weekly sonic report

Bruised knees? Check. Sore thighs? Check. Back pain? Check. A slight loss of hearing? Most probably.

I was at Tuesday’s Weekly Sonic with my arsenal of pedals, contact mic, shaker box and a drum stick and man, was it ever glorious. It was a much more freeform improv-oriented setup early on, with two pedal setups (one noise setup and one delay/reverb-laden setup) along with a keyboard, a drumkit and a xylophone being played somewhere. I started out on my setup, of course, with my friend Aniz (haha, famous dah ko lepas ni!) on a borrowed pedal setup, Goh Lee Kwang on the keyboard, Tey Beng Tze on drums and someone plinking and plonking on that xylophone somewhere to my right.

The racket we put out was quite, quite deafening. Very, very noisy early on, total noise assault, with shades of maybe Hair Police and Hetero Skeleton here and there. Just a bit. I eventually moved over to my friend’s setup and got all Pocahaunted on everyone’s asses, and things slowly reduced in intensity from there, but not without, of course, a few more bursts of noise (either from me during my returns to my setup or from the others who tried my setup out).

Keat (of, well, Silent Keat) arrived a bit later with his bass and then everything got a bit more structured as everyone fell in along with the bass. Kind of like last week, I guess, except with less vocal histrionics. Might have just been me, but we even hit a bit of that krautrock-esque vibe. Again, just a bit, though.

I know, this is a crummy event report so far, and I don’t think it’s going to improve. I was a part of it and wasn’t in a particularly objective mood that night… and neither am I in such a mood now.

I very much enjoyed performing that night, which isn’t really surprising, is it? But it was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that it was my first time performing noise in public. I’d like to think I put on quite a show, to be honest: I tried to get a bit of a Masonna vibe in my performance, albeit a relatively very restrained Masonna (no jumping up and down and bleeding, sadly). Tuesday night was when I really de-stressed after a heavy short semester, and it felt glorious on that level. Hopefully, for the others in attendance, it was a glorious performance as well. Hopefully. The only real negative was that since we were all plugged into a mixer (save for the drums), the whole mix didn’t sound as good as if we’d been going through our own separate PAs/speakers/amps. My walls of noise are quite frequency-intensive and they often dominated my friend’s somewhat more subdued cosmic delayed vocal-isms. My friend and I managed to jam here in Kelana Jaya beforehand, where we played through separate amps, and I have to say that our combination sounded better in the studio.

We may just start a band/project, y’know, my friend and I. I know I’d be down/up for it.

I wanted to talk abit more about my Head-Direct RE2s—which I have, for the record, quite nearly totally fallen for—but then I realised I’d rather write about Tuesday night first. Maybe later. Not that anyone cares, really.