punctuum

i'm going to mexico city on friday. for realz.

why aren't there any data roaming plans for singaporean phones in mexico?

also i cannot pronounce the name of the university i am going to be teaching a workshop at.

HELP! ROLLING IN THE HELPLESS PANIC OF THE UNKNOWN, PLUS WHY DID BBC PRINT THAT SCARY HEADLINE ARTICLE ABOUT THE DECAPITATED BODIES IN NORTHERN MEXICO DRUG GANG FIGHTING ZONE ON THE EXACT SAME DAY THAT I FOUND OUT ABOUT MY NEW TRAVEL PLANS? DID YOU KNOW HOW DIFFICULT IT WAS TO EXPLAIN TO THE FATHER I WAS GOING TO MEXICO AFTER HE READ THAT ON BBC NEWS?

NEW: DOCUMENTATIONS:
VISUAL ARTS | PERFORMANCE ART | SOUND ART
SINGAPORE & SOUTHEAST ASIA

Recent Posts:

Otomo Yoshihide + Leslie Low + Brian O'Reilly + Yuen Chee Wai + Darren Moore + Tim O'Dwyer (Creative Cube, Lasalle, 19 Feb 2011)

Cigondewah - Tisna Sanjaya (NUS Museum, 17 Feb 2011)

House & Memory / Apartment Project - ruangrupa & friends (Jakarta, Dec 2010)

Ang Song Ming + The Observatory (The Substation Theatre, 29 Jan 2011)

Zai Tang + Zai Kuning + Amino Acid Orchestra (The Substation Gallery, 27 Jan 2011)

Andy Yang + The Observatory (Earl Lu Gallery, Lasalle, 24 Jan 2011)

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THIS TIME AROUND, I ENDEAVOUR TO KEEP THIS PROJECT RUNNING AS LONG AS I POSSIBLY CAN!!!

Time for that 2010 countdown. some of my favourites for this year - once again i've also tried to limit it to tracks/albums released in 2010.

1. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs - Garden

this has secretly been my walking song for the year.




2. Lukid - Hair of the Dog

best video i've seen all year.




3. Janelle Monáe - Wondaland

its a afrofuturist messanic android. what's there not to love? she's a name to watch.




4. jj - ecstasy

whales. this will always remind me of the time i was working at RW.




5. Todd Edwards - I Might Be

still the best thing ever.

maybe i will learn german. maybe i will learn bahasa indonesian. or maybe japanese, or russian. i would love to learn all these languages. until we have learnt them, we'll speak in broken bits of words copied studiously from google translate, impressionistic sounds passed from mouth to mouth. sooner or later i'll crack your funny secret code, dear zauberwürfel.

what writing reveals is that we can never be sure what our desire was, one moment ago.

1. indian beers in a smoky dive with a florid HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign over the head of the indian man drunkenly emulating a bollywood version of michael jackson. next morning i awaken unexpectedly blinded in one eye. i stagger around hong lim complex desperately looking a doctor; unfortunately the alphabet grids for the ancient shop directory are damaged, the broken shop names accumulate in a dusty and unreadable pile.

2. sake and moscato. blackout and 4am drunken rearranging pots in my garden. i wake up early the next morning in time for work, idly creating tinfoil ducks and wrapping soft toys in tinfoil while waiting for email replies.

3. standing outside my office, deafened by cymbals from the lion dance troupe rampaging through plates of oranges, when a friend walks past asking me "where is the bank?". he hands me scraps from taiwanese map, japanese florist mag, and some unbearably cute japanese stickers. all stapled together and covered in green paint. "throw this away for me?" he asks.

4. punks dragging themselves across the floor like witches or banshees right out from a Shakespearean play, carousing with vile cans of HAYWARD 5000 and howling, "NO SONG, NO GO HOME!"

we interrupt this half-dead blog for 2009 POP SPECIAL! skimming the top of pop barrel with a filthy spoon to bring you my completely biased and skewed LIST OF TOP 10 2009 POPULAR RELEASES. my listening preferences are admittedly for the most part rather anachronistic (eschewing most modern rock for old or weird sounds - "noises" as some of you like to describe it) but i thought it would be nice to take a snapshot of what i do enjoy from popular music today (i have taken pains to sieve out only late 2008 and 2009 releases!).

this isn't strictly a "pop" list since most people probably won't consider many of the tracks to be strictly within the pop genre, but i guess this is what i conceive to be "popular" music today - music enjoyed by large, hairy, unwashed masses. (its ok, i don't comb my hair in the morning either)

i've included videos so you lazy bastards dont have to read anything and you can just point and click and entertain yourselves with the shiny pictures instead. ENJOY.

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1. Zomby - Float

Where Were U in '92 was probably my favourite album for the year. a rather intelligently stitched mashup of rave sounds (almost verging on the indulgent, but anyway most days i dont even know what moderation means!). just as i was really excited about the awesome sound collage that is Girl Talk, i guess i really like musicians who manage to make new music that is consciously aware of previous sounds which have come before it.

