ZIGGY October 2014 by ZIGGY

October 2014 / Free

BANKS Enter the goddess

The Little Black Issue: Nico Interpol FKA twigs Hedi Slimane The Observatory

Contents

Noise

Style

Elsewhere

36 Cult: Nico When the Velvets’ chanteuse painted it black

16 Buzz: Marques’Almeida x Topshop The denim duo take on the high street

64 Feature: Sonic Youth Sound and vision by Hedi Slimane

60 Incoming: BANKS “It has to be honest and I can’t change that” 62 Talk: Interpol “We actually play more music than talk, which I think is great” 82 Feature: Kill The Lights Into negative space with no wave 84 Talk: The Observatory “Oscilla hopes to empower people in some way”

30 Collection: Bimba Y Lola Fall/Winter 2014 The label wields a new, dark art 31 Icon: Creepers The reason why goths aren’t going barefoot 46 Paint: M∙A∙C x The Rocky Horror Picture Show A wild and an untamed thing 54 Spread: Beige by Beige Since black’s not the only colour

95 Listings: Laneway Festival Singapore 2015 What’s cookin’ on the Laneway stove 98 Parties: Good Vibes Festival 2014 Our report from these muddy banks

Hello

#30: The Little Black Issue The magic of black means it’s probably the only shade that can represent sophistication, simplicity, terror and mystery in the same dark stroke, that’s been urged on in equal measures by Johnny Cash, Coco Chanel and Joy Division fans, and that’s resolute and timeless enough to not wash off that easily. Black is cool and this month, we’re standing amidst it. The twilit likes of black metal, creepers, no wave, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Nico’s solo catalogue haunt the next few pages, illuminating black’s inherent elegance and enigma, and offering a response to Nigel Tufnel’s immortal question, “How much more black could this be?” The answer is none, none more black.

Editor in chief

General Manager

Min Chen min@ziggymag.sg

Yu-Jin Lau jin@ziggymag.sg +65 9844 4417

Writer

Contributors

Indran P indran@ziggymag.sg

Intern Sweehuang Teo

CORRECTION In our September 2014 issue, a report of the Singapore Island Culture Club in our Parties section was incorrectly titled as the Singapore Island Country Club. How silly of us. It is, and always will be, the Singapore Island Culture Club. Apologies to all for the oversight.

Emma Neubronner Ivanho Harlim Loo Reed Marie Liang Rosalind Chua Shysilia Novita Stacy Lim

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without permission from the publishers. The views expressed in ZIGGY are those of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Every effort has been made to ensure all information in the magazine is correct at the time it is sent to print. MCI (P) 083/04/2014 ZIGGY is published every month by Qwerty Publishing Pte Ltd. Printed in Singapore by Also Dominie Pte Ltd (L029/09/2013)

Word

“I wore black because I liked it. It’s my symbol of rebellion.” – Johnny Cash

Buzz

Indigo Girls Marques’Almeida for Topshop Fall/Winter 2014 Text: Min Chen

However much a newcomer to the fashion table, Marques’Almeida has been making the best of its sprightly youth in its freshfaced and unaffected utilitarian threads. In but a handful of collections, the London-based duo of Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida has established an aesthetic based on raw effortlessness and its innovative use of everyone’s beloved denim, which has been alternately distressed, bleached, cut, frayed, dyed and patched together for the label’s now-signature shaggy and relaxed silhouettes. Plaudits have poured in for the duo, and following nods from the British Fashion Council and the British Fashion Awards, Marques’Almeida can now add a Topshop collaboration to its winning streak. In time for Fall/Winter, Marques’Almeida has produced a 68-piece capsule for Topshop that in the label’s grand tradition, comes heavy with denim. Digging deep into what it calls its “youth code”, the

pair unearths a grungy, ‘90s-skewed wardrobe, bringing out the deep indigo and bleached blues in A-line dresses, tunic tops, jackets and straight-cut jeans, all of which carry raw edges, a frayed effect and the label’s logo. Supporting all that denim are other textures, including a haul of knits, dousing mid-length skirts, cardigans and turtleneck dresses in luminous shades of fuchsia and turquoise, as well as leathered blazers and trousers, silky camisoles and blouses, and faux fur-covered accessories. And to round off the collection, jersey staples and underwear provide comfort and casual cool, while square-toed sandals, boots and mules supply pops of colour. Unabashedly fun and free-spirited, Marques’Almeida stays bright-eyed for Topshop, and we’re all the younger for it. Shop Marques’Almeida for Topshop from 9 October at Topshop Knightsbridge.

Buzz

Dance of Death Flying Lotus brings jazz to the afterlife on You’re Dead Text: Indran P Jazz and electronica aren’t the most befitting sounds for an eulogy; but what the hell, if Flying Lotus says his fifth album will have a “jazz feel” and an “all-aboutdeath theme”, then we’re going to get an album of electronically filtered reinterpretations of jazz where death is writ large. And if you know him as the maker of vividly gorgeous and meanderingly irregular music, know that this time, FlyLo’s getting straight to the heart of the meat since this much-anticipated drop has been christened You’re Dead. Since the collision between the old and new musical worlds that birthed the star that is Flying Lotus happened, the producer, rapper and as he’s increasingly becoming known, visionary, has taken what we’ve come to expect as “left-field” further left with a winking charm that belies a scholarly if not soulful virtuosity and charm. And You’re Dead looks like it’ll be

his grandest statement yet. Jazz legend Herbie Hancock shows up here, as does rap’s new crown prince, Kendrick Lamar, rap’s old patriarch, Snoop Dogg, fellow weirdogenius, Thundercat and the Dirty Projectors’ own ray of lovely light, Angel Deradoorian. While the labours of these names have not been sneaked in any definitive form except as an audio-visual trailer featuring disembowelled bodies and sounds of Snoop’s lazy-rich flow, Thundercat’s quicksilver basslines, his own polyrhythmic jazz flexing and a short clip of the Herbiestarring interstellar trip, “Moment of Hesitation”, there’s everything you’ll need to feel deathly excited about this. You’re Dead is out 6 October on Warp Records

Buzz

Charlotte’s Chic Charlotte Gainsbourg for Current/Elliott Text: Stacy Lim What, oh what, can Charlotte Gainsbourg not do? She’s already assembled a sizable filmography, marking herself out as a fearless actress in films like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, while working with such musicians as Beck and Jarvis Cocker on a stunning body of music, including 2009’s IRM. And naturally, Charlotte’s also done all of the above with nary a hair or a thread out of place and more so, with dollops of unflappable chic to spare. That slightly dishevelled coiffure, the white shirt, the worn-in jeans and all that je ne sais quoi have long been her own stylistic calling card, and can be found gracing fashion weeks, fronting campaigns and acting as muse to Nicolas Ghesquière. And now, trust Charlotte to tap on both her artistry and her innate style savvy for the next notch on her already-heavy belt. In cahoots with Current/ Elliott, Gainsbourg is unveiling her first

design project in the form of four capsule collections for the premium denim label. The first of these ranges has already dropped and stunned with its array of casual-luxe French-girl separates. Button-down shirts, fitted T-shirts and striped sweaters dominate with their laidback cool, with leather and wool outerwear, as well as slim-cut denim jeans and corduroy shorts, providing textural accents. While these pieces do reflect her own effortless sartorial signatures, Charlotte’s 40-piece capsule is also reminder that function can make for form. As Charlotte says of her own wardrobe, “When I like clothes, I usually wear them everyday until I wear them out.” And her first Current/Elliott collection has definitely been made for that purpose. Shop the Charlotte Gainsbourg for Current/ Elliott collection at currentelliott.com

Buzz

Hero’s Welcome Aphex Twin is back with SYRO Text: Indran P

In mid-August, a blimp was sighted over Hackney in East London bearing the digits, “2014”, and the Aphex Twin logo. With that, the IDM god and all-around genius, known by his earth name as Richard David James, announced his re-emergence into our world. This move followed a successful Kickstarter campaign in June that allowed for physical copies of the “Windowlicker”maker’s scrapped 1994 record Caustic Window to be available for sale. A week later, the man himself gave weight to the world’s hopes by confirming that his new album will be called SYRO and that it’ll be his “most accessible one” yet. He was lying about the second part, of course. SYRO comes 13 years after James’ last full-length under the Aphex Twin moniker, 2001’s Drukqs, and even after so long, enriches both his formidable discography and the long-held perception of him as a perennially

singular musician. Few artists have managed to consistently and compelling twin enigma with craft like he has and on this record, his eccentricity and execution are more uncannily interwoven than ever. What looks like gibberish track names, like “CIRCLONT6A [141.98] [syrobonkus mix]”, are actually the machines and sound processors he made the album with and the garbled voices that populate each track are the muffled vocals of James himself, his wife, kids and parents. And of the album’s breathtakingly weird electronic and ambient sounds, here’s what he had to say: “I bought every old sampler in existence and bought all the sample libraries. Like a serial killer, basically.” So yes, Aphex Twin has returned, taking our musical past, present and future to a whole new nth degree. SYRO is out now on Warp Records

Runway

Extreme Measures

Lanvin Fall/Winter 2014 Text: Stacy Lim When Alber Elbaz decided to theme Lanvin’s Fall/Winter collection around the triple threat of Extravagance, Extremism and Experimentation, he sure wasn’t kidding around. For, unleashed upon the house’s runways this season were looks

that didn’t shy away from volume, excess, embellishments, layers and a touch of the theatrical. The many ages of fashion have also been ransacked for inspiration: the 1930s for a run of silk-satin column dresses that have been subverted

with surreal applications of fringes, beads and fur; the 1950s for sundresses that have been re-fashioned with embroidered motifs and steely structure; and the 1980s for power suits that, in Elbaz’s hands, are newly cut and sewn with frayed tweeds

and ruffles. “I wanted to bring some typhoon into fashion,” says the designer of his latest creations; and with its alternately dramatic and dreamy turns, Lanvin’s F/W serving is indeed one such untamed and blustery affair.

Runway

Stone Cold

Gucci Menswear Fall/Winter 2014 Text: Stacy Lim Shunning glitz and ostentation, this season’s Gucci gentleman is a sober picture of clean cuts and unflappable composure. Where the house’s Spring/Summer collection came lined with sporty and graphic elements, Frida Giannini has embarked on Gucci’s

Fall/Winter offering with highly structured ‘60s silhouettes, luxurious fabrics and a dusky colour palette inspired by the portraiture of Kris Knight. The mood here runs the mod gauntlet from pastel-hued mohair sweaters, tailored blazers and button-down shirts

to jewel-toned peacoats and two-piece suits, all of which serve up a cutting edge in their design and a softer touch in their chalky colours. As night descends, so the collection transitions from light to shadows with a series of tuxedos, slim-cut trousers and

biker jackets in twilit shades and streamlined contours. These blackshadowed pieces also arrive in the heavier textures of velvets and leathers – used all-over or as accents – that exude the kind of danger and daring that means serious business.

Live Through This

Cold Beat takes on the dark times Text: Indran P

The red line that runs through anger, sorrow, frustration, hurt or just about any disquieting mental state makes us and breaks us all in different ways. Some of the best music of our time has emanated from these dark places, and in addressing demons, its makers have illumined some part of their lives that would’ve otherwise consumed them in harrowing ways. It’s tempting to think of the VH1 appearances of the big names that’ve made it through a rough patch, but in the less buzzed, more DIY corners of the indie world, one young musician has been painfully confessing, gifting both pop and punk in the process. Her name is Hannah Lew, and without blog hype or social media fanfare, she and her band Cold Beat are creating quite a storm.

Emo’s aesthetically certified brand of sad shifted pop culture’s musical shoreline for a while but it’s not from this trajectory that Hannah or Cold Beat hail. The band’s native San Francisco Bay Area was the epicentre of the post-millennial emo craze that spawned the “mall punk” tag but since then, gentrification, technocracy and the approach of Big Business has altered its landscape severely, and for Hannah, bleeding it of its creative soul. It’s from this wide-eyed disbelief that Hannah who struggles with depression, had to admit, “San Franciso wasn’t made for me,” and that “It’s not a place where artists and musicians can really live anymore”. And so, following the lineage of the first and truest punks, Cold Beat’s debut full-length, Over Me, is an

unnervingly honest selfexamination tempered with a burning social awareness that has long been absent from indie rock and even punk itself. “My emotional survival is to write music”, Hannah says, and song after song, we witness her squaring up against her emotions as well as the unseen hand of the politicos as taunt post-punk duels with sunny jangle-pop melodies and Hannah’s own lilting voice. There’s a defiance in this dichotomy that plays with light and dark to draw out the complexity of lines like, “Unknown location / No heart attached”, on ragers like “Tinted Glass” and in simple but universal rumblings of doubt outlined in, “Face of the clock is never kind”, on the propulsive “Fatal Bond”. Peppered with these dark tell-alls are her

feelings about her place in San Francisco today, which she describes as, “Like a heroine in an old story disappears when fingers turn the page”. Delivered with a disorienting earnestness amidst instrumentation both syrupy and jagged, the song, like everything else on Over Me, is a potent blast of pop where everything’s at stake. “I want it to matter,” Hannah says, and we’ll have her know that it does. Over Me is out now on Crime on the Moon Records

Fresh

Text: Indran P

Caribou: Our Love A math professor, drummer extraordinaire and electronic wiz, Dan Snaith has been making incredible music for a long time. But it was only on 2010’s Swim, his second album under the Caribou name, that he realised he could be as body movin’ as he was jaw-droppingly complex. “It dawned on me gradually”, he says and it’s this turn that illumines his upcoming Caribou full-length, Our Love. Begun with its maker’s impulse to “make something for everybody to listen to”, the record will see Snaith’s psychedelic textures coming

at you with a pulsating groove that was merely hinted at before. But as the supremely danceable and polyrhythmic tracks, “Our Love” and “Can’t Do Without You”, show, he hasn’t gone the EDM way. This is still dance with a genuine sense of wonder. Out 7 October

Bass Drum of Death: Rip This

Jessie Ware: Tough Love

Charli XCX: Sucker

BDD have been exemplary in making a career out of leaving nothing to the imagination. The Mississippi garage rock outfit closed 2013 with its blustery eponymous sophomore and now, its rip-roaring follow-up looms large. First peek, “Left for Dead”, is equal parts herald and blooddrawing uppercut. Out 7 October

In 2012, Devotion took everyone’s breath away. In Jessie Ware, there was a neo-r&b singer who wasn’t hiding behind the magical mist of reverb that the form seemed to prescribe. On this much-anticipated second showing, Ware looks set to sweep another win, as the smouldering, bare-all title track avers. Out 6 October

Young, angry women run pop now and Charli’s one of ‘em. With “Boom Clap” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”, which she guested on, being ubiquitous radio placeholders, her belligerent third album’s shaping up to be the fun, finger-to-the-men popsicle the flirty, sassy video of latest single “Break the Rules” suggests it’ll be. Out 17 October

Foxygen: ...And Star Power

Christopher Thurston Owens: A New Moore: The Testament Best Day

Contemporary indie rock’s most volatile geniuses have described their forthcoming third album as a “svelte 82-minute run time of psych-ward folk, cartoon fantasia, softrock indulgences, D&D doomrock and paranoid bathroom rompers” for “speedy freaks, skull krunchers, abductees and misfits”. Peep “Cannibal Holocaust” to find out why they ain’t lying. Out 14 October

Girls may have very unfortunately crumbled but its frontman has been keeping its wispy, tortured, rock-laced musings alive. A New Testament is Owens’ second offering since 2013’s largely acoustic Lysandre and this time around, it’s the hipshakin’ rockabilly of the ‘60s that he invokes in lovelorn cuts like “Nothing More Than Everything to Me”. Out now

Going it alone, Thurston Moore has essentially devoted himself to serving up Rather Rippedera Sonic Youth fare. That is to say, he’s now concerned more with craft than with attitude, with melody more so than ear-wounding volume. On the title track of his fourth solo outing, his “older-wiser” vibes ring with sweet, churning riffs and a guitar solo that our dads will be proud of. Out 20 October

Listomania

Black Out 10 songs that are the new black Text: Indran P

Kanye West: “Black Skinhead” Yes, ‘Ye has made fantastic, fist-up manifestoes about all things black before but this one is his most bloodthirsty. Threading different cultural narratives together over an unrelenting tribal beat, ‘Ye, with his “black leather jeans on”, takes on racism with a snarling fervour and ferocity that affirms why he’s “been a menace for the longest”. Take it from the man himself, this is that “f**k-up-yourwhole-afternoon sh*t”.

The Beatles: “Blackbird”

Written at a tumultuous moment in the Civil Rights era, “Blackbird” was Paul McCartney’s take on the situation in America. With unforgettable imagery like “Blackbird fly, blackbird fly / Into the light of the dark black night”, you don’t have to guess with whom his sympathies lay.

