On the hope/despair dialectic.

Instead of going to the gathering outside the Indonesian Embassy in KL in solidarity with the Aceh punks that were detained and “reformed” last week, I followed my friends Shh…Diam! on another of their road trips to play a gig on the east coast – this time in Kuantan. There were a lot of bands playing, but I recorded these four and two others but those recordings aren’t uploaded (yet) because I don’t actually know the name of the bands.

Loop Analysis
37 min 27 sec / 51.4 MB / 192kbps MP3
Just before Loop Analysis started, the guy in the band closest to a microphone introduced the band as a post-rock band. The last song on Magic Dirt’s Young and Full of the Devil, is an instrumental version of the first song off the album – Babycakes. If you can take that as a reference point, you can start to understand the kind of “post-rock” Loop Analysis play – the more noisy, heavy, grunge form of “post-rock”. Three guitarists, a bass player and a drummer experimenting with a bunch of different ways to make noise with their instruments (for example, using a cello/violin bow). And at one point, they sound like they’re playing Zombie.

The Midnight Meeting
12 min 19 sec / 16.9 MB / 192kbps MP3
I started recording the Midnight Meeting just before they played a “Poster the People” cover. I had no idea who Poster the People were until I went home and googled “Poster the People” and google told me that I was probably looking for “Foster the People”. Of course, that Malay tendency to make F’s into P’s. I also had no idea who Foster the People were anyway, but maybe it sounds a little bit like the Midnight Meeting.

Reason to Resist
22 min 17 sec / 30.6 MB / 192kbps MP3
There’s nothing like a bit of crust to make me feel seventeen years old again. If I was to describe Reason to Resist with 2007 references, they are thrashier than Scum System Kill but crustier than Smash N Grab.

Shh…Diam!
24 min 38 sec / 33.8 MB / 192kbps MP3
Finally, I have a recording of Shh…Diam! in their rockstar mode (as opposed to their acoustic mode and other less noisy modes). The vocals sound a bit weird on this recording, like the treble got cut out, but maybe I’m just underestimating Farah’s low register. As usual, they were just a lot of fun to watch and listen too.