The year was 1996. I was busily updating my Geocities homepage at a cyber café in Bangsar when I noticed a very familiar face planted intently on the computer screen nearby. Having seen him before on TV and reading his articles on The Sun’s Blasting Concept section every week (my dad used to mail the cutouts to me without fail every month) I went up to him and said hello, awkwardly questioning him on the merits of featuring Oasis on the TV show he was involved in called ‘Alternatif’. He was extremely friendly and accomodating as he explained his reasons to me, and we proceeded to exchange CDs as he shared with me his music collection in his small room at Brickfields which had walls of cassette tapes and CDs. His name was Joe Kidd, and he was the first of many connections I made in the local (underground) music industry.
Having being involved only in University Malaya’s music circuit prior to that (UM’s Pusat Kebudayaan back then was very supportive of the arts, although usually of the local, traditional variety), one of my earliest forays into the local music scene was attending a Nirvana tribute gig over at KL’s Life Centre. OAG was playing (with the line-up that included Edmund on bass and Qi Razali on drums), as well as a very young, grunge-era Butterfingers (Emmet was predictably wearing a striped, Cobain-esque sweater) and Lovely Ugly Carnival
(which featured Lim Kok Kean aka Twilight Actiongirl’s DJ Bunga when he still had vocal aspirations). I was really disappointed by that gig, memorable only because of the little guitar combo amps they used for such a big venue with floppy, stand-less microphones slapped on top of it (I was expecting loud Marshall stacks and all that), and being a Nirvana fan back then, the lack of actual Nirvana covers that they played for the night. I never set foot in a local gig again until I left for Japan for college in 1995.
Japan had me engrossed in its rich musical sub-culture, although in hindsight where I was located meant the scene’s musical focus was either New York- styled new school hardcore, metal and boring pop bands, where as I was more interested in the avant-garde and experimental noise scene brewing up further up north with bands such as Melt Banana, Merzbow and Masonna, as well as the Berlinesque techno sounds of Ken Ishii and Takkyu Ishino. I kept up with what’s happening in music by never failing to purchase copies of zines like Maximum Rock N Roll and the likes, and I accidentally caught up and reconnected on the Malaysian scene via an article in the then popular Japanese fanzine on underground culture called Eat Magazine. The article was on South East Asian scenes, and the Malaysian section of course had Joe Kidd in it, which detailed his involvement with Carburetor Dung and his Aedes zine. The article also included his home address. I wrote to him (I don’t remember what I wrote), but never received a reply and never really bothered until that day in Bangsar in 1996.
So meeting up with Joe was a huge catalyst in what would become my way back into the local music scene after my disappointment a few years earlier at that Nirvana tribute gig. As Joe introduced me to his friends who played in bands or made their own fanzines, I realized that aside from their love for music the scene was very fragmented, more so than it is currently, with the words ‘underground’ and ‘ethics’ being tossed and abused. It wasn’t uncommon to see different ‘tribes’ of musical fans lepaking in different sections under one roof, none the more obvious than the creative musical melting pot that was Central Market.
Before being the boring tourist trap that it is now, Central Market was, in its musical heyday, the place to be if you wanted to be ‘in’ the scene. You just showed up there, get the guts to say hello to someone who looked like he belonged in the scene (a dead giveaway would be a band t-shirt. Or long hair) and sooner or later you see your musical social circle expand. Although back then you have to know where you belong, as the place was separated into two obvious sections. Chances are if you’re into new school hardcore, was into
Strange Culture Records bands (by then the most prolific local record label churning out hardcore releases) and actually wore colour you’d be labelled as a ‘budak atas’ and would make the food court on the first floor your regular spot. If you’re a jaded, crusty punk, metalhead or deeply into The Smiths and Depeche Mode and rarely wear anything but black then you’d be a ‘budak
bawah’. And the place where you belong would be Hameed, a mamak restaurant
over on the ground floor.
