So when I came up with my drum n bass/jungle project Spacebar Collective it sort of took people by surprise. By then most people knew me as the bucket-hat- wearing guitarist of a Japanese grindcore band, but by my final years in Japan I started dabbling with electronic music and MIDI. Through some friends who had similar interests that I met via the Central Market circle, namely Azmir Karim, Oji and Sengwai from Cyberwerk, we spent hours in IRC discussing MIDI setups, audio engineering and synthesizers. This was pretty amusing considering the fact that I was in Japan and they’d be four music nerds in a private IRC channel just chatting about really geeky music stuff. This was pre-laptop music days of course, so I spent quite a bit of money on hardware equipment, including an MC-505 Groovebox (which was basically a glorified synthesizer/sequencer) which I bought using my ex-girlfriend’s credit card (which I promptly paid back, of course).
By the summer of 1997/98 me, Azmir, and an old school friend Hrishikesh decided to band together and develop the Spacebar idea. I originally started playing in small venues in Japan, and wanted to take the Spacebar concept further back home. We started sitting down together, toyed with the idea of a loose collective of musicians, DJs, and graphic designers, and began developing songs at Oji’s home studio. Oji, together with Seng Wai was in Cyberwerk, a trance duo that performs live so we figured we’d do the same thing and try out a live electronica band as well. The Spacebar Collective materialized, Azmir took the moniker Numlok, and Kesh was Backslash (which he still uses until now as a DJ). Co-incidentally Kesh had a brother named Murali whom I met years earlier when as teenagers we went to the Singapore Indoor Stadium to
watch a Metallica concert. Murali or Mu as we’d call him gave up on electric guitars (he was a big Soundgarden and Red Hot Chilli Peppers fan, bands he introduced to me when I was 15) and started tinkering with keyboards and samplers. Together with Rene Sullivan he started Discomafia, and this was basically how everything started for us.
Performing in a club/rave with party setting was of course very different than the grimy underground punk gigs that I was accustomed to. With Mu’s help Spacebar began to get shows at parties, usually with Discomafia, at a time when ‘live’ electronica or dance music was pretty much unheard of. Lim (Kok Kean) was also our manager at one time, scoring us numerous gigs at various parties. One memorable but ill-fated performance we had was at the infamous Hancur House venue over at Jalan Tun Razak (then a very popular venue for illegal raves and house parties), organized by the Gillazia crew that included Mu. Spacebar was collaborating with Discomafia, which also included legendary jazz drummer Lewis Pragasam on live drums and Zouk Singapore staple percussionist Tabla Maniam helping us out on percussions. I was pretty much starstruck having Lewis drum along to my electronic beats! This mind- blowing experience was unfortunately cut short when this illegal rave (‘legal’ raves probably didn’t exist back then, due to the copious amounts of drugs present) were shut down and raided by the cops shortly after I finished my set. Dance music and clubbing in general was was really different. In the pre-Zouk days, tobacco sponsors were aplenty, clubbers were friendlier (pushing Ecstacy was great business and you’d often see friends popping pills in each others mouths when the parties started) and big name DJs were often in town playing for a Kent or Salem-sponsored event. It was dirty, unadulterated, drug-driven and completely out of control. Raids on raves even made it to the front page of local newspapers. Party promoters like Tempo, Excessive and Frenzy (who are actually the ones who actually made it to the front page of Berita Harian) were throwing parties regularly. In the beginning the parties were usually held at odd places like building rooftops, deserted bungalows and jungle hillsides, and the then deserted Pudu Jail actually witnessed a large scaled rave party. I wasn’t there personally, but come on, a rave party in an abandoned jail? By that time a bunch of us were living above Joe Kidd’s new apartment in Bukit Ceylon, and aside from Azmir (who started working with Butterfingers on their ‘Transcendence’ album), we had Ken from Spiral Kinetic Circus (currently in The Malayan with Andy from Flop Poppy) and Eugene plus Voon Kee from Novokane. If you remember, Novokane is often credited as raising the bar when it came to local demo tape recording standards!
The atmosphere at 14C Bukit Ceylon was chaotically creative. We had a mini studio where we’d write songs and practice our DJ sets, and at one point the studio included a huge 32-channel mixing desk in our living room and 11 guitars! It was in Bukit Ceylon that we started collaborating with Kenneth Chan from Pervert Design, who did the visual projections for our shows at a time when it was pretty uncommon to do so. With many people living under one roof, we were hecticly productive. Music projects back then included remixing Deanna Yusoff (yes, she came up with one album), programming and playing for Koffin Kanser’s first live show ever (the aforementioned ‘Dari Jemapoh
Ke Manchestee’ soundtrack launch) and even me joining Carburetor Dung as
a sessionist guitarist for their Malaysian tour. The guys from Discomafia, as well as Sam and Brian from Herb Vendors would come and visit, where we would usually geek out about MIDI and audio processing, usually resulting in unexpected collaborations. We also met up with a lot of people in Malaysian arts and the film industry through Joe’s partner Yee I-Lann, one of them being film director Teck Tan. He had this idea about a film involving clubbing culture and dance music intertwining with traditional music. This idea later became ‘Spinning Gasing’, his first local feature film. We ended up becoming advisors for the film since he needed technical help and a touch of authenticity from real people in the clubbing scene. The place we were living in was also oftenly made the location for music videos and shoots, probably since we actually had funky silver-coloured walls left by an architectural firm that operated there before we moved in. Butterfingers’ ‘Malayneum’ music video was shot by our neighbour Kenneth in our living room!