2. Girls Generation - Gee

i'm sorry folks, but number 2 has to be Gee by Girls Generation, or 少女時代 (SNSD) as they are more commonly known in these parts (what? you think the english kids are listening to this?). at one point this year i even tried to learn hangul by transcribing the lyrics to this korean sugary overload. as you can tell, its not too hard when half the song consists of rather profound engrish lyrics such as "YEA YEA YEA!" and "NO NO NO NO!" - PURE POP GENIUS!

3. Ladyhawke - Dusk Till Dawn

once every few years i get excited about a random song that i consider to be my guiltypleasure?/pickmeup?/working song. a few years ago it was Interpol's Say Hello To THe Angels. That song really made me feel like SEWING. While running. now i know this Ladyhawke song is so indie it hurts but but but (and dont let that part of it scare you away) it makes me feel like COLOURING. with a big box of crayons. On big pieces of paper. I think i first noticed Ladyhawke because one of her songs partially sounded like a ripoff of Gary Numan's CARS but i was amused to read later that she said that her intention was indeed to write songs which invoke nostalgia even if you are hearing them for the first time. i think she's succeeded. LETS GO COLOURING. WHILE RUNNING!!

4. Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo

Okay, Joy Orbison uses a vocal sample with only two words in it. But I like listening to this while taking a long solitary walk. I have no other words for it; it doesn't need any more words anyway.

5. Ellie Goulding - Under the Sheets (Jakwob Remix)

I'd put this on my top ten because Goulding was at one point touted gaily by the Grauniad as "2010's big thing". this is one particularly enjoyable (but slightly generic) dubstep remix - while i am not fond of her other folky stuff and wary of the use of autotune in the original, Goulding does has quite an interesting voice (lending particularly to being remixed), and a rather nervous, earnest demeanor that doesn't seem artificial or crafted by industry. i approve!

6. Sub Focus - Could This Be Real

FUNKY HOUSE + BASSLINE WOBBLES + VOCAL BREAKDOWN + PIANO RIFF + RELEASE A DNB REMIX = PROFIT??? I'd say Sub Focus makes my top 10 because its the right track for the right moment in time, cleverly capitalising on all the big sounds at the moment. do you ever feel like you've listened to so much music and so many genres and read so many music mags and music blogs that you can just about predict what music what people will be into? and knowing what will become a hit and what won't? well this song doesn't really excite me on a personal level but even just by listening to it i can immediately envision pitchfork giving it a superhigh score. anyhow, dont mind me, look at the shiny video! look at it! let me also shed a tear for that poignant moment in 2009 when i first picked up a soldering iron - one initially imagines one can build a whole world with it (or in this case, build a party for one's head!) but then in the end, all that you can do for starters is make a stupid LED blink on and off...

7. Bats for Lashes - Daniel

i probably can't call this a true pop list if i dont list at least one Mercury Award 2009 winner - amongst them the most agreeable with me is probably Bats for Lashes because her sound is sometimes like yellow wallpaper; she conveys the tone of PJ Harvey's "Is This Desire?" album (which i do adore) and there's something reminiscent of kate bush in her vocals - maybe its more apparent in "What's a girl to do" (2007):

8. Everything Everything - Photoshop Handsome

Photoshop Handsome gets inclusion because its surely one of the few indie/pop hits with PHOTOSHOP in the title and speaks for a whole generation of kids who've grown up on the internet, with the cry: "I know nothing about my history!" Bonus points for the hilarious reference to clone stamps.

9. Attacca Pesante ft Shea Soul - Make it Funky For Me

now everyone loves a big boozy party in the park, and while i'm completely sick of living in a sweaty muggy tropical island - these guys make it sound like maybe summer on the equator can't be such a bad thing. we can certainly drink outdoors any time we like, unlike in other parts of the world which enjoy the full four seasons (NYEH NYEH HAPPY WINTER YOU GUYS). i mean, i live ten minutes from the beach! perhaps i like this also because of how well the video goes with the song - very fitting footage of people dancing with red plastic cups in their hands - in detailed slow-motion and summery overexposed light flares.

10. Perfume - ワンルーム・ディスコ (One Room Disco)

the first time i heard this track, i was absolutely convinced it was a song from a mobile phone advert, and i must have heard it before somewhere. i'm sure i've mentioned it in writing elsewhere before, but listening to Perfume, dj rupture's description of autotune's effect on human voices as the "aestheticized cry" comes to mind. its true since Perfume for me is void of any emotion - i like it purely as an articulation of technology & modernity (the same way i like isometric diagrams and technical blueprints). i'm morbidly attracted by the idea of pop idols whose voices never appear naturally - but only after being heavily autotuned to the point of being nearly indistinguishable from each other member within their group. personally i find it hard to identify any of the individual girls in this band, but it seems being unable to distinguish the girls as individuals hasn't stopped rabid fans from choosing favourites or idolising the individual girls seperately. their "anonymity" (as result of the flattening effect of autotune) is almost commensurate to the anonymity involved in the fan-idol paradigm, and i always like it when something tells it like it is. the future of pop is the machine. pop is the machine. and we are in the machine.

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NEXT UP: MY TOP 10 LIST OF MUSICAL SUB-SUBGENRE MONSTROUSITIES 2009???
COMING SOON AND THEN LEAVING HASTILY FROM THIS ROOM...