Although I could easily slip into these two groups easily (upstairs by virtue that I was dressed like a hardcore music fan and was based in Japan, downstairs by the fact that Joe Kidd introduced me to a lot of people who hung out there), I would usually be at Hameed puffing away on cheap cigarettes with the other misfits there. Being in what would technically be a mall, Hameed was of course a non-smoking area, but it never stopped the characters that hung out there from smoking, although from time to time we’d keep an eye out for DBKL officers looking to earn an easy RM50 by ticketing us on the spot.
Central Market was essentially my first destination everytime I was back for my summer break from studies in Japan, or whenever I’d arrive in Kuala Lumpur from my hometown in Johor. I would come, usually to Hameed downstairs, armed with a backpack (which usually just contained a towel, toothbrush and boxer shorts) and basically crashed at anybody who allowed me into their homes. I made a lot of friends this way (most notably Azmir Karim, whom I thought looked like Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode circa ‘Songs Of Faith And
Devotion’ when I met him. He would later become one of my regular co-
conspirators) although I would usually end up at Joe Kidd’s apartment over in Brickfields. A lot of musicians where staying at his place and the apartments across the hall. It was here where I met people like Lee, who was the vocalist for Hijrah/Pilgrims and later Carburetor Dung, Fathullah Luqman, the brains behind arguably Malaysia’s first proper indie band Spiral Kinetic Circus, Fathul’s then bandmate Andy (and his whole family!) who later had a successful run with his original band Flop Poppy, dreadlocked Aru of metal band Nemesis and later nu-metal outfit Koffin Kanser, Fendi Mazlan, bassist from Carburetor Dung (and the only bassist I knew back then who couldn’t tune his own bass guitar) and the late Oz of the infamous funk unit Naked Butterfly.
I usually didn’t come back from Japan empty handed. Aside from the numerous CDs and records that I collected and brought back (this was probably due to me running an online distro of Japanese CDs since 1996, which later morphed into the Japanese underground music site called J-Underground, the only English site on Japanese underground music back then), I also came back with
a bandful of Japanese pranksters called Damage Digital. The band initially started as a joke really, the nexus of the idea came up after me, drummer Masayoshi Ichinose and our friends Makoto Kusano and Misa Moronaga took the long drive up to Osaka to watch our grindcore heroes from New Jersey called Discordance Axis play there. The gig was also memorable due to the fact that the other two bands that I saw, the Spanish-by-way-of-Japanese sludge monsters Corrupted and arguably Japan’s best death metallers, Hellchild, became two of my favorite Japanese bands.
Discordance Axis (whom I still believe is the best grindcore band ever) was recommended by Makoto via a split record with Melt Banana that I really loved, enough for me to actually email vocalist Jon Chang. We later became close friends due to the fact that he was a Japanophile. In fact he was the one who suggested the name Damage Digital when I told him we figured we had enough talent to start a grindcore band after seeing his band play in Osaka. Masayoshi and myself basically started writing songs at our college’s music studio (Masayoshi had already graduated and started working but still comes to college to jam!) and began to play small shows around the college circuit. When we later figured out it was too tiring and difficult to play our instruments and shout rubbish at the microphone at the same time, we recruited Makoto and Misa and another friend Shouhei Baba to scream and growl for us. This eventually became the original line-up for the band and how I became the token Malaysian in this Japanese grindcore band.
The band continued on after I left Japan in 1999 and is still actively performing shows in the grind and noise circuit over there, with numerous releases on small obscure European labels. Locally, we managed to record and release a cassette-only album under Joe Kidd’s fledgling Alternative Garage Entertainment label entitled ‘Delete’. We recorded the album in a recording studio in a bungalow somewhere in Petaling Jaya, thanks to Joe Kidd who had extra recording studio hours left over from a project he was working on for a movie. I don’t remember where it was but I was pretty sure our studio engineer was a fine Chinese gentlemen called Tham who probably didn’t understand the kind of ‘music’ we were recording but persisted anyway. Fortunately for him we finished recording everything in one night. When ‘Delete’ was released, I would sell the cassettes myself at gigs. Francis Wolf from the band Spunky Funggy would be selling his band’s cassettes just beside me as well, and I’d always end up selling more cassettes than he did. He jokingly said it’s because I had Japanese people in the band, which was probably true. I bet if the band was made out of five Malaysians it wouldn’t have garnered the attention that it did.