Pearl Jam: “Black” The breakup anthem par excellence of the grunge age, “Black” also saw Eddie Vedder at his most devastated. “Oh, the pictures have all been washed in black,” he bemoaned as he crumbled under the final denouement: “I know you’ll be a sun in somebody else’s sky, but why / Why, why can’t it be, why can’t it be mine”.

Fleetwood Mac: “Black Magic Woman”

Chris Cornell never meant for his ultimate smash to proffer any definitive meaning besides evoking a surreal hellscape through his self-conscious wordplay. So you can take the plea, “Black hole sun / Won’t you come / And wash away the rain”, any way you like it. Grunge says it’s okay.

Johnny Cash: “Man in Black” Heart firmly on black sleeve, Johnny Cash lets on that he wears “the black for the poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town” and “for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime”. Fashion’s the least of his cares here.

You know you’ve got a “black magic woman” when you’re “so blind, [you] can’t see”. And when she’s “tryin’ to make a devil out of [you]”, that’s when you know she’s really toxic. Run, dude.

How’s this for an enough’s-enough perspective on your rocky relationship with your boy/girlfriend: Modest Mouse honcho, Issac Brock, likens his love life to the “clouds [that] just hung around / Like black Cadillacs outside a funeral”.

The White Stripes: “Black Math”

The Rolling Stones: “Paint It Black”

Modest Mouse: “Black Cadillacs”

Spoon: “Black Like Me”

Interestingly enough, the only allusion to the colour black is in Britt Daniel’s heartbreaking lines: “Street tar in summer will do a job on your soul”. It’s another expert touch by a band that has colouristic brilliance at its fingertips.

Soundgarden: “Black Hole Sun”

“Black as night, black as coal” is how Jagger and co. wanted it as they looked down from their debaucherous heights in 1966, debunking the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll myth just as they enriched it.

“Don’t you think that I’m bound to react now”, asks Jack White’s younger self, frustrated with “mathematically turning the page”. He then stands the notion of “education” on its head with, “Listen master, can you answer a question? / Is it the fingers, or the brain / That you’re teaching a lesson?”, over freezedried blues.

Profile

Dance It Off Blue Hawaii shakes off the blues Text: Indran P

Even in indie circles, Montreal duo Blue Hawaii represents something of an enigma. Over the last four years, Raphaelle StandellPreston (who goes by Ra), singer and also-frontwoman of dream-pop lifers BRAIDS, and producer and multi-instrumentalist, Alex “Agor” Cowan, have been making wispy, effervescent electronica that has been frustrating, problematising and ultimately, widening the scope of what is commonly described as an “ethereal” sound and sensibility with lyrics that are uninhibitedly explicit. Besides

having this gameraising dichotomy embedded in their music, Ra and Agor were also the talk of the town for being a couple at the moment of Blue Hawaii’s inception and breaking up during the recording of its debut, 2013’s Untogether. The relational dynamics between Ra and Agor definitely fuelled what emerged to be a compelling work but as Agor told us when we checked in with him recently, “Ra and I are really close friends” and Blue Hawaii is very much alive.

Like its idyllic, almost pristinely utopian and summery sounds (also informed by its Elvisnodding moniker) Blue Hawaii’s story began in 2010 after Ra and Agor returned from a trip in Central America. Inspired by the tropical climate and the swaying rhythms of life of the places they visited, Ra and Agor set to work on their debut EP, aptly christened Blooming Summer. From this collection of hushed, summer-invoking, electro-pop, the single “Blue Gowns” became a blog phenomenon, burning its fuchsia trail through the interwebs, and affirming the lines of opposition between Blue Hawaii and its more frontally upbeat and rule-abiding counterparts in the chillwave camp. Teenage lightning in a bottle, the song was an airily beautiful slow-

dance romp that was also instantly likeable. But all of this was thrown in stark relief by Ra’s gut-wrenching lyrics about a love stolen from her: “I think about you thrusting into her / And I ask myself / How stupid can you get?”. And while the band became known as champions of this interplay between light and dark, Agor blithely told us that they “didn’t think about it much”.

All “Blue Gowns” was for him was the “first time [he] had ever made or produced any music”. And when asked about Ra’s bloodletting lyricism, he was even more unblinking: “She just sung out the very immediate things of meeting me, my ex, her past relationships, our new friends and life”. But it was when things really came to a point of rupture when their relationship began to unravel that Agor more wilfully opened up. Untogether shows the seams of what once with a cold-eyed precision

that also reels from the sting of loss. As he let on, the record was “totally different” from the EP, adding that, “it’s a lot darker and introverted” and that he really feels “the repression and delicate balance in it”. Still, he maintains, “I’m really thankful to work with Ra and to have an outlet into the pop/indie world”. As for the darker and less ambiguous direction the Blue Hawaii sound has taken, Agor’ll have us know that the “building, breaking and tension” are all in service of dance, which, as he sees it, is an “experience that is just different than pop”. For floor-filling sounds with a heart, look no further. Untogether is out now on Arbutus Records

Collection

Witching Hour Bimba Y Lola Fall/Winter 2014

Text: Stacy Lim

Bimba Y Lola’s Fall/ Winter outing is a matter of medieval and mythical proportions. Backed by fierce and magical forces, the label’s newest collection takes its cue from the female warriors, princesses and sultry witches of folk legends and fairytales, and has conjured us looks and pieces that though dark and mysterious, also cast a whimsical spell. That contrast between light and shadows is right upfront in silhouettes that marry dainty embroidery and soft fabrics with luxe knits, wide jerseys and

oversized outerwear. Though delicate on first glance, these looks manage to subvert their own femininity with a dark colour palette and robust layering. And acting as the heroes in this fairytale, velvet arrives to bathe dresses in rich and regal hues of reds and forest greens, while prints take on a supernatural slant by presenting unicorns, serpents and pegasi in bright yet gothic strokes. These motifs also travel onto Bimba Y Lola’s latest accessories line, where gold and crystal jewellery, silk and astrakhan scarves, and

natural hair bags reign with an otherworldly air. While bearing both the strength and femininity you’ve come to expect from Bimba Y Lola, these looks also don’t lack for the mystical and mysterious allure that make up ancient lore. Once upon a time begins right here. Shop Bimba Y Lola at ION Orchard, #B1-04; and The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, #B2-100A

Bimba Y Lola’s Fall/Winter dark arts

Cropped jacket A cold weather staple that’s been cut with drop shoulders, lined with fleece and organically shaded

Wide-legged trousers A well-tailored pair of wide-legged pants that retains style in stripes and its full-blooded colouring

Printed dress Carrying the collection’s key motif, this casualluxe offering is as feisty as it is sensual

Column dress A regal green velvet creation to reclaim one’s rightful throne in

Scarf and earrings A sampling of Bimba Y Lola’s latest accessories, which carry all many of prints and play

Trending

The Creep Keep

Choice creepers

Saint Laurent Brothel creeper in black and red leather with jaguar embroidered fabric

Brothel creepers stand strong and walk hard Text: Rosalind Chua

More than any other shoe, the brothel creeper is the sum of its experiences. Originally crafted for desert warfare during World War II, these thick crêpe-soled boots would be fittingly christened “brothel creepers” for their wearers’ nocturnal proclivities, before earning their style stripes amongst the Teddy Boy, punk and goth sets. Besides collecting functional and fashionable currency along the way, the creeper has stood its ground as well as it’s stood the test of time, with a continued relevance to match its robust soles. And most of it wouldn’t have happened without

the work of George Cox, who in 1949, pioneered the brothel creeper silhouette as we know it today. Cox had wed the desert boot – its rounded toe, suede skin and twin eyelets – with his footwear company’s signature Goodyear welting construction to produce sturdy shoes that, too, were rich in fashionable potential. They looked particularly excellent on the Teddy Boys of the ‘50s, who paired them with a dandified uniform of drainpipe jeans, boxy jackets and quiff; and then on the punks of the ‘70s, who inherited the boot from Malcolm McLaren’s Let It Rock boutique and lent it an air of rebellion. Since then, brothel creepers

have also been fair game for rockabilly adherents, disciples of goth, new wavers and Bananarama, all of whom have infused these shoes with an undeniable subcultural cool. From there, it’s only been a few small steps for creepers to land themselves onto a highfashion runway. However unwieldy and clumsy, houses like Prada, Alexander Wang and Balenciaga have ventured their own renditions of the brothel creeper, fueling its classic form with chunkier platforms, coloured stripes and new textures. More pointedly, Saint Laurent’s latest collection mines the spirit and wardrobe of the Teddy Boys, and

Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2014

George Cox for Purified Snake effect patent leather creeper

Underground Shoes Wulfrun single-sole creeper in royal blue suede

brings creepers right back into subcultural focus. Built and designed for the strong of heart and bold of style, the brothel creeper continues to cut a dapper path – one that’s already taken it from the North African desert to London’s Soho to Rihanna’s video set – that’s all of its own.

Karl Lagerfeld Suede creeper

T.U.K Low creeper with shark gill and monk buckle

Abc

Black Metal Mass

Taking apart music’s blackest sound by the letter Text: Indran P

as in A Blaze in the Northern Sky. Every musical movement has its signal moment that lights the way forward for the future with its bar-raising conception. For black metal, A Blaze by Norwegian legends, Darkthrone, was one such path-paving artefact. The band’s first proper black metal record, it was as blunt as it was brutal and as described by one critic, “just pure frozen evil”.

as in Dimmu Borgir. Universally regarded as the best black metal band in the world, Dimmu Borgir has also served as the ambassadors of the genre, being amongst the few bands that sing and record in English. The band is also responsible for gifting the sound with its melodic dimension, especially through its legendary keyboard solos.

as in Gorgoroth. Christened after the dead plateau of evil in Tolkien’s land of Mordor, Gorgoroth has made a celebrated career out of perpetuating its infamy. Yes, these Norwegians are fantastic musicians but they’re also renowned churchburners and animal immolators.

as in Burzum. If black metal can be seen as a revolution, then Burzum is its undisputed leader. Unparalleled in brilliance and depravity, the oneman-band, consisting of mastermind, Varg Vikernes changed the game with his hybridised primitive and classical playing style, and blackened it further with his senseless killing of a fellow musician, repeated acts of arson on various churches and neo-Nazi leanings.

as in corpse paint. Believe it or not, the black-and-white makeup inextricable from black metal actually has its roots in the shock-rock theatricality of ‘60s rock god, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Since then, it’s become a uniform among black metal practitioners and is often mixed with real blood to achieve a corpse-like or demonic effect.

as in Elizabeth Bathory, the 16th century Countess who stands amongst the most prolific serial killers in history and is purported to have the blood of 640 virgins on her hands. Perceiving her as a saintly figure, metal and black metal’s finest like Slayer, Venom and Cradle of Filth, have devoted much studio time to her.

as in “Freezing Moon”, by Mayhem, a black metal classic through-and-through. With its hyperactive tempos and ghoulish narrative of “fallen souls” who die by “following the freezing moon”, this song serves as a primer for the whole genre.

as in Hellhammer, one of the most influential black metal acts of all time. Despite hailing from Switzerland and not the genre’s epicentre of Norway, Satanic Slaughter, Slayed Necros and Denial Fiend made deep inroads into the scene by combining black, doom, death and drone metal into a slaying combination.

Abc

as in individualism, the social and philosophical outlook that privileges the interests of the individual over society’s or the state’s that’s writ large in black metal. Fenriz, drummer for Darkthrone once famously said, “Black metal is individualism above all”. Which makes you wonder why it’s still the most rigidly policed (read: homogenous) genre around.

as in Jef Whitehead, who has long held the reins of the American arm of the sound as Leviathan. But he’s become more (in) famous for allegedly beating his girlfriend into unconsciousness and assaulting her with tattoo tools. At the time of this writing, he’s been cleared of all charges.

as in King Diamond. A legendary figure in black metal, King Diamond is an auteur, musician and performer who’s even come close to being Grammy-certified. In an arena where everyone wears corpse paint, King Diamond’s also known for jazzing his look up with a fedora and for using a mic handle made out of human bones shaped into an inverted cross. Sharp.

as in Legalize Murder. Being the literally deathly serious deal that it is, there’s also so much to laugh at in black metal. And this is what the piss-taking 2007 mockumentary Legalize Murder exists to do. Basically the Spinal Tap of the black metal world, it sent up all the musical and sartorial conventions of the genre hilariously. There’s a scene of two corpse-painted dudes visiting a grocery store that’s just pure gold.

as in Nicholas Cage. So Hollywood A-lister, whose roles include Ghost Rider, is a huge black metal fanboy who swears by banner acts like Satyricon and Darkthrone. And as it turns out, his son, Weston Coppola Cage, used to front the now defunct LA black metal outfit, Eyes of Noctum.

as in Per Yngve Ohlin. File under poetic justice: In 1991, Ohlin, frontman of black metal titans, Mayhem, who used to go by the pseudonym, “Dead”, slit his wrists and throat with a knife and then shot himself in the forehead with a shotgun, ending up, well, dead. He was reportedly fascinated with death.

as in Regenesis Creation. Texan outfit Vesperian Sorrow was long seen as journeymen in the black metal community until its third album, Regenesis Creation, catapulted it to the forefront of any conversation about the genre. A fantastic balance of symphonic sounds and crushing rhythms, this record was also both widely praised and panned for its heavy use of keyboards.

as in Quorthon. That raspy, shriekscream vocal style that’s a genre staple? Well, hold Quorthon responsible for that. Long-held as one of the pioneers of Viking Metal together with his band, Bathory (see E), he was also a virtuoso on every instrument he picked up.

as in Satanism. Like “keeping it real” is to hip hop, Satanism, its iconography, teachings and rituals, are inseparable from black metal. And while many of its acts only selectively adopt its trappings to shock and provoke, many still go the distance in honouring the devil however they see fit. Gorgoroth, for example, staged a “Black Mass” in Krakow that involved 80 litres of sheep’s blood and nude, crucified women.

as in Transilvanian Hunger. Another hallmark in the cannon of black metal, Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger pushed the conventions of the genre to its extremes, as part of its maker’s vision of “musical regression”. It was also been hailed as a “stark image of evil that was never quite equalled”.

as in unblack metal. Extreme forces always inspire a commensurate reaction and unblack metal is Christianity’s response to god-defiling black metal. Here, the music’s the same but the lyrics, imagery and ethos are in service of Christ. Pioneers include Horde, Paramaecium and Crimson Moonlight.

as in Wolves in the Throne Room. Disregarding corpse paint, Satanism and violence, American brothers, Nathan and Aaron Weaver, have been making black metal on their own terms as Wolves. Remarkably, all their noise is made exclusively on vintage recording equipment and amplifiers.

as in Venom. Black metal may be a Norwegian stronghold now but it was English extreme metal legends, Venom that brought it to life with their 1982 album, Black Metal. Sped-up metal produced in a self-consciously lo-fi way and of course, teeming with violent and Satanic lyrics, this was the founding document of the movement.

as in Zyklon. If black metal wasn’t already formidable enough, Norwegian barbarians, Zyklon merged it with the steamrolling power of death metal to create blackened death metal, an even more brutal form. After more than a decade, the band called it quits it 2010, leaving behind a legacy that few have rivalled or would want to.

Collection

City Slick Onitsuka Tiger x Andrea Pompilio Fall/Winter 2014 Text: Sweehuang Teo

No one goes barefoot this season, as Onitsuka Tiger returns with yet another stunning collaborative collection with Andrea Pompilio. In a union that skillfully weaves the spirit of the Japanese streetwear magnate with the Italian-born designer’s offbeat yet sophisticated style, come eccentric by-products that are bound to hit those streets pretty hard. This fourth union further stems from the concept of an “urban spaceman”, an incongruous yet unique idea of metropolitan cosmonauts interacting with space and the city, lending us a street style that’s as innovative as it is out of this world.

