore. In 2005, front man Ronnie had expounded on the nature of post-rock in an interview:

“I wanted to explore something outside of the standard 4 chord progression that gets repeated for 5 minutes with variations to loud and soft, although that’s great. Post-rock was originally a term used by the press to describe ambient-ish bands that couldn’t easily fit categorization, but after a while it became a kind of joke. Bands were declaring themselves post-rock which just proves that they weren’t really. I wanted to disassociate from the genre but capture the adventurous unclassifiable spirit behind the original intent of the term. So we worked with some of the familiar instrumental build ups often associated with post-rock, and a lot more besides. And no we are not a post-rock band, we’re just a band [….] What the heck is post-rock anyway?”

Whatever it is, there are undoubtedly a thriving crop of bands in Malaysia and Singapore with a keen proclivity to go post-rock. From the pummelling live improvisation of the Kuala Lumpur Post-Harmonic Quintet to the sprightly eighties American TV jaunts of Singapore’s ShameJoannShame, from the galactic chaos of Malaysia’s Akta Angkasa (literally “space act/law”) to the cinematic scores of Singapore’s Documentary in Amber (whose debut EP defies genre conventions by featuring a surprising spoken word piece), it will be exciting to see what developments follow from the febrile post-rock scene of the region.

AMRAN KHAMIS knows his six-year-old instrumental rock combo I Am David Sparkle will never be the Lion City’s answer to Linkin Park. While radio-friendly Singapore rockers Electrico and the Great Spy Experiment continue to win fans, I Am David Sparkle seems destined to be leftfield trailblazers making music that is strictly for the hardcore.

Even though their music might be hard to wrap your head around at first listen, dig a little deeper and you'll find a band completely adept at weaving a sophisticated web of harmonies that are as melodramatically mind warped as they are seductive. It’s a quality that’s held the quartet - which features long time friends Amran, Djohan Johari, Farizwan Fajari and Zahir Sanosi - in good stead within the local indie rock circuit.

With only two albums - 2006’s Apocalypse Of Your Heart and the recently released This Is A New - under their belts, I Am David Sparkle have since chalked appearances at Singapore indie rock event Baybeats and shared the stage with hip-hop legends The Beastie Boys at the Good Vibrations Festival at the Fort Canning Park last February.

A performance at next month's ZoukOut in Singapore’s Sentosa Island is also in the cards.

But it was a concert in Malacca last month that the band swears is their most memorable yet.
“Actually, we had mixed feelings about playing Malacca because we weren't sure if we'd go down well,” Amran said of Recharge Revelation 5 Global Gathering where the band held their own against big names like Simian Mobile Disco and the Jungle Brothers.

The trip there still lingers in Amran’s memory: Not only were they in danger of missing the show due to traveling schedule mix-ups but on the day of their performance, their manager Lesley Chew from Kitty Wu Records broke her leg after a bout of drunken roller-skating at the disco tent.

Luckily, their 45-minute set - playing under the blazing sun and surrounded by fields of mud brought on by the previous night’s rain - went down a storm.

“I think we played a good set to a small but appreciative audience but even though the festival on the whole could do with better on-site management, we still had fun,” added the 30-year-old guitarist.

In December, the foursome will also play at the granddaddy festival of them all, ZoukOut at Sentosa.
It’s an impressive resume for a band that has nothing at all in common with the play list of the I-Pod DJ playing at your local indie disco.

They continue to be a force of sound and fury: On their recently released second album This Is A New (recorded over a six month period in a studio deep in the heart of Little India in Singapore), I Am David Sparkle have crafted a thunderous brew of thrashing guitars, burrowing bass lines and lightly brushed drums that straddle the divide between punchy anthems and wistful ambient textures.
 
FOR NOW, the band is perfectly comfortable with the fact that their quest for world domination begins with trips to Malacca and Kuala Lumpur.

Never mind that back home, this zeal to create something out of the norm has had some music fans tagging them as ‘pretentious’.

“I don’t think we are pretentious because we make instrumental tracks without a singer although being ‘boring’ without lyrics would be a far scarier thought,” counters Amran.

“I think we’re comfortable enough to play our instrumental music to the listeners and the only challenge now is to make sure that we are able to connect with them throughout without any lyrics delivered - either on the record or in a live situation.”

Setbacks notwithstanding, playing to Malaysian audiences is always a joy for the band. “When we played Kuala Lumpur in February this year, we all had a fantastic experience,” he beamed. “We’ve had people writing to us from Kelantan to Sarawak, telling us how they loved what we were doing. It is moments like these that make you want to always get better at what you are doing.”

Contrary to popular belief, Singaporean rockers are making their mark overseas: Punk bands Plain Sunset and My Precious have played in New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan, local hardcore heroes Stompin’ Ground have an almost fanatical following in Malaysia while black metal outfit Impeity scored underground acclaim following a string of successful dates in Europe two years ago.

The Internet has obviously done wonders in helping Singaporean rockers cross borders. “It definitely helped struggling bands to get their music further all over the world to more appreciative audiences that could help them with word-of-mouth promotion, online sales and setting up tours,” said Amran.
But the relying on cyberspace isn’t enough - these achievements also come from the networks built and a lot of the hard work, he added.
 
EVEN AS SINGAPOREAN rock continues to strike a chord with regional fans, Amran feels more needs to be done to get local bands more acceptance back home.

“There are very few avenues here for shows to happen and for bands here to play in a proper club setting,” he argues. “Even now, it is still hard for bands signed with small independent labels to get their music stocked at the big stores here. So whilst the musicians and bands have improved and continue to be hard working, there isn’t the necessary related infrastructure work that is needed for the scene to be sustainable and grow exponentially.”

For Amran, the limited channels available - be it the online music stations Unpopular Music and Sweetmusic.FM or dedicated music websites like AgingYouth.com - aren’t enough. “The bands can only do so much on their own and at the end of the day, they will do whatever is needed to help themselves, and not necessarily the music scene at large. Which is why the bands need others to do this for them.”

This is exactly why a lot of Singaporean bands head elsewhere for gigs: It gives them the opportunity to seek newer pastures rather than cannibalize the already meagre fan base back home.

But don't let this grim picture fool you. Amran assures me that no amount of negativity will tear I Am David Sparkle away from the prospect of tinkering further with sounds, ideas and concepts.
Already plans are afoot for a regional tour, and a gig composing music for a play is also in the pipeline.
“The band has been around for a significant amount of time, and after some hurdles and even moments of inactivity in our past we do want to make the band better and reach out to more people from now on,” he said sheepishly.
 
To check out I Am David Sparkle‘s music, visit www.iamdavidsparkle.com or www.myspace.com/iamdavidsparkle. To contact the band, e-mail iamdavidsparkle@gmail.com.