The Star Online: Entertainment: Music
The Star Online: Entertainment: Music |
| Posted: 11 Mar 2013 12:18 AM PDT Malaysia's own avant garde and experimental music outfit, Space Gambus Experiment, has an exciting new album entitled First Steps Into Inner Space. RIZAL JOHAN unearths Rumi-influenced poetry coalesced with abstract and impressionistic soundscapes and Krautrock after speaking to its founder and creator Kamal Sabran. Where does one go after making a self-titled debut which captures tantalising melodies from the gambus (lute) and the drones of the planet Jupiter among other musical things? Kamal, artist, poet, musician, filmmaker and sound art exponent, had already made a critically devastating impact in the art and music scene with the debut of Space Gambus Experiment (SGE) in 2009. The album featured cosmic radio waves he had recorded when he was the artist-in-residence for the National Space Agency in 2005. As a sound artist, Kamal had achieved his dream of recording sounds that did not eminate from this Earth. He then pursued his quest further by making music using said sounds and the sound of the stringed lute which he achieved through the help of his main collborator and gambus player Zulkifli Ramli. There hasn't been an album to match the artistic achievements in Malaysia before or since the release of SGE. If Kamal had looked to the stars for inspiration then, he now looked to himself for his next musical passage. "The first album was about outer space but this time, it's inner space ... it's the journey of the soul," said Kamal in a telephone interview from Ipoh, Perak. And by looking at himself, he realised one thing early on about his main musical influence. "My influence in music is rock. Which is why this album is heavy, at least, it's heavier compared to the first album. One of the main differences with this album is that I'm playing the gambus instead of Zulkifli. He has a different style of playing the gambus, which is more Malay-traditional, whereas the way I approach it, is like playing a guitar." Kamal explained that Zulkifli was unable to collaborate with him this time around because of commitments with his own band, Dewangga Sakti. Since its formation, SGE has always been a collaborative effort between Kamal and other like-minded artists. Through social media, Kamal reached out to artists, sound-artists and experimental musicians locally and the world over; all of whom share a similar objective of pushing the boundaries of music and art. And First Steps Into Inner Space is no different. Here are the names of the collaborators: Eric Hausmann (USA), Katsuyuki Hattori (Japan), Fahmie Freakmie (Malaysia), Lorenzo Pancini (Italy,) Pilar Rocha (Brazil), Cathy Fern Lewis (Canada), Irawan Prayoga (Indonesia), Akane Kameyama (Japan), Adam James Davis (UK) and Putera Oud (Malaysia). "I would write about 40% of a song and then I would send the track to one of the collaborators. I worked with 10 people but I was selective in the way I worked because I knew each of their individual strengths. A particular track would go to a particular person depending on what I felt they could add to the song be it vocals, guitar or bass. After I got it back from then, I would work on the track further," said Kamal. Kamal admits that this process "took a long time" but he didn't spend all that time - about three years - working on just the 11 tracks featured on the new album. "I had written over 100 songs but I selected the best 11 songs for this album," said the 35-year-old. The methodology of sound Kamal described the songwriting process he had undertaken for First Steps Into Inner Space. It is complex in the sense that he wanted to make the intangible, tangible with the germ of the idea being the song's title. "I was influenced by (Persian poet) Rumi's poetry for the album title and title tracks. That was how I worked on this album. I would think of a title and then I would start writing the music," said Kamal who recorded, mixed and mastered the album at his home studio, Ipoh Experimental Art School Malaysia and American collaborator Hausmann's studio, Spilling Audio in Portland, Oregon. Thus was born such philosophical and mystical titles as Earth is not my home I'm just passing by, Living is easy with eyes closed, What you Seek is Seeking you and The Wound is the Place where the light enters you. Once he had a title, Kamal would pick up the gambus and write a melody to suit it and that would form the base of the track. "Everything starts with the frequency of the gambus. I needed to be careful with it because I didn't want the sound of the gambus to get lost in the mix. The gambus has a limited frequency to it," he explained. After that, Kamal would take drum samples for the beat, live guitar recordings, synthesizers, synthesized vocals and even sample hisses, pops and crackles of old tape and vinyl recordings to add what he calls "layers and textures" to his music. "I'm exploring philosophy and Islamic paintings with this album. It is a more personal exploration. The cover art for the album is of a Mughal Emperor and this type of art is known as a miniature painting. It's interesting because this art form has been around for centuries and there are similarities between this and Western art movements like abstract and impressionist. "The Islamic paintings were usually two-dimensional and flat; the colours are flat; there's no form, no shadows, and there is a lot of repetition. For example, all the trees will have one shape and they all look alike in the painting." Kamal had taken the parallels from art and supplanted it into music making. "With SGE, there is no structure like verse, chorus, verse or we need an intro here or a bridge there. I had taken a minimalist approach to writing the songs. An entire song may just consist of two chords but it's the colour of the instrumentations that make it whole; that gives it its own shape, form and structure. "And working with other people made it improvisational as well because what I originally sent them would change once I got it back and it would continue to change until I was happy with it." While there are no lyrics in the album, Kamal would sing the title