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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 of their earlier shows at the original Lim Kok Wing campus in Kelana Jaya. I wasn’t actually paying attention to the band, but more to Ihsan whom I thought had skills as a drummer. When given the opportunity to play for the band I jumped into it, as I was itching to be playing in a grindcore band again. Sure enough, the gig was held in what seemed to be a roofed basketball court, no stage, with no miking for the guitar amps and drums, a very back-to-basics set up. I don’t remember what I played, but I remembered the someone from the audience stepping on my guitar cable towards the end of our set, breaking it, rendering my guitar completely useless. So instead I started balancing my

guitar on one end using one hand, and proceeded to do a circus balancing act amongst the moshing crowd. Fun times indeed.

The first member of Kuala Lumpur Post-Harmonic Quartet (KLPHQ) was Firdaus Shah aka Pidos, whom I spotted at another gig in a Cheras art gallery while I was sessioning (on drums this time) for yet another band, R.U.S.H..

Honestly, I wanted him in the band by virtue of his good looks. I had this idea of finding really good-looking band members so I’d be able to sell the band.

This idea failed immediately. The band had a loose core of members, which amalgamated nicely once I was introduced to Fairuz Osman aka Piut who would become the guitarist, replacing Pidos who started playing keyboards instead. When we started we used to jam over at Loque’s (Butterfingers) Bilik Bedah studio at Bandar Sri Manjalara, usually at 2-3am. Loque himself played bass for a few shows, but we must have went through at least five bassists before settling on Tariq Hamzah who was also playing for Simon The Fag (later renamed I Am Rain for obvious reasons). But then again we went through at least eight drummers before settling on Mamat, drummer for screamo band Elisebelle Tears which disbanded earlier.

Funnily enough, I have actually met Mamat quite a few years earlier when he was 14 and at the same gig where I was at. The gig was at Barnum’s in One Utama, and although I have a hardly remember who played (I think Prana played, Jeremy and Jeffrey Little’s band, currently running Laguna Records.) I remember vividly what I did after. As I walked outside the venue, I spotted a kid wearing glasses sitting alone. There was nothing remarkable about him, except the fact that he was wearing an Atari Teenage Riot (ATR) t-shirt. ATR, if you didn’t know, are one of the purveyors of the whole digital hardcore movement, a band that I was a big fan of at that moment. So I tried to buy the t-shirt off the kid. He said no because then he’d be left running around One Utama with no t-shirt on. Mamat was that kid.

KLPHQ had a concept of never releasing a recording, and being a live band instead, similar to what a theatre production would be like. Our first show was actually at someone’s home, specifically the home of Mokhtarizal (formerly of Sevencollar T-Shirt) who was organizing a small gig in his front lawn. Piut hasn’t joined the band yet at that time, but he was actually one of the confused people in the audience as we went on a 20-minute wanking of a song. Yes, just one song, for 20 minutes. The songwriting process fortunately progressed better, and the band actually went to better things, having headlining one of the three stages in a particular instalment of the Rock The World concert to playing Singapore’s Baybeats Festival. Fairuz Sulaiman aka Blur was inducted to the

band as well, often providing thought-provoking (or simply gross) projected visuals to accompany our oftenly irregular live performances. His masterpiece?

Throwing glowsticks on stage while we were performing at Rock The World.

We’d often invite the audience to make up imaginery lyrics to our instrumental songs, and often forcing them to stand up and squeeze in amongst themselves uncomfortably since the norm at post-rock gigs (especially in Singapore) is to sit down, starry-eyed. This annoyed the hell out of me, as we tried to feed off the audience’s energy to be able to give back a powerful performance. That was the idea anyway. Sometimes this energy would not be enough, and we would purposely do something drastic or unpredictable onstage to get a response from the audience. Like shout at each other and abuse our instruments. Or even bandmates. Yes, I have kicked a bandmate on stage for missing a cue. And yes, I have apologized to him.

My work with KLPHQ led me to organize Motion Picture Soundtrack, which was a series of gigs that tried to blend quality music and visual arts experimentation.

It ran for at least four times, the first being at No Black Tie where we had painter Rina Shukor doing a live painting onstage while four bands played throughout the night. The latter shows were done at Laundry Bar over in Mutiara Damansara, were we did everything from our own interpretation of wayang kulit using children’s toys with overhead projectors to hanging shower curtains, bedsheets and neon-painted boxes with blacklights on stage. I’d like to think of it as putting music in an irregular setup and presenting it an artform, although my association with the arts scene locally can be described as minimal at the very best.