The movie that Joe Kidd was working on was Hishamuddin Rais’ ‘Dari Jemapoh
Ke Manchestee’, and he was in charge of the soundtrack album. Our recordings
that night made it to this album, although we were never really featured in the movie itself. They had a press conference and a gig when launching the soundtrack, which was held at a Chinese assembly hall in Chinatown. Damage Digital played at this gig, but it was more memorable to me as it was the earlier shows of Aru’s band Koffin Kanser, which at that time consisted of just him, plus myself and Azmir on synthesizers. Aru recorded ‘Gott’ for this soundtrack (and performed it that night), which sort of blew my mind when I first heard it since it meshed live, chugging guitars and programmed drum beats perfectly. In case you didn’t know, the song is called ‘Gott’ to divert attention away from the fact that the chorus actually went, ‘God, religion sucks!’.
Lim (Kok Kean aka DJ Bunga of Twilight Actiongirl) was also working at Pony Canyon Records at this time, back then a record label that fully supported underground bands like The Pilgrims and a few others. Working with Joe Kidd he worked on a compilation CD called ‘The Underground Chronicles’ that also featured Damage Digital. Lim was the only friend I met thru Central Market that actually visited me when I was in Japan. This was also probably due to the fact that back then I had to make regular visits to Toys ‘R’ Us and countless toy stores there to get him the limited edition Japanese toys that he wanted as a serious toy collector. He was also responsible for giving me one of my first proper CD cover layout job (I ended doing up doing endless CD covers), which was for a live album for metalheads FTG.
Damage Digital went on to play several sweaty shows at metal and punk gigs in KL and Singapore. Our shows were really intense (and short) and things quickly become chaotic the moment the first riff starts. During one of our shows at Fire Disco (then a very popular venue for underground gigs) things got so intense that our vocalist Makoto growled so hard that he vomited into the microphone. At another gig in a shady part of Serangoon in Singapore I got so over-excited that by the last song I was pulling out my guitar strings with my fingers, which resulted in them getting cut badly and getting blood all over my guitar. Don’t even mention the countless times Misa crowd-surfed over the audience, much to the delight of their groping hands. Who wouldn’t want to grope a Japanese girl? I guess we really suffered for our art.
During the big black metal witch hunt of 2000, no thanks in part to Harian Metro’s (still) irresponsible reporting, we saw one of our shows at the now defunct venue called Factory over at Bukit Bintang being raided by the authorities. The gig was called “Tora Tora Tora”, and featured amongst others
18SGG and Custom Daisy (whom I later sessioned for also in a gig) plus my side project with Jijoe (formerly of Stoned Crows and Spiral Kinetic Circus) and Aru. This side project (whose name escapes me) was just about to perform when we heard “Kami dari Polis DiRaja Malaysia.” being announced over the PA system. We thought the soundman was pulling a prank, but when there was a mass exodus to the exit we knew things were serious. There was a huge scramble to the exit, and we were then ushered with the rest of the performers thru a back exit via Starhill’s parking lot. When we were outside we could only shake our heads in disbelief as truckloads of Black Marias were hauling kids just for attending the gig. The negative media blitz against gigs didn’t end after that, and from my observation Harian Metro would just recycle headlines using the terms ‘black metal’, ‘seks’ and ‘kambing’ once every 6-7 years. The band didn’t return back until September of 2010, when we had a reunion of sorts with me back on guitar, the first time since 2002.