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Damo Suzuki is headed to KL! Come catch me and some buddies jam with the legendary ex-frontman of pioneering krautrock band Can. From Wikipedia:

He currently leads what is known as Damo Suzuki’s Network – as he tours, he performs live improvisational music with various local musicians (so-called “Sound Carriers”) from around the world, thus building up a ‘network’ of musicians with whom he collaborates.

Among the musicians in his live shows have been Michael Karoli and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru, Dustin Donaldson of I Am Spoonbender, Cul De Sac, Passierzettel, The Early Years, The Bees, Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene, Airiel, Acid Mothers Temple, The Holy Soul, The Sandells, the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet (with whom he has recorded the 2007 EP Please Heat This Eventually), The Skull Defekts, AIDS Wolf, Edmondo Ammendola and Dave Williams of Augie March, Gordon J Watson & Simon Doling of Terminal Cheesecake, Stephen Mcbean from black mountain, The Prestidigitators, Gary Jeff of God, Calamalka, Karl Asa of J>A>W>, Hamish Black, tynder and many, many others.

Happening 27 Nov 2010 at the Annexe KL 8pm, entry by minimum donation of rm20.

Component one, more mulling to come

To mull, to ponder, to ruminate.

To debauch, to seduce with sensuality, to lead away from virtue.

Mull, debauch = thinking about fucking things up. I think I got it.

Furniture’s album is currently in mastering with Nick Lee. We played some new songs last night, seems like they went down well with the audience. Encouraging!

I should be posting events before they happen.

Cityscapes we're done.

It’s taken a while to get here and listening to the whole album in one sitting tonight was like seeing major chunks of the last 5 years flash by. Most of the band (plus our vocal manager and not-so-vocal album artist) have given their thumbs up to most of the album, so it’s on to stem mixdowns and mastering.

Here is the 3rd album preview track (other 2 here and here), see y’all real soon.

Furniture – Vacancies.

I don't want to carry this mattress alone

The walls of KL’s historic Pudu prison go down today, making way for road expansion and what will likely be another mall or variation of the theme. Pudu prison suffers the fate of KL’s callous urbanization with other recent casualties including BBGS and Bok House. Pictured above is the prison wall in a scene from Tsai Ming-Liang’s I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone.

On that note here’s another preview track from Furniture‘s next album, a song in part inspired by the shifting sands of our city’s landscape.

Furniture – Monuments

The track is also on the Furniture MySpace page.

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1962 – March 6, 2010

Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart last Saturday. He is gone and Sparklehorse is no more. The world’s lost another understated music visionary.

When Furniture played an acoustic show last year, we thought to throw in a cover. It was the first time the band ever played a song that wasn’t our own, and we did Sparklehorse’s Gold Day from the album It’s a Wonderful Life. I was anticipating our set just to play that song.

Here it is, in memory of Mark Linkous.

Download here.

Work in progress.

I’ve been busy with not much time to blog. The Furniture album’s eating up my studio hours, it’s coming along slowly but surely. Here’s a taste of what we’re working on. A whole song this time, not a short sample. I’ll be posting a few more tracks as they come along.

Furniture – False Start

Alternatively, listen to it on the Furniture MySpace page.

The SG sees some action

My neighbours will attest, it’s been a week of recording loud guitars. Finally found a song that could do with the grunt of my Epiphone SG. I found this axe in Wellington about 8 years ago. It was a left-handed and on sale, so I picked it up and left it sitting in a corner ever since.

The cherry red was screaming Angus Young and I just couldn’t live up to its awesomeness. Over the years my other guitars have seen customization while the SG kept its stock fittings.

Finally my poor step-child guitar gets its time in the spotlight, and it did not disappoint (after some tweaking). Here is a raw mix of the SG on Furniture’s Entrails, bridge pickup going through a ProCo Rat then the Ceriatone JCM800 clone head and cab:

More loud guitars for Furniture’s Infinite Impossibilities. I wanted the trashy sound of my punk guitar, a Fender Jagstang with Seymour Duncan TB-4 Trembuckers on the bridge. Also through the Proco Rat and JCM800 clone:

In both instances, the recorded tone was also influenced by mic setup. I had a kick drum mic almost front and dead center on one speaker and stuck a sm57 behind the cab.

The 57 sounded like crap on its own, but mixed in with the front mic it added a lot of dimension, I think. Finally I tweaked the phase to balance out the bottom end depending on how it was sitting in the mix.

Recently we’ve been working on trumpet and cello parts, a fascinating reprieve from recording guitars most of the time.

Aziz blows

It’s a challenge to get these parts sounding like they were played in a much larger space, but I’m almost there with some creative layering and phase manipulation. I’ll spare the details.

Alia bows

Here is an excerpt of trumpets, cellos etc. from One For The Rest Of Us:

OK, back to work.

Azmyl Yunor on banjo

Last night was the first time recording a banjo in the studio. Here is the unmixed Ballad Of Mat Som, to be released on Azmyl‘s upcoming album:

The Flowers Beneath My Skin

27th June was a busy day with my participation in 2 events at KLue‘s Urbanscapes 2009. First was 1 hour of live film scoring in KLPac‘s cool air conditioned Pentas 1 theatre, then out playing with Furniture under the blazing midday sun while being filmed by the good folks at the Weekend Sessions.

The live score for Kit Ong’s The Flowers Beneath My Skin was a collaboration between myself, singing songwriting noisenik Azmyl Yunor and avant-garde composer Yong Yandsen. We alternated on drums, guitars, saxapohone, glokenspiel, autoharp and bells as the film screened above us. Description from the Urbanscapes page:

The Flowers Beneath My Skin (2006) by Kit Ong, 70 minutes

Synopsis: This film is about a spirit that haunts an apartment, where the occupants are into foot-binding, castration, and skin peeling. The spirit observes their daily ritual. This is not a horror film, and the spirit is not frightening. But the people staying in the apartment are.

Director’s statement: “There have been many cases of group suicides in Japan. Strangers who have met earlier on the net commit suicide together in remote places. Most of them die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide poisoning deprives the brain of oxygen. The person will hallucinate before dying. This film is happening in the mind of one such person. In her dying minutes, time and space have become warped, and she hallucinates about the 5 strangers she is slowly dying together with. And as her mind unravels, she reveals little things about herself. The story is sandwiched between two people who know the suicide victims.”

Ronnie, Azmyl and Yandsen have been making music and sounds on their own (and with their many solo/band projects) and occasionally together (with other friends along also) at wild humid improvisatory jam sessions at the Studio in Cheras, KL (SiCKL), also home to many Experimental Musicians and Artists Co-oprative Malaysia (EMACM) events. This will be their first time as a trio scoring a film live.”

An excerpt from the performance (recorded on the Zoom H4):

Download the entire set in 3 parts (320kbps 44.1kHz mp3) :

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3