Hence: the newly refreshed Colorado Eighty-Five and Himalayan Boot. While preserving Onitsuka Tiger’s original and signature aesthetics, these kicks have been given the Andrea Pompilio treatment, and emerged in new skins, graphics and textures. The three variations of the Colorado Eighty-Five runner are fierce with modern styling, with its standard monochrome palette given a lift with pops of greens and oranges, a smart use of tweed and Pompilio’s iconic graphic work. Likewise, the Himalayan Boot arrives in three bold strains, which throw up great blends of orange

suede and nappa, as well as a good dose of geometrical prints. Proving that there’s more than enough creative fuel in this joint force, Onitsuka Tiger and Andrea Pompilio’s latest collaborative outing brings singular chic and techinical expertise into the world of street style. And consequently, its fruits are meant so be worn loudly and proudly, so let your stripes show. Shop Onitsuka Tiger at VivoCity, #02-09

Upclose with Onitsuka Tiger x Andrea Pompilio

Colorado Eighty-Five 1313 Grey tweed, suede, orange nappa and a dotted midsole sit tight and neat on the classic Colorado Eighty-Five, lending it a contemporary skin

Himalayan Boot 0000 Given an all-over graphic treatment, Onitsuka Tiger’s classic Boot now comes doused with Pompilio’s geometric motif and a chic monochrome

Collection Text: Stacy Lim

H&M Studio Fall/Winter 2014 H&M’s mighty Fall schedule doesn’t just consist of its much-anticipated collaboration with Alexander Wang, but also, the unveiling of its latest H&M Studio collection. Recently presented at Paris Fashion Week, the brand’s newly christened seasonal line makes a point of an easy-going and nonchalant bohemia, headlined by sharp tailoring, flirty silhouettes, and oh-so lush fabrics. Where blazers and aviator jackets boast masculine touches,

Studio also offers maxi dresses, mini skirts and drape blouses in silk crepe, silk satin and a litter of sequins for an ultra-feminine silhouette. Top that off with autumn staples like faux fur coats, athleticshaped pullovers and other cashmere pieces, and you’re ready to greet the colder months with effortless pizzazz. Shop H&M at 1 Grange Road, ION Orchard, VivoCity, Suntec City Mall and Jem

Fred Perry Soho Neon Collection

Setting up shop in London’s Soho – the ‘50s cradle of modern jazz, skittle clubs and British rock – Fred Perry has turned out a collection illuminated by the district’s vibrant sounds and neon signage. The Soho Neon Collection, then, boasts the classic Fred Perry Shirt, sweaters and cardigans with black bases accented by neon tipping, rayon blend yarns and Perspex details. These dazzling highlights also extend into Fred’s button-down shirt styles, in their cut-and-sew panels and contrasting Laurel Wreath logo, and onto accessories like the Hopman and Kendrick leather shoes. Available at Fred Perry Authentic Shops at Cineleisure Orchard and ION Orchard

New Balance 90’s Outdoor Pack

Bershka Fall/Winter 2014

All you city dwellers and urban warriors will surely dig New Balance’s newest drop of pavementhitters. Aiming to put a bit of adventure into city living, the label’s 90’s Outdoor Pack leads off with the classic MRT580 silhouette, its suedemesh body and REVlite soles newly updated with a ‘90s-fresh palette of luminous hues like yellow and purple. Also part of the pack are the 574 in three new and neon colourways, as well as the HRL710, which pairs similarly bright colours with a tough and rugged attitude. Available at New Balance Experience Stores, Leftfoot, Limited Edt and Actually

Embracing both the city-scape and the wilderness this season, Bershka is entering Fall/ Winter with a collection centered equally on urban and organic renewal. That means a range that divides itself evenly across casual cosmopolitan looks, which pack an edge in workwear and sportswear-skewed cuts, and naturally fluid silhouettes, accented by ethnic motifs and boho touches. Separately, these looks offer an urban ‘tude on one hand and a romantic allure on the other, but mixed, matched and mingled together, make for the unique Bershka girl who can take on the wild and the pavements without having to break a sweat. Shop Bershka at ION Orchard, VivoCity, Marina Square Shopping Mall and Bugis+

Cult

The Art of Darkness When Nico painted it black Text: Min Chen

In 1967, Nico, the actress, model, Warhol Superstar and chanteuse for The Velvet Underground, released her first solo album. Chelsea Girl was an exercise in European chamber folk that was steeped in flutes, strings, and agreeable harmonies composed by Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne and Tim Hardin, and that contained zero creative input from Nico herself. Unsurprisingly, Nico hated the album, decrying the thing in 1981 with, “I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away.” And indeed, however excellent, Chelsea Girl was but someone else’s sketch and idea of the enigmatic German beauty, and an attempt to dress her in someone else’s straitjacket. It represented Nico in no way at all, because, well, only Nico could do that. Until then, Nico’s career had been pretty much the product of her statue-esque, marblecut good looks. They

landed her in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, scored her modelling gigs all over Europe, caught Andy Warhol’s eye, and served as a tambourine-playing foil for the Velvets. But it would’ve been folly to write off Christa Päffgen as just another face, for behind that beautiful mien lay very dark, poetic waters. And following Chelsea Girl, they bubbled up as Nico began writing songs – icy, despairing, uneasy and avant-garde dirges that were unmoored from all warmth and romance. They came fueled by encouragement from her “soul brother”, Jim Morrison, and by her own discovery of the harmonium, an ancient pump organ with which she found the eerie, wind-like sound to match her nihilistic vision. The music that fills 1969’s The Marble Index, then,

was far from nice or friendly, but a series of hermetic and shadowy hymns, set to a spectral harmonium and devoid of rhythm, and clad in Nico’s deathly symbols of frozen warnings, Titanic curses, dancing demons, dungeons and roses in the snow. “There’s nothing more to sing about,” she laments on “Facing The Wind”, “Not now or when they carry me away / In the rain.” For Nico, even night would not be night enough. John Cale, who effectively produced The Marble Index, recalls Nico bursting into tears upon her first listen to the album, crying, “Oh! It’s so beautiful!” And yes, The Marble Index was without precedent, a gorgeous gothic specimen that was utterly detached

from the then-occurring Summer of Love. It may hardly have been the season for funereal moaning, but Nico, undeterred, would further warm to her subject on the following Desertshore and The End…, released in 1970 and 1974. Both preserved her bleak and severely medievalist soundscapes – in a grim, Teutonic drone on the former, and sinister synthesizers (courtesy of one Brian Eno) on the latter – producing such chilling elegies as “Janitor of Lunacy”, “Afraid” and a frightening cover of The Doors’ “The End”. From that emerged a portrait of Nico, the artist, who, for all her icy, ethereal exterior, fiercely wrestled with mortality, madness and the void within. As James Young remembers her in his book, Songs They Never Play On The Radio,

“There was something almost pure about her. A concentrated will. Not pretty, sweet or socially acceptable, certainly, but intense, uncompromising and disarmingly frank.” Though unmitigated commercial flops upon their release (John Cale: “You can’t sell suicide”), these albums would latterly make up a triptych that besides illuminating Nico as a musical iconoclast, set an example for post-punk to follow. Countless musicians from Siouxsie & The Banshees to Björk to Patrick Wolf have thrived in her shadow; Throbbing Gristle valiantly ventured its own re-interpretation of Desertshore; Joy Division’s Closer exists; and the entire goth rock scene owes her an aesthetic and conceptual debt. In Bauhaus’

Peter Murphy’s own assessment, “Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else’s Hammer horror film gothic. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico’s was real.” And true enough; in attempting to circumvent her great beauty, Nico would make some of the most avant sounds of the ‘70s, while laying bare greater if graver truths about herself. “She didn’t bother with neurosis,” remembers Danny Fields, Nico’s close pal who aided in her quest to make The Marble Index, “she went straight to psychotic.” Her mythical landscape, then, which came populated by hunters, falconers, janitors of lunacy and frozen borderlines, wasn’t just an idly painted picture, but a route straight into Nico’s heart of darkness. It may have been a blackly lit and dissonant scene, but all of it was real and true, as Nico intoned on “You Forget To Answer”, “When I remember what to say / you will know me again.”

Rewind

No B.S. music

The Black Album

How This is Spinal Tap schooled rock ‘n’ roll Text: Indran P

In 1984, a fictitious band, comprising actor-musicians Christopher Guest, Michael Mckean and Harry Shearer, released a rockumentary whose lol-worthy punchlines still resound today. This is Spinal Tap was rock and metal rendered dumb, delightful and unquenchably fun. Its eponymously titled soundtrack (referred to diegetically as Smell the Glove) was a likewise myth-destroying force that was equal parts veiltearing revelation and equal parts limb-animating rock document. And it paved the way for all-blackeverything. Hush up as we honour a true classic.

None more black These days, the question, “What’s an album cover to the music it’s packaged with?” will most certainly elicit raised eyebrows and instant judgment. But in the early ‘80s, at the apex of hair metal’s world domination, when postmodernism’s rudderless meaningmaking sensibilities hadn’t yet entered into the cultural bloodstream, the answer would’ve been, “Everything!” And its with this spirit that Spinal Tap initially chooses to cover Smell The Glove with an image of a “naked woman with a dog collar around her neck, and a leash and a man’s arm extended out… pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it”. When pressured by concerns of marketing palatability to change it, the band opts for an all-black cover. And upon seeing the updated cover for the first time, guitarist Nigel Tufnel famously exclaims, “There’s something about this that’s so black, it’s like, ‘How much more black could this be?’ And the answer is none. None more black.” The Beatles, the Velvet Underground and AC/DC might’ve blacked out their sleeves before and Prince and Metallica would follow

suit later, but one of the great beauties about this disc by a fictitious band is that it had already decreed them all irrelevant. There is none more black. Black mirror Yes, the parodic payload of the film is why it’s emerged as the beloved cultural artifact that it is. But it’s the soundtrack and diegetic music that give it this mark-hitting comedic power. Mirroring rock ‘n’ roll’s insistence on taste-immune musical, emotional and sexual enormity, Spinal Tap took shots at the gods of the genre and cut ‘em all down to size. Gleefully hopscotching through rock history, its tracklist was a fingerpointing extravaganza of accusatory indictment. Self-serious doom-andgloomers like Venom and Black Sabbath were told to take a chill pill on songs like “Stonehenge” (“Stonehenge / Where the demons dwell / Where the banshees live and they do live well”), while the sexism, misogyny and crotch-first meatheadedness of just about every big-name rock band were held up for the degenerate attitudes that they were in self-explanatory songs

like “Sex Farm” and “Big Bottom”. This is why the late great Roger Ebert declared, “Spinal Tap is not that much worse than, not that much different from, some successful rock bands”. Jokes aside Deflating rock’s outsized sounds and egos was what Guest and co. set out to do with This Is Spinal Tap. But at the end of it all, once the jokes are well-worn and the guilty parties have been flogged (by laughter), what’s left is a consistent appraisal of the evolving tenor of rock’s zeitgeist. In this respect, the soundtrack serves a period piece, immortalising the immediacy and appeal of rock up until the ‘80s, with stadium-ready riffs, fretboard theatrics, keyboard feats and sheer rambunctious swagger, all of which can only be found in archived form in pop culture today. Songs like “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” are reminders of a time when, for ecstatic, lifeaffirming, body-moving release, there was nothing better than rock. After all, laughing and grooving are both agents of catharsis, and as rock’s lightning bolt, Spinal Tap inspired both.

Mix

In Lush Company with

Paul T, Effen and Jeremy Boon Sound wisdom from a trio of Lush Mix DJs Text: Indran P Photography: Sweehuang Teo

Sonic Calling

Paul T: I started off as a DJ in university. I’ve just always enjoyed playing music for friends. I think that’s part of the DNA of a DJ: wanting to share with people the music that you truly enjoy, and that you feel is good. Effen: I wasn’t planning on being a DJ until one night in 2003 when Zouk brought James Holden for the first time and he was playing some of his dark, progressive stuff. That made me want to start. Jeremy Boon: I was listening to all kinds of music and always liked exploring different styles ever since I was young. I liked to share music with people and I found that DJ-ing was the best way for me to do that.

When the Beat Drops Where’s The Paul T: I’m a resident DJ Scene At? at KPO which means I don’t have to strictly play to the dancefloor. It’s great because I have the opportunity to dictate what I want to play on the day itself, which basically spans soul, r&b, house and hip hop. Effen: My mainstay is between progressive and trance, and at the current moment, a bit of EDM. I like incorporating trance and progressive styles into the EDM that I currently play. Jeremy Boon: I play all sorts of music, actually, but my main loves are soulful sides of music like jazz, disco, or just house. But I like playing everything from funk to EDM.

Effen: I think the electronic music scene is still very small, but in schools, they’re starting to have programs for music production and a bit of DJ-ing but other than that, I’m seeing a couple of young producers who are being signed to European labels. It’s small but it’s very positive. Jeremy Boon: Playing at Zouk every weekend, I’ve seen lots of people react very well to dance music. Learning is a big part of understanding music and I think a whole new generation will go on to explore other genres of dance music. This is very positive to me.

Lush Matters

Paul T: When you sweep the dial to Lush, the sound is completely different: it’s indie, it’s a bit leftfield. That variation makes it a bit more exciting. Effen: Lush definitely has that cutting edge. It’s very important to me in the education of music across the country. Jeremy Boon: When Lush started out, I was given the opportunity to have my own one-hour show called Private Reserve where I got to play music that I’d like to share. I really appreciate that they gave Singaporean artists and DJs an opportunity to do that on national radio. I don’t think any other radio station would do that.

Tune in to Lush at 8pm on 13, 20 and 27 September for Effen, Paul T and Jeremy Boon respectively.

Rage Against The World Don’t mess with Single Mothers Text: Indran P Single Mothers are a rarity in contemporary indie rock and punk: they’re a knowingly angry band. And it’s not about any larger philosophical or aesthetic commentary through volume, attitude or style with these guys. Neither are they using the reliably fertile avenue of noise to enliven some deep-held artistic truth. As frontman, Andrew Thompson, lets on, “I could pick up an acoustic guitar and write a love song to my girlfriend if I wanted to, but I’m not going to go pick up an electric guitar, find my band and write a love song to her when I can get all my pissed-off sh*t out.” And it’s with this fundamental rage that the Ontario foursome is set to grab the reins of modern punk. Like the unsubtle and bruising music it

makes, Single Mothers boasts an origin story that is legitimately unfashionable. Back in 2008, in London, Ontario, Thomson started Single Mothers as a way to exact revenge on an ex-girlfriend. 16 members and two very scrappy EPs later, the band’s current and first-ever serious line-up sees Thomson on vocals, Michael Peterson and Justis Krar on lead and rhythm guitar respectively, Evan Redsky on bass and Matt Bouchard on drums. The band played the club circuit for two years before calling it quits when Thomson’s father shipped him off to the neighbouring Germanic town of Swastika (yes) to prospect for gold (yes again). There, Thomson not only struck it rich but acquired a complicated relationship with drugs, which he fleshed out in the solo EP, Honesty is a Confidence Problem.

Then, in 2013, cash-rich but frustrated with the hollow affluence he was mired in, he returned to London only to find a new cause to stick his fist up against. London was now a university town filled with, in Thomson’s words, “full-chested English majors” and “kids throwing up on [his] front lawn”. Very quickly, he revived Single Mothers and set to work on its debut LP Negative Qualities (wink), an album custom-built to overwhelm. Already, its first listens have been making booming echoes in the indie world as they convey Thomson’s sloganeering shouts, which expertly twin the streams of Fugazi’s calland-response strategies over wild, beer-y, jugular-seeking rock. Unrepentantly honest, lead single, “Marbles”, takes multiple stabs at the entitled mass of

student culture with lines like, “I don’t care about your first intentions / I don’t care about your typewriter ribbon / I don’t care about your punctuation”, while “Christian Girls” has him airing out, warts and all, his failure at getting the girls: “I thought it’s ‘cos she was a Christian / Turns out the girl just really wasn’t with it”. Sure, there’s chucklepotential in uninhibited displays of extreme emotion like this, but in using both parts of “indie rock” to make pulverisingly original music and cope with very real, white-hot sentiments, the band is exemplary. Who else is telling it like it is and playing it as such? Negative Qualities is out 7 October on Hot Charity

Collection

Man Up Gap taps GQ’s Best New Menswear Designers for style tips

Text: Min Chen

For seven years now, the top men’s title that is GQ has been showing love and recognition to America’s emerging designers as part of its annual Best New Menswear Designers project. This contest doesn’t just pick and choose today’s finest designers in menswear, but also acts as a mentor and agent in advancing the talents and careers of these up-and-comers. Previous nods have been bestowed on designers like Saturdays NYC, Bespoken and Marc

McNairy New Amsterdam, and this year, the honours go to four more sharp and shiny creative talents. They are Brooklyn Tailors, En Noir, M.Nii and John Elliott + Co, all of whom, as Jim Moore, GQ’s creative director, so puts it, represent “an individual aesthetic that celebrates their unique talents, bringing to the mix a strong point of view and a bold statement”.

New Menswear Designers in America, the clotheshorse will be producing a limited edition collection that sees contributions from each winning designer. It’s the third time that Gap and GQ have teamed up, and while these new cuts and looks may emerge from separate sensibilities, we’re ensured of perennial pieces that’ll define, serve and win over any modern guy. Let’s find out just how.