With Joe Kidd as our neighbour downstairs, it was not uncommon to see and meet visiting punks and musicians who often crashed at our places. Fathul (Spiral Kinetic Circus) was also living in the same block, living just below Joe with, among others, Zemang from Kuchalana. We had a void deck in our building, where we’d just work on art projects or just have barbecues. Our house parties were quasi-legendary and bugged the hell out of our neighbours, since everybody basically had two floors to party on! There used to be days when I’d wake up from last night’s party and see strangers sleeping in our living room. Most notable was one crazy night when someone with an obvious low tolerance to alcohol managed to puke on our bathroom’s door knob, and later proceeded to vomit into a clogged sink. If that’s not enough, he (or she, we never figured out who) managed to pull all of our toiletries which were on a shelf above the sink, into the aforementioned clogged and full sink.
My regular haunt this time aside from my regular evening visits to Central Market was Excessive Records, located on Jalan Walter Grenier near Bukit
Bintang. This is where I met people like Bryan Burger, Boon and of course Callen Tham, who was my guru of sorts when it came to DJing. Goldfish and Blink, then wide-eyed teenagers wearing really baggy clothes were often there, and Bryan Burger would often feed me with the juiciest DJ gossip whenever I’m around. My gigs with Spacebar also brought me over to DJ Low’s Loops Collective studio often, where I often practiced with maestro DJ Acid, who was Malaysia’s DMC Turntablist Champion at the time. Acid went on to play with us live on countless shows including one at Genting Highlands (back when it was still acceptable to have rave parties over there) in front of at least 10,000 people. The same gig had at least nine people performing on stage including turntablists, percussionists, didjeridoos, MCs and the works. The same gig also had us freezing in the cold onstage as rain forced the show to start late by at least two hours! We were left standing by on stage until it started with no food, just mineral water that nobody wanted to drink since everyone was dying to go to the toilet. Total overkill but at least the money was good. Yes, we played for money as well.
Around the same time I realized that lugging around expensive studio equipment just to play out live was very cumbersome, so I began DJing instead. This also came about because I was approached by a German DJ friend to beta test a new DJing system using control vinyl records, which later became the Traktor Final Scratch system. I supposed it made more sense for us, to have DJ-like control, but without the extra pain of bringing crateboxes filled with records around. Acid later gave me confidence to play out on my own as a DJ, but in the beginning he was always behind me nudging a record or two when my timing was out. The first show I had as a solo DJ was actually at a friend’s club in Penang called Cornucopia (defunct), where I was heckled to death by a drunk patron who kept insisting that I play rnb instead.
Of course you cannot mention clubbing in the early 2000s without mentioning Movement. Located at the end of Jalan Bukit Bintang in an old cinema, it was at that time the best club with the best soundsystem. The crowd at Movement was always the most up-for-it crowd, and they had the best crowd-pulling DJs thanks to tobacco sponsors with deep pockets. Their DJ console was a good 15 feet up, accessible only via a wobbly metal ladder, but once you’re there you really do feel like God with your lesser minions dancing in the dancefloor below. DJing there was a challenge because since the club was really huge (it was an old cinema after all), there would actually be a noticeable delay between the monitor speakers in your console and the house system. There was also a smaller room at the back, usually filled with dodgy types being
engulfed in sweet-smelling non-tobacco smoke. This room was also where we played our longest ever live set ever at 5 hours! Our friends at Excessive Records, Callen and Terence Chong (who would later became Altered Image) was in charge of Movement in its latter years before it tragically burned down (probably because it was an old cinema, but who knows?) Since the club was just within walking distance of Bukit Ceylon, we’d walk over on a quiet Tuesday or Wednesday night with a CD of a freshly minted Spacebar track, and we were actually able to play it out on their house system, just to check out how the song would play out in a club. It was like having a club as your personal stereo! One memorable gig there was when we were called to open for our junglist hero Goldie. I bought Goldie’s ‘Inner City Life’ years earlier as a student in Japan, and his music was what got me into drum n bass in the first place, but I never thought I’d end up opening for his set. It started really badly because the club owner was being an ass about something, which resulted in us plugging in our equipment, setting up, the unpluggin everything, arguing, and plugging everything back in yet again. This wouldn’t usually be a problem but remember the DJ console was a good 15 feet off the ground. By the time it started all was good, and I was so excited I spilled my drink all over Goldie himself in the cramped DJ console but he didn’t mind it one bit. Nice bloke. Sorry, Goldie. Another memorable gig there was the ToneDef party organized by Tone Magazine, one of the first local music rags in English. It was the first time local electronica acts were brought together under one roof and performed live together. Aside from Spacebar, our contemporaries Cyberwerk, Herb Vendors and Discomafia played, but at least this time we performed on the stage and not at the God console, which meant more space and not having to climb up a ladder to start performing. Having said that our intoxication level that night probably made that 3 feet on the stage feel like 15 feet anyway. How do I know this? I fell while trying to get on stage.