over the song but he had a few problems with it initially. "I didn't like the sound of my voice. I wasn't happy about that. It wasn't until I fed my voice into vocoder (a system used to reproduce human speech) that I discovered another aspect of synthesized sound. "This album is heavily influenced by electronic music. And the sound I was referencing in particular was Kraftwerk (the German band credited for pioneering electronic music in the 1970s) and other early electronic music genres like Krautrock." Wikipedia describes Krautrock as "an umbrella term for the rock and electronic music influenced experimental music that originated in Germany in the late 1960s." So what are the first steps into inner space? Well, the first step is listening. You can download Space Gambus Experiment's First Steps Into Inner Space here: iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/first-steps-into-inner-space/id603419833 bandcamp http://spacegambusexperiment.bandcamp.com/ CDbaby http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/spacegambusexperiment3 Watch the official music video: For more information, visit |
| Posted: 11 Mar 2013 12:00 AM PDT Read the review of Space Gambus Experimement's First Steps Into Inner Space. While the idea of blending electromagnetic reverberations from the planet Jupiter with sounds of the gambus and setting it all against an art rock canvas was impressive to say the least, if I'm being honest, the first Space Gambus Experiment album did very little for me. Four years on though and sophomore record "First Steps into Inner Space" presents an entirely different proposition. It pulses with raw emotion and that, I believe, is simply down to the fact that Kamal Sabran, the man behind SGE is no longer dealing in ideas but proper songs; some optimistic and determined, some bloody, beaten and defeated, but all (12 in total if you count bonus cut "When My Sorrow Was Born") fully-formed. We're still not presented with verse-chorus-verse configurations or anything quite so commonplace (it's doubtful if Kamal will ever go down that route), but there is structure, and that really is what is most satisfying about "First Steps …" as a whole and the individual tracks that tip the hat to everyone/thing from Rumi, The Beatles, "Tubular Bells" and Hawkwind to Plato, Silver Apples, "Die Mensch-Maschine" and Spiritualized. It's a record that serves up psychedelic space rock and harrowing avant-garde noise as well as beautiful melodies shrouded in electronic buzzes, bleeps (wait, was that an engaged tone in "Dalam Gelap Kenal Cahaya"?) and whirs. It's music from another dimension with its feet firmly planted in this one. Most of all, "First Steps …" is a dazzling piece of work. Take a bow, Kamal Sabran, you crazy diamond. |
| Bieber wraps up London tour without hitches after rough week Posted: 10 Mar 2013 09:00 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - Pop star Justin Bieber wrapped up his final London show without hitches on Friday after a week riddled with paparazzi run-ins and a trip to the hospital. Bieber, 19, sang and danced his way through his fourth night at London's O2 Arena on the European leg of his Believe world tour, back to his normal self after collapsing on stage from shortness of breath on Thursday. The Canadian-born singer was treated by doctors backstage and given oxygen on the third night of his London shows. He returned to the stage after a 20-minute break and completed his set but was later taken to hospital as a precaution, the singer's representatives told Reuters. The singer also had an altercation with a UK photographer on Friday, caught on camera by Reuters, which showed Bieber get out of a van, try to move towards the unnamed photographer and threaten him using several swear words. He was reacting to the man's foul-mouthed criticism of him and his security team after the singer appeared to have made contact with the photographer as they moved towards the vehicle. The bouncers held Bieber back, but the incident is likely to create more negative headlines for one of the world's biggest pop stars. 'ROUGH WEEK' Since being discovered on YouTube in 2008, Bieber has built a huge following of mainly teenage girls attracted to his clean-cut image, slick videos and catchy pop songs. But the intense media spotlight that follows him around the world has clearly unnerved the Boyfriend singer. Bieber has had several run-ins with paparazzi in recent years and took to Twitter this week to criticise the media for what he called fabricated stories about him during his stay in London, where he is performing his sold-out tour. After the latest altercation, he returned to the micro-blogging site, where he has more than 35 million followers. "Ahhhhh! Rough morning. Trying to feel better for this show tonight but let the paps get the best of me..." he wrote. "Sometimes when people r shoving cameras in your face all day and yelling the worst thing possible at u ... well I'm human. Rough week." 'POP BRAT' Thursday's onstage collapse was not the first for Bieber. He suffered a concussion during a concert in Paris last June after falling into a glass wall. Bieber's illness came just days after he angered many fans by appearing for his first night at the O2 nearly two hours later than the advertised time. The singer blamed technical issues for the delay, and said he was only 40 minutes behind schedule, but the media jumped on the story and the popular Sun tabloid referred to him in a March 7 story as "Pop brat Justin." The tabloid attention has not been limited to the late show. Newspapers described as "bizarre" his decision to wear a gas mask on a night out. They also reported that Bieber, who celebrated his 19th birthday in London last week, tried to take 14-year-old Jaden Smith, son of actor Will Smith, to a club, where Smith was turned away, along with Bieber and his entourage. Bieber took to Twitter and Instagram to vehemently deny the reports he tried to take the underage Smith to a club, saying instead he was forced to leave the venue when the club's security guards behaved aggressively towards his fans who were lined up outside. |
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