And here’s where Gap comes in: in collaboration with GQ’s Best

Shop the collection at Gap at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, #B2-101

Daniel Lewis (second from left) and Rob Garcia (third from left)

John Elliott + Co

Pullover Hoodie

Quilted Baseball Jacket

While John Elliott has every intention of filling men’s closets with modern-day basics, he’s also making sure there’s nothing, well, basic about his wares. That means his LA-based label’s slim jeans, T-shirts and sweats, though cut from his foundational triumvirate of denim, French terry cloth and jersey, come in alternately slouchy fits, asymmetric cuts and panelling that bespeak a unique character and casual cool. Says John, “My goal is to have somebody take a second look and say, ‘That’s something I haven’t seen before.’” Likewise, his off-basic, offbeat spirit, as much as his grunge and skateboarding influences, are all over his Gap pieces – a hoodie, pairs of sweats and selvage jeans, and a baseball jacket that bespeak a modern breed of West Coast steez.

Collection

John Moore (fourth from right) and John Elliott (second from right)

M.Nii

En Noir

From its name right down to its sensibility, designer Rob Garcia has decided outright to paint it black. “It’s the first colour I design in,” he says, “and it keeps things consistent.” And En Noir, which he established in 2012, has been keeping his word in collections that blend high fashion, street wear and his socalled “monochromatic minimalism” for precise, attitudinal looks. The label’s way with prints, textures and fabrics – spread over tees, tanks, shorts and jackets – have seen it keeping close to cutting edge, while finding fans in the likes of A$AP Rocky and Pusha T. En Noir’s Gap gig means we’re due for a tough and brooding array of goods, including a mix texture T-shirt, a none-more-black pair of jeans and a mighty fierce leather hoodie jacket.

Striped T-Shirt Shearling Jacket

Moto Jeans

Striped Jumper

Surf’s up and M.Nii is already there. Originally a Hawaiian tailor shop that ran from 1948 to 1968 in Oahu best known for its custom trunks (JFK was apparently a customer), the modernday M.Nii has stayed well and true to its roots by serving up no-nonsense casual separates for surfers, sports enthusiasts and regular bankers alike. The label’s retro-flavoured bermuda shorts, striped jersey tees, washed flannels and legendary surf shorts are the product of designer John Moore’s careful handling of M.Nii’s legacy, as he notes, “The originals essentially can’t be improved upon.” Similarly, Moore has made sure M.Nii’s surfer stripes stay on-point for Gap, infusing a shearling jacket, a pair of twill pants, a crew-neck jumper and a T-shirt with an authentic Hawaiian cool.

Brooklyn Tailors

Since Daniel Lewis’ idea of a suit is less Don Draper and more Albert Hammond Jr., it only follows that his Brooklyn Tailors label should find itself on the side of the art-schooled Williamsburg hipster that’s now all grown up. By and for the creative class, Brooklyn Tailors prides itself on classic suiting and shirting, boldly patterned and crafted out of high-end fabrics like donegal wool, that while fit for the boardroom, also manages an unflappable cool. And for a good seven years, it’s worked perfectly for the label’s customer base of, in Lewis’ words, “people who moved [to Williamsburg] when they were 18 to be in a band and now work in advertising”. No doubt, they’ll likewise dig Lewis’ Herringbonelined, corduroy-coated and perfectly cut Gap contributions.

Bonded Mac

Herringbone Blazer

Time

Military Might The Longines Avigation keeps timeless watch Text: Sweehuang Teo Birthed from the marriage of tradition and technology, Longines’ new Avignation is an essential part of the puzzle in the Swiss watchmaker’s Heritage line of watches. Initially designed and crafted for the British army back in 1949, the Avignation was christened with a portmanteau of “aviation” and “navigation”, and true to its name, has prided itself equally on the kind of excellence and precision that would fulfill any military standard. Tide and time be damned, Longines’ iconic timepiece continues to remain a benchmark of the watchmaker’s quality handicraft, particularly as it emerges in a fresh guise for the modern age and masses. The Avignation model presented this year by Longines re-asserts its mighty form and function. Similar to the original from the 1950s, the Avignation bears a 44mm black lacquered and polished dial with white numerals

and a 24-hour scale in red, and comes encased in a soft iron plate and dome, protecting it from the effects of magnetic fields. Housing a L704 self-winding, mechanical calibre, this modern model also features scratch-resistant sapphire crystal and rhodiumplated hands coated with Super-LumiNova®. Finally, it’s fitted on a black alligator strap with a buckle. Given Longines’ renown for the elegance and excellence of its timepieces, it’s only natural that the Avignation is anything but lacking. Where Longines’ techinical sophistication, timeless design and craftsmanship once made for a handsome timepiece that’s proven invaluable to military men, the brand’s contemporary outlook, augmented to its robust heritage, now serves to bring the Avignation into the future and onto our wrists. Way to soldier on.

Paint

Creature of The Night M.A.C x The Rocky Horror Picture Show Fall 2014 Text: Min Chen

The legacy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is more than just a bunch of Halloween costumes and midnight showings: the cult film’s 40th year still sees it standing as the ultimate protopunk musical, ready with both horror and madcap theatrics, and rife with a subversion and fabulousity straight out of Transsexual, Transylvania. Marking its fourth decade, as much as the season

of Halloween, Rocky Horror’s loud and proud style – represented by such zany characters as the Transylvanian aliens Magenta and Riff-Raff, and of course, the singularly mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter – has finally (finally!) found its way into our makeup kit, thanks to M∙A∙C’s timely 21-piece collection that boasts the shine and colours to match the light over at the Frankenstein Place.

All is outrageous in this gathering of lip pencils, loose glitter pots, liquid eye liners, pigments, mascaras, nail lacquers, and sculpting and shaping powders that have been designed to recreate the looks of your favourite Transylvanian. Paying further homage to the film is the Riff-Raff sixpan eye shadow palette, a Greasepaint Stick to nail Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s own zany peepers, and of course, a range of

four Lipsticks that make statements from brick red to bluish red. Oh-so bold and brazen, this M∙A∙C x Rocky Horror tie-up is bound to make for a supreme spectacle as it arrives just in time for Halloween. Surely, you’re already shivering with antici… pation. Available from late October onwards at M∙A∙C at Ngee Ann City and Sephora at ION Orchard

All that’s wild and untamed on M.A.C x The Rocky Horror Show

From left Sculpt and Shape Powder in Bone Beige / Emphasise, Lipstick in Frank-N-Furter, Zoom Fast Black Lash in Deepest, Riff Raff eye palette, Glitter in Gold, Greasepaint Stick in Intense Black, Nail Lacquer in Formidable, and Lashes

Paint

Secret Affair Intense, dramatic and passion-induced states and shades Text & styling: Min Chen

Benefit High Brow Glow pencil Allow your brows to glow with this soft highlighter that with a light blend under your brow, instantly illuminates your arches

Jessica Lange for Marc Jacobs Beauty

Make Up For Ever Rouge Artist Intense Lip Color in 52 Rebellious Red Rich and saturated, this lip colour does exactly as it says on the tin, with a bonus ferocious shade

Marc Jacobs Beauty Eye-Con No.3 in The Innocent Marc Jacob Beauty’s newest Eye-Con No.3 palette comes decked out in a spectrum of tanned shades in rich mattes and glimmering metallics

Bauhaus “The Passion of Lovers” Marc Jacobs Beauty Lust for Lacquer Lip Vinyl in Shiny Plump that pout with this lip vinyl that’s been infused with champagne grape and boasts sheer and lustrous coverage

Crabtree & Evelyn Nail Lacquer in Cinnamon Crabtree & Evelyn ventures into nail lacquer territory and the results are 12 gorgeous shades, including this dazzling metallic bronze

Sephora Dramatic Line 24HR Felt Liner A dramatic line is indeed just a single sweep of Sephora’s long-wearing and rockstar-worthy black liner away

Burberry My Burberry EDP A scent inspired by the iconic Burberry trenchcoat, My Burberry bottles polished and elegant notes that recall a London garden after the rain

OPI Nail Lacquer in Skating on Thin Ice-Land OPI’s Nordic Collection pops with this black cherry hue that bags considerable sensuality Brooke Shields for M.A.C Lipglass in Knockout M∙A∙C’s other new romance with Brooke Shields births a limited edition range, including this Lipglass that’s not shy with the bright orange red

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Shopping

High Drama Because subtlety doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make for statements Text & Styling: Min Chen

Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 2014

Shopping

Topshop Blue and green gilet

Charlotte Olympia Ying Yang Perspex box clutch

Rick Owens High-top leather sneakers

Lou Reed Transformer

Bimba Y Lola Necklace

Topman Design Embellished turtleneck sweater

Christian Louboutin Mandolina heel

Dries Van Noten Geometric silver print wool skirt

Nixon Sentry Chrono timepiece

Nicholas Kirkwood Embellished suede ankle boots Saint Laurent â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;80s Square print shirt in silk crepe

DKNY Striped fur coat

Coach Leather fringe gloves

Topman Tasseled bow tie

Maison Martin Margiela Goat hair-trimmed wool-blend jacket

Kate Spade New York Sequin flare dress

Maison Martin Margiela Embellished cropped jacket

Kate Spade New York Ear warmer

Walter van Beirendonck Fall/Winter 2014

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Clean Cut Minimal means for maximal impact Text & Styling: Min Chen

JW Anderson Fall/Winter 2014

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COS Black T-shirt

Uniqlo Ultra-light down vest Marni Sculpture bag in black

H&M Double-breasted coat COS Sweater dress

Pull & Bear Knitted pencil skirt Baxter of California Clay pomade

Ray-Ban Clubmaster in metal and acetate

Bimba Y Lola Long sweater dress

Lacoste Robe dress

Topshop Unique Cropped knit top

Club Monaco Cheyenne sweater

Neil Barrett Panelled grained-leather jersey sweatshirt

New Order Substance

Acne Studios Ribbed knit sweater

Phillip Lim 3.1 Pashli backpack

Emporio Armani Fall/Winter 2014-2015

River Island Black smart-slim trousers

Club Monaco Carly sweater skirt in heather oat

Jil Sander Moccasins in brushed calf leather

Hay Black scissors

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Black Art Once upon a midnight dreary Text & Styling:Min Chen

Vera Wang Fall/Winter 2014

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Butler & Wilson Spider brooch Alexander McQueen Clutch

Make Up For Ever Artist Liner

Topman Round signet pinky ring

Obesity & Speed Death Valley sweatshirt

agnĂ¨s b. Brimmed hat

Rag & Bone Wool sweater

The Cramps Gravest Hits

New Look Skirt with lace panel H&M Menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leather-look trousers

Topman Design Loose knit turtleneck sweater

Pull & Bear Printed sweatshirt

Underground Shoes Apollo single sole creepers in black suede

COS Black coat with cowl

Dolce & Gabbana Gold-plated, onyx and glass rosary necklace

H&M Black chiffon blouse

Manic Panic Semi-permanent hair colour cream in Raven

Coach Brandon black boots

Erdem Fall/Winter 2014

Saint Laurent Low waisted skinny jean in faux leather

Band of Outsiders Wool-crepe cape

John Varvatos Fall/Winter 2014

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Beige to Beige Photography: Ivanho Harlim & Shysilia Novita Styling: Marie Liang Models: Eva @ Mannequin, Toni @ ave and Dianna @ Upfront

On Toni Woolcotton twill ski pants by COS On Eva Oversized turtleneck sweater by H&M, and wool skirt by COS

On Dianna Wool coat by COS

On Toni Linen blazer with elbow pads by H&M

On Dianna Mac coat by RAINS, polyester work vest by Humvee from B&H Photo Video, and wool pants by Ralph Lauren

On Eva Brushed wool sweater by COS

Incoming

Behold a Into the mythic, monumental sounds of BANKS Text: Indran P

Goddess

Incoming

She calls herself a goddess; she calls everybody else gods and goddesses – this is BANKS. Back in early 2013, the smouldering “Before I Ever Met You” enveloped the blogosphere and sent the buzz machine of the indie world into overdrive. Gradually, with more amberhued, slow-burn singles that locked pop hooks and emotional disclosure into a dangerous flirtation, leaving a sensual yet vulnerable coo to document the drama, the world came to know more of its maker. In the span of just one year, Jillian Banks has taken the hyper-chic neo-r&b style and dismantled it altogether, rendering the particularities of all its constituent parts negligible in the thrall of her red-blooded sound. It’s for this reason that her full-length debut, Goddess, is the triumph that it is. We caught up with her at Good Vibes Festival in Kuala Lumpur (and before she’s due to take the stage at Laneway Festival Singapore 2015) to find out the meanings behind the head-turning strokes in her music. How was your Good Vibes Festival experience? It was amazing. I had never been to Malaysia before and I was taken aback by how incredible the crowd was to me. To be honest, I didn’t expect such love; I felt really connected to them. I felt like everybody was just in the moment and it was really special. Congrats are in order for Goddess. How does it feel to finally have it out? Oh my gosh, I don’t even have words! It’s just an exhale. I’m so happy that it’s finally out. This album was a form of selfacceptance for me. I put my heart out and I had to accept every thought that I had, whether it was heartache; whether it was anger; whether it was feeling like the sexiest goddess in the world; whether it was feeling like the weakest, most fragile human. Just accepting it and writing it and putting it out into the world was a very liberating thing. Does the title also stem from this spirit of self-acceptance and liberation? Everything I do comes from writing, which is how I express myself and think, even. I called the album Goddess because it fit the theme in my music of embracing the humanity, embracing every emotion that I put into this album. It was empowering for me to do that; whether I was feeling weak or strong. Every single person is human and every single person is a goddess. Men

are gods and women are goddesses. Everybody is just so powerful and I just wanted to highlight that. “Before I Ever Met You” was the first reveal of you as BANKS. Take us back, what did you want to do with the track and how did it feel to have it played by Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1? It was surreal and unexpected. It’s what anybody would feel if they made music and heard it on the radio. It’s the best feeling in the world. You know, I just do. I just make and I just write. It just comes out; nothing is logical, premeditated or planned about my music. Whatever’s inside of me that I need to express just comes out. That song was just boiling inside me for a long time. I think it finally just came out the night that I wrote it. And in negotiating your emotions, would you say that you’ve found a balance between hip hop and electronic sounds? I don’t try and find it. I just create what I love. The atmospheres in my music are just the atmospheres that I create for each song. I don’t think about what is hip hop or what is electronic or what is acoustic. I just make each song dependent on its mood, soul and heartbeat. And all my songs happen to make sense together because they’re coming from one human.

Looking at the production credits, there’s also a strong UK presence running through the album since a number of the songs are produced by the likes of Jamie Woon, TEED and Al Shuckx. Did you seen kindred spirits in them? It was different for each person. TEED, I met through his publisher. He was in Los Angeles for a little bit, and his publisher wanted to pair us to have a writing session and we got together and we just hit it off really quick. I meet Jamie Woon through [producer] Lil Silva, who’s also from the UK. And Al Shuckx and I met through our managers. All of this was fantastic. Like I said, it was different for each person and we all hit it off. For me, everything has to be natural. I have to work with people I’m inspired by and I found it in them. This definitely shows on “Waiting Game”, which melds Sohn’s dark textures perfectly with your voice. Thank you! The song’s out so I have to let it go where it goes. There wasn’t much of a vision behind it. Everything comes together when I write but before that, I’m almost blind. There’s no concept or idea before the song arises. It just comes out of me. With “Waiting Game”, I was going through something personally and I really needed to write about

it, and it needed to be supported by a growl and an atmosphere that felt heavy, gritty and dark. That’s what I wanted. Your latest single, “Beggin for Thread”, is noticeably more driving and upbeat than the rest of the album. What led to this? It’s funny that you brought up that song. Out of all the songs on the album, “Beggin for Thread” is the one that I wrote the earliest. So I think when I wrote that, I was in a different realm than when I wrote the bulk of the rest of the album. That’s why there’s different electricity with that one. One of the song’s lines, “My disproportionate reactions fuse with my eager state,” captures your confessional lyricism perfectly. Are you ever afraid of revealing too much? You know, when I first started releasing music, I had to make a decision to not hold back anything, because people are hearing it now. But I write music the way I’ve always written, which is as an outlet. And that’s the only way that it can be an outlet for me. It has to be honest and I can’t change that. If I do, it won’t be music to me. You’ve said before that you’re very inspired by Erykah Badu and Fiona Apple. As a modern artist, what do you make of the place of those

artists in pop today? Those artists are incredibly powerful and strong and inspiring. They have their own voices, their own sounds, their own heartbeats and their own everything. I don’t think they need to have a spoken-for spot in pop culture. The beauty of those artists is that they are just themselves. They live with the people that connect with them, and for those that don’t, they don’t give a s**t. And what about the new breed of female artists like Lana Del Rey, FKA twigs, Kelela and yourself, of course? Thank you. I think it’s a very powerful time for women, and for music and honesty. In music today, we’re seeing this type of female power that is effortless. What’s got you excited about playing in Singapore for St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival 2015? The crowds! I’m sure you’ll be amazing! Also, I want to explore Singapore a bit more. I haven’t gotten a chance to do that because I’ve been touring so much. I kind of go to a new place every day. I haven’t gotten a chance to wander around the cities and get a taste of the culture. I just want to taste your city. Goddess is out now on Harvest Records. Read up on Laneway 2015 on page 95.