Tone Magazine was really supportive of what Spacebar was doing, and often featured us in their publication. Maybe they genuinely liked us, maybe their female editor had a thing for Azmir, but it really brought attention to what we were trying to do. I will always remember the last interview we did with them, which was with Abigail de Vries (who I ended working with together a few years later), because as we were halfway through the interview, I-Lann from downstairs raced up to our apartment and told us to switch on our tv sets as something big was happening in New York. The date of the interview? September 11, 2001.
Aside from Tone, there was a lot of support on radio for our music. There was Angie Ng’s show on WowFM, and Fresh’s and Aminah’s show over at Red104.9. Radio was probably more lenient then, and Spacebar was once actually asked to perform live on air on Red104.9, which we did for one solid hour. One solid hour of drum n bass, live. Totally unthinkable now, especially since we blundered the first part of the show which resulted in dead air for at least one whole minute. For the show we had Teh Tarik Crew’s Altimet (we collaborated earlier at another event organized by Tone Magazine) and DJ Nicky C as our MC. I’m pretty sure a recording of that show exists somewhere. I also remember a live radio interview with them where after a lengthy chat session, they opened the lines for listeners to call in. One interesting fellow called, requesting to talk to me, and he proceeded to sing the chorus to Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That
Way’ to me live on air. It was a very enlightening experience to say the least.
Of course a few years earlier there was also Kamil Othman’s ‘The Alternative
Rock Show’ on Time Highway Radio, which has since become an Tamil radio
station. Kamil Othman was a high-ranking director in a company that pushed the Multimedia Super Corridor in Cyberjaya, but he was a huge music nerd and the closest we had to BBC Radio One legend John Peel. He would play the most obscure tracks on air, (thinking back, I wonder how he got most of the tracks cleared for broadcast) and I would listen to him religiously every week, as I’m sure most music fans then would. I was called into his studio once to talk about my music, and he actually played Damage Digital’s ‘Motherfucker’ in the background while he was interviewing me, in its entirety, not once, but twice!
Rock Revivalists
By 2003 and 2004, drum n bass was at its full swing (it has never fully regained momentum since) and I was DJing regularly at clubs around KL and Singapore. As I was doing all this a bunch of friends whom I knew as serious music collectors started planning for a series of parties for real music friends, These four, Lim and Kelvin whom I knew from my Central Market days, Daryl Goh who I met thru his work at The Star and Ah Xu who I worked with at photoshoots became Twilight Actiongirl, and they had the best flyers, or at least had a foolproof concept for it. Rather than just putting the names of the DJs playing, these guys actually figured out more people would come if they put the names of the bands whose songs they were going to spin! I guess seeing the words ‘The Smiths’, ‘New Order’ and ‘Depeche Mode’ made a lot of music fans excited to go see them play at this small Hartamas club called Bar Amber. All I remember about this club was that it was predominantly blue and purple and there’s always familiar, smiling faces when I stepped in there.
The early Bar Amber gigs were awesome not because they happened, but because we wouldn’t know whether it would happen or not. There used to be Friday nights when I’d wait anxiously for an SMS to arrive stating whether that night’s TAG party was happening or not, since Hartamas in those days was notorious for having parties shut down by the authorities. It was like a family affair, and I’d meet friends that I made years earlier from the Central Market and band days. Or rather it was a good way to hear our lives’ musical anthems being shared loudly in a club environment. I guess their perseverance paid off, as they were quickly snapped up by Zouk KL which began operating sometime after that.
Around the same time I started my appreciation of the post-rock genre. Personal developments at the time made it easy for me to relate to the blank, desolate worlds painted by this mostly instrumental genre. Inspired by Deftones’ ‘Minerva’ and other bands such as Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, locals Damn Dirty Apes (their magnum opus “Death of Optimus Prime” is one of local post-rock’s definitive tracks), R.U.S.H (later Furniture) and a bunch of Hobbit-esque Multimedia University Cyberjaya students who called themselves Sgt Weener Arms, I began a new musical project that was drastically different than my earlier endevours. It started the moment I picked up my rusty, trusted Ibanez Talman guitar (it has been duly neglected due to my commitment to turntables instead) and later buying myself a cheap delay pedal. Jijoe (ex-Spiral Kinetic Circus) suggested the name Kuala Lumpur Post- Harmonic Quartet (later Quintet) when asked for something that sounded like ‘Kuala Lumpur Philharmonic Orchestra”. The only idea that I had in my head was ‘wall of sound’, and by the time that idea evolved I was dying to leave the DJ console and start playing back on stage with a guitar again.
Prior to this I had started to play the guitar again, even sessioning on guitar for the final ever Custom Daisy show in Shah Alam. I had met Ihsan Ariffin (currently with They Will Kill Us All) and Ishaq Mohd Nor of Custom Daisy years earlier when they still had nu-metal leanings, and actually witnessed one