i have lost friends and ear drums

ow!

last night's gig, i have lost friends, by the rascally chee wai was an exercise in volume control and sad brutality. i was dumb enough to place my ass 2 metres away from the main speakers and got the full brunt of the beautiful noise. it was so loud, sorry, it was so LOUD, my jeans were flapping.

the posters for the gig was deceivingly peaceful. and chee wai's apple looked deceptively puny. chee wai fronted the first act. he began on a gold fm snooze mode. tweaking the laptop and the mixer, he plied snatches of odd conversation ontop of a bed of sleepy wet sounds. i was expecting brian richmond to come in with the traffic report. then zai kuning cut the house lights, and the party began. a rock solid cliff wall of sound came looming and hit the audience front and center. it came, blasted and nailed us to the back wall.

shit was loud.

it was unrelenting. jus when i thought it would ease up, dude tweaked another knob on the mixer and pushed us ever more back. pound for pound for rounds in that sound. yt was behind me. her foot was cold. after wat seemed like the 25th hour (it was 15 mins) the lights finally went up, and we were released back into wonderful silence.

grateful smiles erupted.

next up was zai kuning. he had a bow and a guitar sitting across him. thank god there wasnt a laptop in sight. mr zai was inarticulate rage articulated with howling sadness. he was ripping, hacking, sawing the 6 strings. so hard the bow strings kept coming off by the strands. and that strange howls, that started off malay but came out elvish. i took pictures, but ive got uploads problems man.

evan and leslie came next. their set was also in darkness, with leslie on 6 string and evan on apple. leslie concentrated on doing rock star poses and sad star noises. evan massaged his laptop and coaxed the drums. both created a soundtrack to a disaster movie of bruckheimer proportions. i envisioned helicopter chase sequences (mainly super pumas from our MIW) and caldecott hill sized giant waves. i saw heroic food drops and massive water desalination plants. i saw fiona xie canvassing sponsors for milk powder and disposable underwear. and in the end, leslie knelt in front of his buzzing guitar and fed the feedback into the audience.

the last act was this obscure norwegian band, Del. not amitri, they were billed as a drone rock band thats highly improvisional and highly original. the lead was a stocky guy with a cheerful goatee and huge slippers. from the get go, Del performed the proper definition to the term drone rock. imagine fluffy room sized cotton candy that floats from the ceiling and smothers you, layer upon layer upon layer. after 30 seconds you are embedded in sticky fluffy pink candy up to your molars. that throbbing in the back of your head is the first sign of tooth decay.



im not sure i like it all, but my jeans are happy
hootie