Talk

Back in Interpol gets loud on El Pintor Text: Indran P

With a black-clad majesty, Interpol burst onto the scene and offered indie rock one of its finest events with 2002’s Turn On The Bright Lights. The record’s brooding verve, swaggering melodrama and throbbing grooves established the band as an instant main-attraction which wielded as much mystique as it did infallible rock smarts. More than a decade on, following the expansion of the band’s dark, cleftchin rock, a period of hiatus and the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler, Daniel Kessler, Paul Banks and Sam Fogarino have returned to the fray with El Pintor, their first album in four years. Always a band with a lot to live up to, Interpol lets rip here, taking its dashing shadowplay to swelling, arenasized proportions, while keeping a firm grip on its fundamentals. In our chat with him, guitarist and founder Daniel Kessler tells us why he thinks El Pintor’s one of their best.

El Pintor has just made its way into the world. How did the record come together? I think after we toured the last record, we had a bit of an open slate, as far as what we did next was concerned. Once we got off the road, I just started playing guitar and some of the songs just came to me. I wasn’t really trying to do it this way, but in their very bare form, the songs just jumped at me. When we got together, we sat in a room and we had really good chemistry. It was a very quick writing process because we were very much in sync, and we made good time creating and developing the songs.

Yes, good question. I see El Pintor as a progression of our songwriting. The more you give, the better you get. That’s the idea; improving as artists. You don’t do this just because this is what you do with your life. You do this because you have something to say. A big part of El Pintor came from this element. Right off the bat, people will say, “Oh, it’s an Interpol record”, and they’ll recognise the band and the sound of the band. To me, it’s an Interpol record progressing, being taken forward. I think it’s one of our best records and very strong from start to finish. It’s very relentless and intense throughout.

The title is an anagram for “Interpol”, which was also the title of your previous album. Is that why you picked it? You know, titles of albums are sometimes really representative of the actual body of work like the lyrics and everything. But sometimes they’re a bit more abstract and leftfield. We already had the artwork and Paul suggested “El Pintor”, and I really liked it. Not because it was an anagram, but because there was something about the imagery of an album called “The Painter” that said something to me. Sometimes you just like things and you don’t really know why. This title just spoke to me.

Definitely. This is your most robustly aggressive-sounding album to date. That’s true. It might seem like we did more but we actually did less. In the last record, we had a lot of keyboards, atmospheres and so forth. It was just that kind of record, and it was cool to do something different and to explore new things. I think that’s a healthy thing to do. On this one, we knew by the way the songs were sounding on guitar that it was going to be a very guitar-oriented album. We were able to play them in a pretty s**tty rehearsal space and they bounced off the walls. They had this urgency about them. In that sense, we felt that we could be able to play a show. And that felt great. The songs weren’t that much different from what the three of us performing, so we kept

So, even with a patently distinct sound, did making El Pintor feel somehow different for you?

it pretty basic. But that’s not out of intention. We heard the songs and we decided that we didn’t need to add more just to add more. These songs have enough in them. And what’s it like playing as a three-piece? Well, I think of us a fivepiece, because onstage, we’ve always played that way and we still do now. We have two extra guys who play with us who are very much part of our live band and very close to us. Honestly, I haven’t thought that much about the difference between being a trio and a quartet. As long as things are moving forward and more importantly, the songs are moving forward and we do an incredible job balancing the guitar, bass and vocal parts, it’s never too complicated. You can have quicker power stations, because it’s just three of you and it’s quicker to get there. We actually play more music than talk, which I think is great. You also mentioned the guitar-centric nature of the album. I don’t think it was a decision so much as it was what just came to me. That’s what I like about it. I didn’t sit down and consciously decide to make it this way. The last record was a bit more conceptual, leftfield and more spacious without as much dizzy guitars. And that was great. If I make a record like that, there’s a good chance that I’m going to go in the opposite direction on the next one, because I want to do something different. So I think I was just in the mood to do this and this is what came to me.

Black Tell us about “All the Rage Back Home”. It’s one of the most euphoric songs Interpol’s ever done and it attests to the urgency you were talking about earlier. Thanks man. It started with a guitar riff I wrote on the last day of our last show in Buenos Aires. Paul and I got together after our break and went through different basslines which he played at different speeds. One time, he played the one on the record; a really charging one and right away, I was in love with it. I really didn’t feel that the song should go in that direction but as soon as he did that, I went, “Wow”. Sam [drummer] wasn’t in New York yet, but when he did get here, he sunk his beat into it. The rhythm section is full-on and it puts a spin to my guitar parts, which I love. This song was indication that things were going well within the band. It’s been called “Interpol’s first love song” by many critics. I love that they would think that! If it’s a love song, it’s not a very typical one, I suppose. But I think we have other love songs; I think Paul sings about love all the time! With this song, I was more fixated on the line, “All the rage back home”, I thought it was just so great because it was part of the English language that people only used in the ‘20s and you don’t really hear it anymore. It was great thinking about what those words meant when you put them all together. It means something positive but

the actual lyrics are kind of menacing almost, you know? At this point of your career, are you annoyed by people bringing up Joy Division when they talk about Interpol? Yes. There’s your answer. Let’s talk about the legacy of Turn On The Bright Lights. 12 years on, what does that record mean to you? I’m fond of all our records – that’s not just a diplomatic thing. I know people really have a fondness for it. Making your first record is a special time. And it’s true: El Pintor was written and recorded almost entirely in 2013, but with Bright Lights, we had our whole lives to make it. The band started in ’97 and we played our first show in ’98. It saw us from our beginning, from our demos of “PDA” and “Roland”, to growing and building up to later songs like “Obstacle 1” and “Roland”. I think it’s part of rock ‘n’ roll where people have a romance and a connection to the first album, the band’s first introduction to the world. I was like that as a kid and I stand by it now. What’s the future looking like for Interpol? Lots of touring. This time next year, we’ll still be on tour. We’re having fun playing shows and we’re going to keep doing that. I should also let you know that we had a guy from Singapore, Caesar Edmunds, who was an assistant engineer on the record. He’s a great guy. El Pintor is out now on Matador Records

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Sonic Youth Tame Impala Fans Coachella. CA April 2013

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Sonic is Hedi Slimane’s latest volume of photography, compiling 15 years’ worth of scenes from his musical adventures in London, New York and California. Here, we unveil an exclusive curation of his photographs that have been culled from the pages of Sonic, and that contain all the youthful panache and poetry that have long made up Slimane’s visual signature. Images: Hedi Slimane courtesy Almine Rech Gallery Fondation: Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent

Jeff Froth Mecca. CA April 25th 2014

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Crowd Surfer Santa Ana. CA March 23rd 2014

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Rexx With Car Rex Osterkamp Orange. CA August 31th 2013

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Bethany at Home Bethany Cosentino Best Coast Eagle Rock / Los Angeles June 1st 2014

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Surfers California Youth Laguna Beach. CA December 28th 2012

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Detail San Onofre. CA January 23rd 2011

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Wyatt and Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jacket The Garden Orange. CA January 15th 2013

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Julian Shaun and Nick California Youth San Clementa. CA July 15th 2013

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Jennifer and Jessica The Clavin Sisters Bleached Recording Studio The Valley / Los Angeles May 22nd 2014

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Stage Santa Ana. CA March 23rd 2014

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Rex Osterkamp Newport Beach. CA August 31th 2013

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Crowd Surfer The Garden Santa Ana. CA October 10th 2013

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Joe Portrait of A Young Musician Austin. Texas May 2nd 2014

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Hedi Slimane’s Sonic boom Text: Min Chen Image: Courtesy of Saint Laurent

Rare is the Hedi Slimane creation that is exempt from the sound and mark of music. It’s the one thing that’s powered the designer and photographer’s singular vision, that echoes in his body of work, and that continues to inform his pictures and silhouettes. His designs for Saint Laurent, for which he’s been Creative Director since 2012, have so far come steeped in legitimate punk, grunge and rockabilly cool, further heightened by the Saint Laurent Music Project, while his eye and lens continue to be trained on the music culture at large.

Hardly a trivial business, Slimane’s many ventures into musical grounds are the authentic pursuits of a music fan that’s true-blue enough to be on familiar terms with rock ‘n’ roll’s mythical and stylistic vernacular. So even though Slimane may have never produced a note of music, in astutely documenting and giving form to the world of sound, he can rightly count himself a vital part of it. Sonic is the latest manifestation of Slimane’s musical fixation and a photographic compilation that stretches back 15 years. For, in that time, Hedi hasn’t just been busy revolutionising the contemporary male silhouette, but hasn’t once stopped chronicling the rituals, people and paraphernalia that surround any musical event. Carrying Slimane’s raw, spontaneous and black-and-white imprint are scenes of bands onstage, moshing and crowd-surfing offstage, as well as intimate portraits of legends (Lou Reed, Keith Richards, Brian Wilson) and future legends (Christopher

Owens, Sky Ferreira). In 2007, too, his relocation to Californian climes has meant an immersion in its youth-led subcultures, which has impacted Saint Laurent’s surf and skate-skewed offerings of Spring/Summer ’14, and has also found free-spirited expression in his photographs. It’s all there in images of surfers and skaters, and of the California music community’s key players like Best Coast and Rex Osterkamp. Besides bearing Slimane’s records of alternative and musical milieus, Sonic will also come accompanied by an exhibition hosted at Paris’ Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, which will display a sampling of Sonic and a video installation that juxtaposes Slimane’s London images (from 2003 to 2007) against his Californian cycle (from 2007 to 2014). In assembling these photographs, the entire project is as equally good-looking as it is testament to Hedi Slimane’s love and passion for music – its makers, its sounds, its audience and its stylistic

execution. As Sky Ferreira has attested, “He knows how to capture musicians so well because he’s a true music fan.” And the many well-deserved plaudits that Slimane has received for his design and photography aside, it’s perhaps this accolade that wears particularly well on him.

Sonic Publication: September 2014, Xavier Barral Editions. Size: 216x254 mm, 262 B&W photos, around 216 pages + one 16-page booklet with captions Price: 47€ Exhibition: 18 September 2014 to 15 January 2015 at Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent, Paris

Talk

Close Contact FKA twigs bares her heart Text: Indran P

Three years ago, Tahliah Barnett was the go-to video dancer for all echelons of the pop pantheon. At some point then, she was also a cabaret girl in London. But in August this year, under the moniker FKA twigs, she released LP1, a stunning album of multihyphenate sounds that was as beautiful as a sonically realised vision and devastating as a document of emotional disclosure. Taking the unblinking

maximalism of the Internet age to the inmost regions of the heart, the chanteuse and producer laid bare the most emotionally urgent facets of the human experience, bringing into clarity the darkest corners of her sexual and romantic life on a dazzling fleet of sounds. Our chat with her was the unabashedly honest and illuminating one we thought itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be. Everyone, meet one of modern popâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most exciting tideturners.

Congrats on LP1. What was it like putting the album together? It was really fun and also incredibly painful, really easy and at the same time, really hard. Every single thing that you could imagine about making an album happened. But ultimately, I wanted to do something that was really honest and something that represented what I had been going through, something that also challenged me in terms of production, songwriting, musicianship and directorship. I didn’t go to university, so this was my final dissertation. You insisted on learning all the instruments and software used to create the soundscape of the album. Was this also part of you realising your “dissertation”? Yes, I just wanted to make my own sonic palette. I’m so fussy about sounds, how they’re EQ-ed and how they’re filtered. I’d listen to the same thing over and over again and change it slightly and be like, “Yes, now it’s perfect”, but no one else would hear the difference. Everything on the album and every single sound on the album had to be performed in a certain way and I wasn’t happy until everything was how I saw fit.

Talk

And given that this was your first full-length showing, how did you approach it? That’s a very good question. My approach was very soft, like water. Do you know what I mean? When I was in the studio, I felt soft and fluid, like water; like a cleansing of things I didn’t like. I don’t mean that I wanted everything to be intricate. It was more so that I wanted constant waves of sound that were soft, calm, fluid and fun. So, it wasn’t so much perfectionism or anything like that. This sensibility also shines through in your music videos, which you’ve made quite a few of. What interests you about the format? Well, I’m a creative person. I just enjoy being creative, fulfilling tasks with a beginning, middle and end. For me, doing a video is the icing on the cake. If you spend so much time doing a song and you love it so much and you feel so proud of it, it’s like honouring it. It’s giving it a really cool visual to go along with it. That’s why I work the way I do. At that time, I was the first person to meticulously do a video for every single song and now, I guess that trend seems to be catching on with other artists and this

is the point for me where I start losing interest. It’s interesting to be constantly challenged and pushed by ideas and to have people chasing your tail. I thrive on this. How do you feel about all the buzz from the “Water Me” video that announced FKA twigs to the world? I don’t really think about it. It’s not really more relevant to me than “Hide”, my first song, or “Two Weeks”, my first single. It’s just a page of something that I did. Actually, the video that touched me the most was “Ache”. It was just so raw; the song and the visual were all so painfully simple. There are not many sonic elements in there but there’s something so beautiful about it. Going back to LP1, what did you do different on it compared to your earlier EPs? I think I was much more confident and I pushed myself more as producer. I focused on things even like enunciating my words and things that I’ve never been bothered about before, like singing into a nice microphone. I basically honed in on all these small details that I overlooked on the two EPs and was super involved in every single

aspect of its creation. I mean, I’ve always been hands-on but this time, it was much more focused. I wanted to do my very best and still keep it natural. It was just much more of an exploration of who I was as a person and who I am as an artist now. Was there a particular emotion or aesthetic that you wanted to immortalise in the album then? Not really, I wanted to do something that felt like me and I wanted it to be original. The only way I can describe it is by saying that I wanted it to be “honest” through making my own palette of sonic colours and by mixing them and showing people that things could be done in a different way. This is my way of doing something right now. I was just excited to show people what I was doing and inspire other people to do it differently. At the end of it, I wanted to make brave sonic decisions. And this is notably reflected in how you’ve fixated on the interplay between power and submission in the album’s standouts, “Two Weeks” and “Hours”. Yes, I’m figuring it out. As an artist in public, if you’re writing about honest experiences,

about things that don’t apply directly to you, then you’re figuring things out while people watch you at it. It’s exciting and weird. At this point, I think there’s real strength in submission and real weakness in dominance, and that’s something I’ve concluded after the past two or three years, even in my own work as well. I’ve seen that there’s incredible strength in vulnerability and incredible weakness in being too rigid. It applies on so many emotional, sexual and musical levels. If you’re too rigid, you’ll snap. But if you’re water, you can’t be broken. That’s what I’m exploring through my music. One of the most remarkable things about LP1 is your transparent lyricism about your emotional and sexual experiences. What made you want to open up this way? It’s not like I wanted to be honest; it was more a natural thing. I’m an honest person and that just happened. I didn’t think about it, really. I didn’t even think that people were going to pick up on it. I just did it because I was just being myself. When I’m in a good place and when I’m being chatty, I will tell everyone everything.

You definitely tell all on “Pendulum”, which has been unanimously hailed as the album’s emotional centerpiece. I feel the same way too. It’s my favourite song on the record and it’s also the most painful song for me. “Pendulum” was the moment when I had the revelation that I had to do the majority of the record myself and it came with the breakdown of a working relationship that I loved. I realised then that you are alone in what you’re doing. You are the only person that truly cares about what you’re doing; you are the only person that has true intentions for what you’re creating, therefore you have to do it alone. I wrote the whole song in just 10 minutes in that spirit. It really built up my confidence a lot. So is there any separation between you, the artist, FKA twigs and you as Tahliah Barnett? No. I am Tahliah and Tahliah is FKA twigs. There’s no separation. I’m one, one personality. It’s not like I’m not wearing make up today and my hair looks different, therefore, I’m Tahliah. That’s not how it works. LP1 is out now on Young Turks

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Kill The Lights Celebrating the black reign of no wave Text: Indran P

Patti Smith once said, “Art plus electricity equals rock ‘n’ roll”. As great and quote-worthy as that sounds, Smith’s pronouncement reduced rock to a formulaic product, replicable, packageable and inevitably indistinct. It’s from this very point that no wave – its sights, sounds and spirit – took shape. Offering not a return-to-rock moment, no wave was forward-looking and bruising in its rigour to reclaim culture form the lassitude it had slipped into once rock and its more belligerent incarnation, punk, had become neutered and predictable. Musically, it was pop culture’s last new beginning, and it erupted in a frenzy of black-hued sounds and shapes that still cast a shadow today.

New York state of mind

No wave was a New York thing. But interestingly enough, its existence was fuelled not by the city’s reputation for producing great art but, rather, its decline. They may’ve planted the

flag but by 1977, New York’s first wave punk forebears – Television, The Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie – had been co-opted by major labels, leaving the city bereft of its spirit of bohemian derring-do. It was from this vacuum

of innovation that no wave arose, helped in no small part by the fact that in the late ‘70s, the city was a wasteland, with entire downtown neighbourhoods abandoned, allowing for artists to live on almost nothing. It was the perfect place to say “No”. The first non-New Yorker to recognise this was Brian Eno, who happened to attend an event whose flyer simply intimated, “BANDS” in May 1978, at the city’s alternative arts venue (and one of no wave’s constant staging grounds), Artist’s Space in Tribeca. At this five-day fringe gala, no wave’s eventual standard-bearers, DNA, James Chance & The Contortions, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks and

Mars took the stage. In them, Eno glimpsed the creative ferment unfolding in New York at the time: “The New York bands proceed from a ‘what would happen if’ orientation… What they do is a rarefied kind of research”. Under his direction, a compilation album, No New York, featuring the aforementioned bands, was released. And while it drew the ire of many for its exclusion of the scene’s other inhabitants, especially the highly regarded Theoretical Girls and The Gynaecologists, the record became the official calling card of no wave and announced New York as its birthplace. Over and above that, though, the low rents and creative freedom afforded

by the city’s underground rock scene made for a fertile environment where anyone with a guitar, camera or concept could make something of themselves. As DNA’s Arto Lindsay reminisced, “There was a youthful thing about seeing how far you could push anything”.

The power of “No”

Way before rock ‘n’ roll or punk expressed the possibility of Man being freed from the shackles of society, culture and their shared weapon, morality, Friedrich Nietzsche lit the way forward with three simple words: “God is dead”. This was the ultimate negation, the abrupt and irrevocable severance of the umbilical cord connecting us to a

higher power. This was absolute freedom and absolute agency, and an endorsement of selfmaking, self-inscribing meaning taken to the nth degree. No wave, in its very christening was a tableau of this moment of freedom born of dissent and rupture. It was refusal rendered sublime through its own artistic manifestations that, at every instance, affirmed the power of “No”. “The anti-everything of no wave was a collective

caterwaul that defied categorisation, defiled the audience, despised convention, [and] sh*t in the face of history”, said its mainstay, Lydia Lunch. For her and her fellows who lived and made no wave, the arch-nihilism they felt was symptomatic of a “desperate need” to “rebel against the complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms and disco”. The somnambulism of American society compounded with paranoia from the debacle in Vietnam, widespread political corruption, rampant poverty and the lie that was the Summer of Love, was a clear indication that culture – and its supposedly path-lighting forces, music, art etc – had failed humanity once again. Inspired by Richard Hell’s anti-anthem, “Blank Generation”, a sign-of-the-times screed that knew no template or precedent, many no wavers produced their own scathing missives in which “No” was writ large – a potent symbol of all the possibilities for the rejection of and resistance against the soul-numbing state of their milieu. Teenage Jesus & The Jerks offered up the searing “Burning Rubber” in 1978, which became emblematic of the urban squalor and disenchantment of the times on lines like, “The leaves are dead / The door is closed / The garbage screams at my feet / I just want to be alone”. Such feelings were also shared by the legends-to-be, DNA. On their hyper-abrasive gnasher, “Not Moving”, keyboardist-vocalist Robin Crutchfield intoned, “Where are we going / We’re not moving, we’re not moving,” in a belligerent sing-shout. “Most of my lyrics at the time dealt heavily with alienation and feeling

Feature

sounds of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and now the new new wave of electroclash, all gesture back to that foundational album”.

left out”, he explained years later, affirming that the almost cosmological negativity of life then led to the necessary birth of no wave. Sonic Youth, too, at the earliest stage of its career, on its first self-titled 1982 EP, were also in on this, as on “I Don’t Want To Push It”, Thurston Moore chants the telling lines, “There’s no more to borrow / There’s no more to steal / And no more to feel”. It was at this point of total abjection, when the human spirit was at its lowest that no wave signaled a way out of the muck and mire. As Marc Masters offered, “There is only one question to which no wave offered a ‘Yes’: ‘Is there anything left when you start by saying ‘No’?” Like its avant-garde predecessor, Dadaism, no wave furthered the idea that any human construct could be negated, giving rise to new possibilities. Transposed artistically, no wave’s ethos of negativity led to a white-hot focusing of rebellious creative energy that caused ever-ringing rumbles in art and music. The gates were now truly open.

Punk music mass

“You had to go through this one place, sort of like a cabaret, and Suicide were playing there…They scared the sh*t out of me. I was like ‘Oh my God, do

we have to play here?’” That was the New York Dolls’ own Sylvain Sylvain recounting the first time he encountered Suicide. And if a dissolute punk godhead had a reason to shudder, you best believe that Suicide was so much more than merely terrorising. It was from this band’s anarcho-andavant-everything sound and attitude that no wave’s jet-engine birth cry erupted. Formed in 1971, Suicide was the twinned force of Alan Vega and Martin Rev. With the former on a microphone and the latter on nothing more than a $50 keyboard, Suicide sounded the first no wave salvo that blasted through the glass ceilings of mainstream and independent music, and freed up room for wild, interesting and dangerous sounds to be made. 1977’s Suicide was this album. A collection of seven songs that were weaponised highbeams of Vega’s reverbed, Elvis-nodding croon and Rev’s metallic tremors, the record knifed out the parameters of the scene before it even had a name. As critic Wilson Neate remembers from cult favourites like “Ghost Rider” and the 10-minute crusher “Frankie Teardrop” (“possibly rock’s scariest song”), “It’s all so obvious: the synth pop, techno, and industrial dance

But no wave’s debt to Suicide didn’t end just at its blackening of the pop and punk spectrums. The towering, right-inyour-face style of live presentation was Suicide’s too. “We didn’t want to entertain people”, Vega recently said, adding, “We wanted to throw the meanness and nastiness of the street right back at the audience.” Describing their shows as a “Punk Music Mass”, the band were openly confrontational with their audience, with a leatherclad Vega menacing the crowd with a motorcycle chain and cutting his face with a switchblade just to get a rise out of it, merging afterburner pop with performance art. Seeing them live, Lydia Lunch “fell to [her] knees in praise of the gods”, seduced by Vega’s “intensity, terror and focus”. Against profitability, common sense and punk, Suicide bore a hole through pop culture’s consciousness and impolitely changed the game. “People always complain about limitations, but that’s bullsh*t – you can do anything you want, if you really want to. Suicide started out with, like, 10 bucks,” Vega recently reminisced. It’s for what this 10 bucks went on to do that no wave fixture, Glenn Branca had this to say about him: “If you have to find out who the godfather of no wave was, it was Alan Vega. He

was doing no wave years before any of us”.

Rock sacrilege

Suicide’s lead was appealing to no wavers because it presented a ground-up artistic approach that was as visceral as it was mystifying, an approach that former heroes like The Ramones had very quickly lost. As The Contortions’ Don Christensen recalled, “We’d seen bands from CBGB get signed; we’d seen them make records. The whole punk and new wave thing was supposed to be something different, but we watched them just turn into the same sleazy thing.” Governed less by a sound than by a Year Zero impulse to start anew, no wave was the ultimate rock sacrilege, described vividly by Simon Reynolds as a “defilement of rock’s corpse”. If anything, the way in which no wave’s bands used the standard rock format to stage their revolt against it was the best testimony for its short-lived existence. After all, as Lunch saw it, “Music was just a particular tool to get across the emotional impact”, rather than an end unto itself. And while she later admitted that she “still [doesn’t] know a single chord on the guitar”, she used knives, beer bottles and broken glass to make “short fast soundstabs”, felt especially on hard-edged missives like “Orphans” and “The Closet”. Her comrades in Mars were more stylistically radical, playing every instrument like a drum, incorporating “African elements” to make what bassist Mark Cunningham called “ecstatic trance music”, devoid of tempo, tonality and unified rhythm. Their output, including the seminal “Hairwaves”, was crafted to reflect extreme states of dissociation and mania.

But besides such reactionary acts, no wave also boasted consciously adept musicians who produced fantastic feats of sound. Glenn Branca was one of them. Composing symphonies for the electric guitar to be performed by a large ensemble of handpicked players, which he called a “guitar army”, he stunned audiences into total submission. James Chance was another virtuosic figure, who combined the influences of Iggy Pop, James Brown and Albert Ayler into a freeform mix of punkfunk, a style he invented. Together with The Contortions, he made no wave’s more accessible – because it had “a tonal center” – but most physically demanding music, with his harrowing alto-sax tormenting the skin-tight rhythms of his players. DNA, too, made immortal, influential sounds with their überangular grooves, as its members channelled their experimental theatre backgrounds into guitar-keyboarddrum onslaughts that disassembled as they progressed. The abstract and self-deconstructing nature of the band’s music belied the fact that it rehearsed everything down to the most minute gear change, putting paid to the misconception that no wave was all empty rhetoric. As a cultural spasm, no wave was an incredibly potent one. The rock ‘n’ roll and punk that no wave sought to eviscerate are today only richer for its existence, and though not openly or willing mentioned, much of anything that’s appraised as “modern” or “cutting-edge” today bears the teeth-marks of no wave’s deep-cutting bite. Our musical worlds collide today in large part because, for a brief moment, in New York, no wave’s black sun mapped out their head-on course.

Black Talk

The Observatory sounds the battle cry on Oscilla Text: Indran P Image: Dan Yeo, White Room Studio

Like a sabre through the heart of passivity, inertia and blind faith, The Observatory has been filling our air space (and beyond) with its menacing polyglot sounds that are breathtaking and devastating in the extreme. In 2012, the band released its fifth album, Catacombs, an intimidating

work that more than solidified its reputation as a peerless force with its labyrinthine inquiry into harrowing states of mental disquiet. In August this year, with new members, Cheryl Ong on drums and Yuen Chee Wai on synth and electronics, the band expanded its charcoal-streaked, world-conquering aesthetic to even greater and louder proportions, weaving nuance and heart into its grandiosely eloquent imperatives on its new album, Oscilla. We caught up with the polymaths as they shed light on their latest boundary-torching statement.

How have the album launch shows been? Leslie: I guess that when we were playing, most of us didn’t realise what the set-up looked like. After the first night the response that we got was quite shocking. Somehow, everything fell into place – the lighting, the sound, the performance, the projections, everything. And it kind of affected people. So I think that was nice. Vivian: I don’t think it was super polished, you could still see that it was a DIY kind of show. We liked that. The main thing is that everyone understood what we wanted to achieve, which was to make the show very inclusive. We wanted the audience to feel like it was together with us, rather than cut off from us. Oscilla is your hardest, heaviest and most insistent album to date. Give us a brief history of its origins. Leslie: The album took a long time to take shape. I would say that it also followed a very different trajectory because we

toured these songs and developed them as we played them live. Vivian: We went through all these changes, with Bani Haykal [former member] and us kind of splitting and then getting Cheryl and Chee Wai on board. They joined only in March, and then we recorded it in May. By then, a lot of things also happened with the songs in between, with arrangements, feel and tempo. We also had to establish the working chemistry between the five of us. We took about five days to record everything live. Leslie mixed it and we decided that he design the album. And what led to its colossal guitar sound? Dharma: We were very influenced by this Norwegian band we were touring with called MoE in 2012. It wasn’t just their sound but their approach to playing music. When they go on stage, they’re more than 100 percent. Every note is intense, and it was amazing watching them deliver it. So, that sense of volume came from there. We took that

approach and made it our own with our styles and our way of doing things and built a very big sound. What did you do different here from Catacombs? Leslie: There was this sense that, when I approached writing the lyrics for Oscilla, I wanted to make it more connected. Maybe the fact that the previous album was so much about mental states like lunacy just made it very disconnected and alienating, almost. This time round, it had to be about something that’s happening right now. All of us are very socially interested in what’s going on around the world, with activism and the different points of view that have been surfacing. There’s this sense that people are just trying to scream when they can’t in a democratic system where all they get is a vote. It’s not just an exclusively Singaporean phenomenon; it’s a worldwide phenomenon. So Oscilla is about this moment we’re in now. Dharma: Musically,

Flag Talk

Catacombs was very closed to me. The basic approach was to sound very mechanical, like a human playing things in a mechanical way and repetitively. So a lot of the influence from Krautrock and the German rock scene from the late ‘60s and ‘70s was fixed as well. When we came to Oscilla, we felt this need to stretch out, jam a lot more and adopt a more freeform approach. It was something that evolved, on the road especially, and it felt very strong and reassuring. It’s stated in the liner notes that, “where the former [Catacombs] was lined with uncertainty and delusions, the latter is confident and defiant”. Could you please explain? Leslie: It’s all about the psyche and people getting affected by just being mentally exhausted from having to keep up with pretences and working, being a cog in the machine. The inspiration came from people in this housing estate near where we live, in Commonwealth.

There are a lot of old folks that are kind of off their rockers, just hanging around. They must have been working so hard all their lives till they’ve reached a point where no one is caring for them. Vivian: And that’s what I think Oscilla is like. It’s trying to highlight the marginalised and the minorities of society. It’s also about highlighting the fact that there needs to be a lot more love and acceptance amongst different groups. It’s not just about minorities, it’s also about breaking down whatever prejudices you have and then challenging whatever status quo there is that’s oppressing people at the moment. Oscilla is really about hoping to empower people in some way. So what was it about the time that elevated political matters to such a forefront in your music? Vivian: We just got tired of being inhibited. People feel very helpless, that’s the biggest problem. The helplessness will destroy us, cripple us and make us stop caring about

anybody or anything. I think we felt like we needed to engage, to help people feel better. Chee Wai: At this present moment, I feel that people all want change. You go on social media and you see people starting to really rally together. So, it came at the right point in time as well. Well, on the that note, Leslie, in the run-up Oscilla, you said that, “There is always hope. A never-ending wellspring as long as our minds are willing to draw from it”. And in the title track, the region of Zomia seems to be a place that inspires such hope. Leslie: I never knew such a region existed until I started reading those books that you’ll find in the liner notes. Not everything is modern, especially in this part of the world. A lot of people choose to stay away from the state, you know, like in cooperation. These things were on my mind when I wrote about this. There were people just kind of fleeing to the higher ground, whereas in the valleys, that’s

where cities are formed. Historically, people move up to higher elevation so that tanks, horses, and governments have a hard time getting there. So just going further up was the inspiration for a sort of refusal; just being more critical about the kind of society we’re living in right now. Chee Wai, what was it like recording Oscilla as a new member of the band? Chee Wai: I come from a very free, improv background, so getting back into a band set-up was an adjustment. I had to learn structures, melodies and chord progression. Also The Observatory’s sounds are not easy to learn! It was a challenge initially, but once I got into it, I just got sucked in. And everything started flowing. You now have an entirely new album with a very different sensibility, outlook and sound. Where does Oscilla stand in The Observatory canon and what does the record mean to you? Dharma: Oscilla was the

first album for which we were exposed to intense touring. There was this whole tour which started in late 2012, a month-long tour, where we went through the whole hardship of carrying our amps in the cold, not getting to take a shower during gigs and eating gas station food. That whole experience really changed not just our mindset, but our approach to music and Oscilla is the result of that. Whenever I play these songs, I really go all-out and give everything. It feels exhausting and amazing at the same time. Leslie: The lyrics are quite heavy here and if I allow myself to get into that headspace, it can actually get quite depressing. But I can’t wait to play this more. This album is about us shedding our inhibitions and just going for it. Oscilla is available at BooksActually, Hear Records, Roxy Records, Cat Socrates, House of Turntables and on theobservatory. bandcamp.com.

September 2014 / Free

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Review

Death From Above 1979: The Physical World

Text: Indran P

In 2004, as dance-punk jived and hyped its way to its short-lived zenith in the indie world, the duo of Jesse Keeler and Sebastien Grainger released You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, showing the world – or rather the large part of the world that wasn’t in on the other bass-and-drum duo Lightning Bolt – that trebly, devastating fuzz

could be coaxed out of a bass amp and drums to make the snotty, starryeyed music called rock. Not then or since has there been anything like it and since the band’s breakup in 2006, it’s come to be one of those oft-mythologised works revered for all the right reasons; for its novelty and its audacity. But there’s the problem: how does a band with its own self-imposed musical limitations transcend that specific niche it burned? On The Physical World, DFA 1979’s first record in a decade, the band answers with: by being novel and audacious all over again. But that’s not to say that this is Woman Part 2. Due to how it exists in relation to its predecessor, The Physical World only avails itself to a few merits, chief

of which is how far it diverges from the dance-punk sensibility. “Cheap Talk” may open the album with Keeler’s gravelly basslines and Grainger’s snare-andcowbell exhortations but by the time the chorus hits, the bass riffs swell and the drums intensify and meld with palpably overpowering force, leaving only a delirious synth loop to provide any semblance of nuance. Volume is the move here and what’s starling about World is just how much an un-trending sound like metal has come to be a part of its arsenal. Everything that follows “Cheap Talk” operates on a “loud and louder still” dynamic, dance and punk be damned: “Right On, Frankenstein” and “Nothing Left” recall the speed-demon thrash of early Metallica; “Virgins”, “Always

On” and lead single “Trainwreck 1979” are loud, steam-rolling, world-conquering Maiden nods without an inch of space between their bass power chords and jet-engine drums, the latter of which shows up in blast-beat black metal form on “Gemini”. In the eye of this churning, raging storm, mid-album surprise “White is Red”, is a lush, alt-rock ballad that gets mighty thunderous towards its end. If Woman’s bass-anddrum roilers sounded inconceivable, here they are majestic and levelling for being made by just two people who’ve walled themselves into an unforgiving aesthetic. As DFA 1979’s singer and lyricist, Grainger definitely has done some growing up, resulting in World’s less snarky,

less sexual and more genuinely earnest lyrical bent, with much of the album devoted to his laments on the obscene level of simulation that is par for the course of life in the Internet age. Of all his harried screeds, it’s the closing title track’s harrowing verse, “I can’t sell you / If no one buys / Torn out your heroes / Click and they die”, followed by the refrain, “Oh no, not again / I get the feelin’ this is never gonna end” that rings the most viscerally. Pondering what’s left of the physical world and questioning the morality of a culture at its most self-erasing digitally mediated state would never have seemed like the things that DFA 1979’d do. But hell, 10 years later is 10 years better, and it’s the same elephantine band on the cover.

Review

88 Text: Indran P

Cymbals Eat Guitars: LOSE

Simian Mobile Disco: Whorl

At its best, “indie rock” re-presents the rhythms of lived experience in singularly relatable ways. And on LOSE, CEG produces just that kind of “masterpiece”-worthy offering. Wide and red-eyed, punch-drunk and resolute, LOSE is an intensely personal record that is big on catharses and yet allergic to empty sentiment. Opener “Jackson” affirms CEG’s rep as anthem-makers par excellence, issuing from a swooning rush of ringing guitars and “ooh ooh ooh” harmonies, building on a rising arc to a kaleidoscopic whirl of shoegaze sounds. As its fraught chorus, “Got the space sickness / While we wait on the weightlessness / A delirious kiss / And the feeling of falling in”, intimates, the rest of the record will follow in this dramatic sway. Next up, “Warning”, a tale of how “the shape of true love is terrifying enough”, is a multi-textural barrage. People and places from frontman Joseph D’Agostino’s past and present pop up throughout the album, but on “Chambers” and “Lifenet”, these allusions are even more enlivened by his bleeding-heart earnestness, allowing a more vivid glimpse into his sprawling, tragic and complex story, testifying greatly to both parts of “indie rock”.

Today, in the musical domain of both mass culture and the underground, the most hotly trending development has been the cross-pollination of the dance and pop worlds. In a climate like this, you’d think that one such as SMD honcho, James Ford, a dance-savvy poptimist, who besides clashing the worlds of techno, electro and pop together, has written and produced for pop-rock Big Names like The Arctic Monkeys and Haim, would have a shrewd enough grasp of the taste of the times to deliver a record that’d resonate compellingly, wouldn’t you? But alas, it seems SMD have opted for a counterintuitive approach on its fourth album, favoring abstraction over tangibility and statement-making over an actual statement. Written in the Southern California desert before being recorded live, Whorl is SMD is at its most hook-less and least immediate. The going here is largely ambient, with keyboard effects occasionally providing some drama to a bloodlessly pretty sonic landscape. It’s telling that the best and most evocative songs here – “Calyx”, “Tangents” and “Jam Side Up” – allude to one thing: old SMD.

Rustie: Green Language On his name-making 2011 debut, Glass Swords, Rustie alchemised UK bass, wonky, hip hop and even techno into a universally danceable sound where sheer volumes of sonic information slammed your body into movebusting states. Its knowing over-the-topness prompted him to make, in his own words, a “more serious” album and for a while, he’ll almost have you believing him. The first two songs, “Workship” and “A Glimpse”, couldn’t be further from anything in the Rustie playbook, with the former opening with a space-y, Oneohtrix Point Never-type synthscape and the latter taking off with distorted synths as a new wave arpeggio gives way to – gasp – an electric guitar! But just after, “Raptor” rips forth, with strobing synths and machine gun808 drums, all bathed in blinding light. Here and henceforth, Rustie reprises his maximal touch while exploring the now in-demand dance sound of trap, expanding the lexicon of popular dance music. The Danny Brown-featuring “Attak” ably proves this, with the rapper’s coked-out flow dueling with Rustie’s coked-out beats. Even the ambient, new age-y eponymous closer won’t detract from the powerful kineticism that came before.

J Mascis: Tied to a Star As the frontman and sixstring demigod behind Dinosaur Jr, J Mascis’ creative arc has seen him increasingly temper his empyrean riffage with a great measure of melody, resulting in the recent release of two great – including Tied to a Star – mostly acoustic solo albums. The proof is in the fact that even in the quietude of his softer, unplugged side, there’s still a lot of gold to be mined. Unlike its predecessor, the mostly-solo Shades of Why, Star is a band effort that includes Chan Marshall of Cat Power fame. These extra hands never once crowd out Mascis’ cabin-tested beauty, as evinced in “Wide Awake”, a fingerpicked meditation that quietly climaxes with an enmeshing of Marshall’s hushed coos and a crystalline guitar solo. On the more upbeat “Wide Awake”, spry chords and a driving rhythm section light the way forward for a eyes-closed guitar solo, harkening back to the jam-band sensibilities of the Grateful Dead. Blissed out and virtuosically tranquil, even the proper solo songs here, in particular, “Come Down” and “Stumble”, affirm the almost effortless mastery Mascis has always had over both his instruments.

Wiz Khalifa: Blacc Hollywood When weed/cloud rap became a legitimate “thing” in rap, it was only because Snoop’s instantly recognisable, vaporous, lazy-rich flow burned a niche towards crossover clout. Since then, all but a few of his growing army of imitators have come close to evoking the fun, spontaneous, reverie-fuelled time that is the advertised perception of a weed high. Wiz has been a high-profile dabbler of this form but never has he failed so thoroughly. Every song on this outing is a reminder of his wake-n-bake shtick (“In my car, uh-huh / Cruisin’ down the street, uh-huh / So stoned I’ma need something to eat, uhhuh”, on “So High”). And if all that gets stale – and it does, fast – he’s quick to affirm how he’s so rich, he can afford to fade out all the time: “Is this the top? / I got my own weed, sucker, so I ain’t gotta hit yours” (“KK”). None of this breaks away from the exhibitionistic character of mainstream rap (Blacc Hollywood is also his first Billboard no.1), so it’s not on any principled grounds that Wiz flops hard. It’s for the simple reason that here, he is, even by his own standards, flat-out wack.

Review

The New Pornographers: Brill Bruisers

The Vines: Wicked Nature

Blonde Redhead: Barragán

Bandleader A.C. Newman has called Brill Bruisers “a celebration record” that reflects his newfound happiness after coming out of a rather rough place in his life. And throughout its 13 songs, the record exudes a joie de vivre both infectious and sincere. As the neon lights on the sleeve attest, The Pornographers invoke the touchstones of pop history to explosive, colouristic effect here. It’s with teeming power pop that the title track opens the album; all nonsense vocal harmonies and rushing guitars coming at you with a feel-good bite. This hook-y pep is further enriched on the zippy Dan Bejarhelmed “War on the West Coast”, where even though there’s a war going on, only one thing matters: “I wanted to go home with you / I wanted to stay true to the cause”. Like 2005’s superlatively excellent Twin Cinema, Brill Bruisers conveys joy with an immediacy that is independent of reflection or cause. It’s the sound of feeling happy just because you do and rockier standouts like the new wave-y “Backstairs”, the psych-rock romp “Fantasy Fools” and the rockabilly-gone-delirious “Dancehall Domine” go the distance in proving how right this feeling is.

Yes, The Vines still exist, but this is a different incarnation from the “Get Free” era, since frontman-guitarist, Craig Nicholls, is the only original Vine left. And yes, The Vines are still the Nirvanaaping act it always was. While the former fact is inconsequential, the latter one is encouraging, especially today, with guitar-centric rock drifting ever more easily into nostalgia. Starkly and defiantly anachronistic, Wicked Nature is a nudefemale-on-the-cover, double LP-return-torock passion project that is writ large with agenda. Rock ‘n’ roll is a tricky enough proposition as it is today and Nicholls’ not-very-A-list rep might make his frenzied outbursts harder to swallow, but it’s to his credit that when he comes out swinging, he always connects. Hard, heavy and punkflavoured, opener and lead single “Metal Zone” blitzes by, ushering in sabre-point rippers like “Psychosomatic”, where he hysterically bawls, “Shoot your gun!”, and the grunge-accented missive “Reincarnation”. Softer ballad-leaning songs like “Truth” and “Venus Fly-Trap” then buttress the overall quietloud dynamic that worked so well then and still does here. Rock, it seems, isn’t quite dead.

On the pose-perfect, noir-ish “Cat Tin Roof”, Kazu Makino offhandedly says to her bandmates: “Maybe we should work on it a little bit more”. But frustratingly enough, while self-referentiality has long been one of Blonde Redhead’s more enchanting points, on its ninth album, it emerges as a literal cry of lack. Coming four years after Penny Sparkle, a record flamed for it synth-y heavy-handedness whose only payoff was ephemeral, Barragán is positioned as a more experimental, less on-brand corrective. And all the trappings of this conscious aim are plainly visible: opener “Barragán” is a field recording of birdsong spliced with guitar and flute harmonies; “Dripping” is lovelorn crier enlivened with a darkly tinted house-disco fusion; while late-album sort-of-epic “Defeatist Anthem (Harry & I)” is a six-minute trip through delicately picked guitars massaging Makino’s whispery falsetto before shape-shifting into squelching electronic sounds. As thoughtful, artful and undoubtedly pretty as these songs are, there isn’t a moment where the band’s fixation on its idyllic wonder isn’t broken by a spontaneous flourish or revelation. Barragán is content to revel in its reveries.

Review

Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: The Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s by Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje Text: Min Chen

Like punk that came before it and metal that came after, the goth subculture has graduated from being a mere niche interest to a worldwide phenomenon that can be identified through music, visuals, fashions, hairstyles and an ideology all of its own. Then again, while punk and metal have

been immortalised to death, and even as contemporary goths continue to be born with every sweep of black eyeshadow, there’s been a woeful lack of documentation of how the goth movement actually gained traction amongst the living. Noting that, Andy Harriman and Marloes Bontje have taken it upon themselves to assemble an epic compedium that traces goth back to its shadowy beginnings. Titled after Batcave’s “Sexbeat”, Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace shuns any theoretical

definition of what it means to be a goth and instead, goes straight for the heart of the matter. Its focus falls on the first decade of the movement, which rumbled in a post-punk ‘80s that lacked even the lexical prowess to employ the word “goth”. Dubbed new wavers, new romantics, morbids and bats, these early goths made music, styled hair, donned clothes and made art that would effectively form the nucleus of goth. And this volume sifts through and documents just that – the movement’s communion of personalities, art, fashion

and audience – in a fascinating visual and oral history. In its images and interviews surely lie nostalgia, but also, the imaginative and seductive seeds that exploded into a global community. Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace, then, acts equally well as study in subculture, a celebration of post-punk and a distillation of goth identity. While haunted by the ghosts of goths past, it also does some fine haunting in its snapshot of the individuality and creativity that once thrived in the dark.

Listings

agnès b. PUNK+ Photo Exhibition by Sheila Rock 2 to 26 October @ The Substation Gallery Text: Min Chen

More than four decades after the fact, punk still lives. It’s all over couture collections, new music, advertisements for butter and gritty-type films starring Gary Oldman, having been consistently co-opted, commodified and celebrated throughout the ages for being the thing it was. Then again, for a movement that so defiantly railed against convention, tradition and polite society, punk’s true potency is bound to escape mass consumption. Instead, its legacy is less in a T-shirt slogan than in the underground clubs, the sex shops, the streets, the gigs, the art galleries and the kids of the late‘70s that wore punk on

their sleeves not for any sort of cool, but because they were, simply, punk. A glimpse into that – that brief moment where punk was the revolting and revolutionary ideal that sat outside the walls of the establishment – arrives with Sheila Rock and her body of work. An American transplanted to London in 1970, Rock spent her time photographing the people, performances, safety pins, rehearsals and back-door scenes that made up the burgeoning British punk scene. These are documents of bands like The Clash, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Chrissie Hynde, The Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, as

well as the movement’s other young and stylish adherents (Jordan of Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique, Jeannette Lee, Caroline Coon), all of whom are captured in the glow of punk’s halycon days. Rock’s pictures have already made up the limitededition volume known as PUNK+ – containing 199 photos and contributions from the likes of Don Letts, Nick Logan and Glen Matlock – and a travelling exhibition, which began in Europe in 2013 and which will hit our shores this month. Staged as part of agnès b.’s 10th anniversary in Singapore, PUNK+ will be unveiling 28 of Sheila Rock’s photos, while

making a point of the French label’s continued allegiance to the worlds of art and music. In here lies a taste of punk in all its initial glory, back when it was run by kids not corporations, when attitudes and sensibilities were pure, and when anarchy first descended in the UK. Rock herself cherishes punk as “a celebration of something exciting and positive” and her pictures ensure that’s what lives on. Admission: Free

Listings

Freq-ender Music Festival 31 October to 1 November @ Infinite Studios Text: Sweehuang Teo

Hot Chip 2manydjs

Doorly

Aldrin

Marco V

This Halloween weekend, your pumpkin-carving and trick-or-treating will be taking a backseat to What The Freq? (WTF), a two-day festival where the ghosts and ghouls of electronic music’s past and present will be coming out to play. Redefining the ideas of “Halloween”, “party” and “Halloween party”, WTF will be transforming Infinite Studios into a great big dancefloor, populated by DJs, stage performers, dancers, drag queens and robots,

and pumping with techno, electro, trance and house, for a proper horrorshow. The aptly christened FREQSHOW marks the first day of the festival, with a number of big names taking the decks. Local and regional guns like Singapore’s Aldrin and Zig Zach, Malaysia’s Indiego and New Zealand’s Ladyflic will be paving the way, before the evening climaxes with three international headliners. There’ll be

Doorly, who arrives fresh from his partystarting stints at Ibiza’s Pacha, the rave-worthy Hot Chip, who’ll be showcasing their electro smarts in a DJ set, as well as the unbeatable duo of 2manydjs, who, well, you already know. Friday’s FREQSHOW will serve as the perfect appetiser for what’s to come on Saturday: Mekanika by Godskitchen. A dazzling audio-visual show, created and helmed by the institution that is Godskitchen, the night has already made its way throughout the UK, fronting a world-class visual extravaganza and backed

by high-quality trance acts. Mekanika will be hitting Singapore with the same spectacular aplomb, with the likes of Marco V, Morgan Page, Wolfpack and GLOWINTHEDARK headlining, and Andrew Chow, Zushan, BATE, Genji5ive, Lissa Zombie and Dipha Barus lending support. Where better to get yer freq on? Tickets: $108 (general admission for single days), $188 (general admission for two-day weekender) and $128 (general admission atthe-door); $198 (VIP for single days), $358 (VIP two-day weekender) and $218 (VIP at-the-door); available at eventClique

Listings

Vibe Beach Sports and Music Festival 18 October @ Siloso Beach, Sentosa Text: Sweehuang Teo

You haven’t seen a beach festival until you’ve seen Vibe. Set to rock the island of Sentosa next month, this lifestyle beach affair will be transforming Siloso Beach into a multisport playground by day and into an adrenaline-fueled dance party by night. This’ll be the first outing where sports, sounds, sand and sea will meet, offering you party monsters and sports enthusiasts alike the chance to get live and get physical.

AN21

Vibe Guide: Tips for fun and survival at Vibe Bottoms up! Be sure to stay hydrated thoughout the day, as you soak up the Vibe.

Cosmic Gate

John O’Callaghan

Game on

Your athletic dreams begin as Vibe Beach Sports and Music Festival hits the ground running at 9am. Beach volleyball and beach soccer competitions will be taking place throughout the day, pitting 32 amateur teams against each other for top honours, bragging rights, and shiny prizes of up to $1,500 in cash and VIP access to the after-party. Vibe will also be attempting to break Singapore’s Zumba record by assembling the biggest number of participants (at least 1,200) to dance in unison on the beach. And they’ll have great leadership in the form of French Zumba icon,

Alix Pfrunder, who’ll be heading up the segment. Other activities like Beer Pong, Football Freestyle and the Sports Bod Competition will be happening as well, so you won’t be standing still for long.

Dance on

Of course, you won’t be gaming in silence either. As the tournaments and activities roll on throughout the afternoon, there’ll be no shortage of DJs on hand to get your blood pumping. A line-up of local and regional DJs, including Jean Baptiste, Anand, Kenneth Francis and Styluxtakut, as well as Hong Kong’s Miles Slater and Bali’s Yuki, have been arrayed to accompany

your sports day and pave the way to a evening of EDM greatness. By night, the courts will be making way for a dancefloor, with three renowned international headliners all set to drop hits into the wee hours. First up, there’s AN21, who emerges from Stockholm to unleash his bangin’ house style that’s been a smash at shindigs like Ultra Music Festival, before DJ Mag’s Best DJ of 2008, John O’Callaghan, steps up to the decks with his dynamic brand of trance energy. Last but definitely not least, Cosmic Gate will be doing what it does best: letting loose its epic and evergreen EDM,

which has filled 46 albums with defining singles like “Analog Feel” and “F.A.V”, revved up thousands of international gigs and thrilled millions. A high-powered day and night, Vibe Beach Sports and Music Festival will be working both your sporting and partying muscles, and won’t be stopping until you break a sweat. Such is the stuff that ultimate beach festivals are made of, so come claim your spot. Tickets: $70 (early bird), $90 (standard) and $110 (at the door) for all-day access, and $35 to $45 to apply for Zumba and beach sports, available at vibebeachfest.com.

Stay sun-proof Stay well-protected from the burning sun, and don’t scrimp on the sunscreen or sunblock. No Louboutins You’re at the beach, not a runway show, so come properly attired. Towels and flip-flops will come in handy. Keep it clean Amidst Vibe’s many thrills and spills, remember to clean up after yourself and leave the beach as pristine as you found it. Go cash-less Vibe will be a cash-less experience, where you’ll be able to purchase e-coupons beforehand and have your RFID tag preloaded with value. Play nice Competition or no, Vibe is all about sportsmanship, so don’t be a sore loser or smug winner. Play fair and love thy neighbour. Have fun! Let loose, game on and dance like no one’s watching!

Listings

Laneway Festival Singapore 2015

24 January 2015 @ The Meadow, Gardens By The Bay Text: Indran P

Yes, it’s that time again! Back for its fifth run, St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival Singapore will unfurl its biggestever payload of indie goodness across two massive stages at The Meadow, fulfilling all your live-wired dreams. Five years later is five years better and this instalment of the festival promises an even larger offering of acts than all its past editions. Ever since its first run in 2011, Laneway has brought together the biggest movers and shakers of the indie and electronic worlds, the artists and bands that rocked the charts and your hearts, for one day of show-stopping

musical offerings and now, it isn’t showing any signs of letting up. For its fifth anniversary, the festival will blow the roof with its spectrumdefying array of bands that includes trip hop shamans, Little Dragon, responsible for some of 2014’s most infectious earworms with “Klapp Klapp” and “Paris”; neo-r&b chanteuse, BANKS, whose earthy, smouldering, texturedriven take on r&b, as heard on hits like “Brain” and “Waiting Game”, has seen her graduate from blog sensation to bona fide star; and London singer-producer FKA twigs, who gave us one of the most fascinating records of the year with LP1.

There’ll be many, many more acts to come, so save that date and stick around to find out in just whose fantastic hands you’ll be in at next year’s incarnation of the festival. If you thought Laneway 2014 was spectacular, you’re in for a treat the same time next year! For the full line-up and ticketing information, proceed to singapore. lanewayfestival.com after 2 October. Also look in on our conversations with BANKS (page 58), FKA twigs (page 78) and Little Dragon (coming up next month).

Listings

Text: Indran P

Singapore Island Culture Club

Ep!c presents R3hab

Pops of the Top

4 October @ Zouk

9 October @ Loof

3 October @ kyo

What better way to start the month than to boogie down to the exquisitely chilled out tunes courtesy of the Singapore Island Culture Club? And with local legend Aldrin helming the decks, you can rest assured that the jams will be lush. Entry: $20/25 (incl. one drink)

Transfix presents Paul Van Dyk

If you know your Dirty Dutch, or if you just like banging, body-rocking sounds, then you most definitely know what a big deal this is. One of the architects of the “Dutch house” sound that all the new kids are jumping on, R3hab will show you why he is the real deal. Entry: $33/38 (incl. two drinks)

TARO & Inkswel

4 October @ kyo

3 October @ Zouk

Get on your knees and bow! This night, Paul Van Dyk, one of the first few DJs to clinch “superstar” status, will descend from trance heaven to gift us mortals with his sweeping sounds. Save the date. Now. Entry: $33/38 (incl. two drinks)

After a pop-fueled good time last month, Pops of the Top returns to Loof to keep you indie kids dancing. Ginette Chittick and Jinmart once again take over the decks to unleash glamorous indie rock ‘n’ roll. Even if you don’t remember the first time, you’ll now have the perfect cause to remember this time. Reservations: email loof@loof.com.sg or call +65 9773 9304

TARO is the abbreviation of The Analog Roland Orchestra, an orchestra of synthesizers and drum machines all helmed by one man, Michal Matlak, who isn’t too stylistically far off from Aphex Twin. Joining him on this riveting night will be Aussie house-funk maestro, Inkswel. Get ready to dance yourself off. Entry: $20/25 (incl. one drink)

Para//el presents Paul Ritch

10 October @ Velvet Underground – Dance

Fusing harmonic techno with gushing soul, Paul Ritch’s productions and live sets are the making of a tech-charged legend. His 2012 Secret Garden EP is a fine example of his expert handling of atmospheric textures and dancefloor bombast, and certainly puts in a good word for the man’s own Quartz Rec imprint, which is equally rich in minimal techno releases. Following top billing at dance temples from Amnesia to

Darren Emerson

11 October @ kyo

Space to Womb, Paul will be getting comfy at Velvet Underground – Dance with another of his stunning live sets, with Mixmag vet Digby travelling alongside with his arsenal of disco bombs and future beats. Entry: $28/33 (incl. two drinks)

Ever heard of Underworld? Then, you know that Darren Emerson is one of the most esteemed figures in dance music. Working with artists as diverse as Depeche Mode and Jamie Cullum throughout his long career, the multihyphenate tastemaker will surely bring the best of his house, trance, techno and electronica chops this night. Entry: $20/25 (incl. one drink)

Listings

NoPartyHere Nomad Series II presents Bradley Zero, LeFtO and Thris Tian

ZSS presents Bassjackers

11 October @ Zouk

At long last! Thanks to Zouk, this’ll be the first time the Fedde Le Grand-certified house sensation Bassjackers will grace our shores. Expect the same hard-driving verve on hits like “Mush Mush” and “Zing” that sent Rihanna herself to their doors for a remix. Entry: $28/33 (incl. two drinks)

21 October @ kyo

Taragana Pyjarama

Transfix presents Arty

Colouristic, ethereal and dance-y to the letter, Nick Ericksen has lent an airy touch to high-profile remixes for Delphic and Polock, while filling two esteemed albums: 2012’s Tipped Bowls, a sleeper hit in the indie-dance community, and Nothing Hype, which came ripe with jammy cuts like the blog favourite, “PUR 1”. If you like your indie dance-y, you know where it’ll be at now. Tickets: $20, available at the door and at peatix.com

What does it say about the Russian EDM prodigy that he’s already been receiving unprecedented club play and support from heavyweights like Tiësto, Armin Van Buuren, Above & Beyond and Swedish House Mafia? Well, it means that he can damn well turn up. Hit up “Around the World” and “Up All Night” to get just how. Entry: $28/33 (incl. two drinks)

16 October @ Life Is Beautiful

18 October @ Zouk

Purveyors of fine leftfield parties, NoPartyHere have really outdone themselves this time. In this excellent instalment of its Nomad party series, heavyhitters from the Boiler Room, Bradley Zero and Thris Tian, will lock arms with LeFtO to bring you an exquisite time. Already an in-demand name here, Bradley Zero is known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of cutting-edge sounds, which show up in his überdiverse vinyl-only sets. His buddy, Thris Tian, is an undisputable hero of the dance underground who’s been namechecked by everyone from Gilles Peterson to Erykah Badu. And LeFtO, well, no sound, from old-school hip hop to UK bass, is spared from his reinventive thrall. All this means that this night will be legendary. Entry: $20/25 (incl. one drink)

Syndicate presents Untold 25 October @ kyo

Besides being hailed as a “true selector”, DJproducer Jack Dunning is also the honcho of Hemlock Records, home to scene-makers like Ramadanman and James Blake, testifying to his clout. For a night of incredibly heavy techno and dubstep, it’s safe to say you won’t find better. Joining him will be Syndicate’s own synaptic animators. Entry: $20/25 (incl. one drink)

Savage Skulls 31 October @ Canvas

What better way to spend Halloween than to get frightfully down and drrty with these worldconquering Swedes? Having already cornered the market on pounding grooves, cheesy hooks and fat basslines, this duo will see to it that you freak out with headturning hits like “Bass Kick” and “Dachstein”. Entry: $28/35 (incl. one drink) and free entry for all who come in costume

Parties

Good Vibes Festival 2014 @ Sepang Go Kart Circuit, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Text: Indran P Images: Aloysius Lim and Alvin Ho / Good Vibes Festival Special thanks: Marcia and Sarah of 19SIXTYFIVE

Parties

“Good Vibes” is a de facto experience that every festival promises, so when a musical gala christens itself with that very assurance, it sure does set itself up for a lot. And despite inclement weather and all its inconveniences of a muddy terrain, pushedback set times and cancelled performances, this year’s instalment of the fest still delivered ably on its promise. Like it did last year, Good Vibes brought together Malaysia’s in-demand DJs, rising singer-songwriter talents and celebrated bands with acts from neighbouring countries, including Singapore’s very own Electrico, and international big-names. This year, the acts in the latter category reflected the beyondeclectic approach of the festival, with indie&b chanteuse BANKS, pop powerhouse Ellie Goulding, electo-rock mainstays Empire of the Sun and dance-punk institution !!!, more than bringing it for the 8,000 attendees that braved thunder, lightning and a whole lotta mud to see them.

Even as dark clouds gathered above, Malaysian YouTube sensation Elizabeth Tan announced the start of the festival with her lilting, pop-coloured tunes, as, on the other side of the festival ground, in the silent disco tent, DJs Domingo and Polar Seas, got the engine going on the dance side of things. Long the fixtures of big stages in their homeland, KL’s alt-rock heroes Kyoto Protocol this time helmed the decks at the Green Stage, serving up rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly. Sadly, not too long after that, the weather took a turn for the worst with streaks of lightning and torrential rain putting a temporary end to the proceedings, and resulting in the cancellation of slots by three Malaysian bands and Electrico. But as luck would have it, the weather gradually improved, allowing for the first international act, BANKS, to take the stage. Having steadily made her name on her all-black approach to r&b over the course of 2013, the pop princessto-be, delivered an unquestionable tour de force of high-stakes, emotionally charged songs that boasted a maximal thrust. Opening with her break-out hit,

“Before I Ever Met You”, the LA singer also lent her sensual, smouldering coos to blog favourites like “Change”, “Goddess” and new single, “Begging for Thread”. Next up, Empire of the Sun ensured that the massive throng received a colossal sensory experience, populating their widescreen trance-rock sound with a dazzling assemblage of dancers, a vividly strobing lightshow and all-around party vibes. When they unleashed their megahit “Walking on a Dream”, the jumping, dancing crowd more than affirmed their ingenious melding of rock and dance. After, it became obvious that playing to a smaller crowd and not having as many production aids did not matter to !!! one bit. Fearlessly clad in swim shorts, frontman Nic Offer was the fest’s indisputable cheerleader, mixing wry humour, unself-conscious dancing and unstoppable intensity into explosive party-starting energy. Performing songs from the full extent of its discography, including the frenetic “Myth Takes”, the sexy housenodding romp “Slyd” and the funked-out “One Girl / One Boy”, the band offered a reminder of why it is thriving

despite the demise of the scene it grew out of. And to affirm his commitment to both parts of “dance-punk”, Offer spent most of the set’s last song in the crowd, diving headfirst into a large puddle of mud at its close. On the stage across, it fell on Ellie Goudling to wrap up the night, and as with Empire of the Sun, she had a massive stage setup to help her do just that. Yet, none of the flash was necessary since there was only one thing the crowd cared about: her world-conquering voice (not even her surprisingly great dance moves). A pop lodestar who can literally just let the hits do the talking, Goulding said little but let “Lights” and all do her good work. It was a showcase that would’ve won over the most hardnosed indie purist. As affirmed on its banner, Good Vibes 2014 did indeed do what it set out to do. And on this day, elemental forces bowed before showstopping musical ones.

Clockwise from top Ellie Goulding, mid-flight; Nick Littlemore and fans; Fans; BANKS trills; Empire of The Sun emotes; Ellie Goulding drums; Jillian again; Nic Offer!!!

Parties

100

Dr. Martens presents Deap Vally @ Beep Studios Text: Indran P

What: Valley girls with a difference The White Stripes are no more and The Black Keys seem to acquire a new member with every new release, but Deap Vally has arrived to fly the flag loud and proud for all rock ‘n’ roll twosomes. New to the game, the duo of Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards has blitzed quite a path for itself, standing shoulder-toshoulder with shows alongside titans like Thurston Moore, Iggy Pop, Queens of the Stone Age and Dinosaur Jr. But besides being namechecked by the greats, the band made a fantastic case for itself with its 2013 debut full-length, Sistrionix, a lightning bolt of riff-heavy power and sass. And thanks to the good people at Dr. Martens, we got to see the Californian dames let rip right before our very eyes.

Who: Rock ‘n’ rollers and sisters-in-arms Even a casual listen of any of Sistrionix’s heatseeking songs will reveal that Deap Vally is about unsubtle, unadulterated rock. The big-haired, daisy-duked image of the girls also poses no riddles as to their ‘70s-alluding musical allegiance to drrrty, from-the-gut rock. And all those for whom that school of thought / way of life reigned true showed up. The fangirls were there in full force, as were the smattering of fan boys, some of whom were sporting Iron Maiden and Metallica tees as a show of bold, legacycontinuing solidarity. Being outnumbered and out-vibed, the hipsters sat this one out. Either that, or they were sulking in the shadows.

How: All-girl, all-rock power No one would’ve expected two girls who met at a crochet class to become hard-rockin’ bombshells, but Lindsey and Julie have made it their mission to tease and ultimately, nullify stereotypes. And so, invoking Zeppelin, Sabbath and Priest, the girls launched into a set of brick-thick riffage and spitfire pounding that was all the louder and all the more urgent for their show-stopping chops. From the swelling riffs of opener “Raw Material”, to the fist-up, hard-livin’ anthems like “Baby I Call Hell” and “Bad for My Body”, bluesy, incredibly distorted, megaton rock flowed from the stage in waves. It was loud, lovely and lethal, just like its makers.

101

Parties

The Observatory @ The Substation Text: Indran P Images: Martin Chua and William Grant and Sons What: Local titans raise the bar (and blow the roof) Given its peerless and imposing discography, it’s become natural to expect outstanding things from The Observatory. Even as recently as 2012, the band affirmed its nonpareil status with Catacombs, its fifth album that took its polyglot post-rock stylings to even more enchanting heights. But this night marked a new beginning for the band as, besides a new line-up, there was also a new album, Oscilla, to play and celebrate. And for the full house that packed The Substation that night, it meant bearing witness to a level of virtuosity, craft and rigour that aren’t easily found within or without our shores.

Who: Noise enthusiasts and diehards It’s hard to be an inbetween when it comes to The Obs. You’re either in or you’re out. And it’s this uncompromising aspect of the band’s evolving sound that has been one of its greatest gifts to listeners and gig-goers alike, crossover appeal be damned. And in this corresponding spirit, the gathered crowd reflected this as diehards, local scenesters and the culturally clued-in stood under the same roof to welcome their heroes. After all, if there was one place to be this night to take in boundary-torching sounds, this was it.

How: Oscilla unleashed A menacing drum line by new member, Cheryl Ong, announced the start of the set as, lurching, roiling guitars, churning synth-bass and leftfield electronics coalesced on “Distilled Ashes”, Oscilla’s 13-minute closer. More expansive, more confrontational and more direct, every instrument, including Leslie Low’s ominous voice, was stretched to its limit in service of the harsh truths the song espoused. Catacombs number, “Accidentogram”, then followed, paving the way for Oscilla’s title track which established itself as the album’s glowering masterpiece. Later, old friends and affiliates of the band joined it for a melodic set of covers from David Crosby and The Police before the night drew to a close with Oscilla opener, “Subterfuge”, coming full circle on its ripping movement of noise.