My birthday

Have not been blogging lately...coz I've been hooked on Facebook! Yikes! Ok, also because my Flickr was not working well at home & needed to find out about making collages as I wanted to have some photos on this post.

Finally got round to uploading the photos from my birthday celebrations. My presents received.

Hmm...seem to have a purple theme to it. There's the musical doll, something to pamper me and my forensics book (biography/cases).

Of course, what's celebration without food & entertainment! Well, what you see here are from Fish & Co. (Glass House) and Sanobar (One Fullerton).

Breaking Out - Year of Exploration

This year seems to be for me a year of exploration; a breaking out of conventions; a year of "adventure" and pursuance of my passion for the arts.

I've been rather proactive and "daring" this year. 1 obvious exploration was my try-out with the art installation design project. I have never expected myself to do any design or visual art stuff as I can hardly draw. But this being a platform for amateurs, I actually dared to sign up for it. And I won! Well, probably because it's more craft than drawing. That probably boosted my confidence a little. I realised that once I have a concept or inspiration, I am of a 1-track mind.

Then there's my resolve to look into new genres of sound & music and I found electronica/indie. Well, there are various types but it's interesting to explore new ways to make sound & music. I decided not to attend any SSO concerts or classical concerts and to make attempts to go for performances that I have never tried before. Well, there was Electrolab and these few days' Hadaka. Think if I were still in the previous conventional mindset, I wouldn't have gone. Maybe the old ways were getting "boring" or restrictive for me...maybe this year I wanted more activity & dynamism; new things...wanted to feel alive. Maybe because of certain influences.

I've also been seriously looking into photography. Guess it's really because I now have a digital camera which allows me to freely take photos without wasting film and & I can try out the features of the camera. And there's Flickr. Haha...maybe a bit thick-skinned, but some photos I took before looked great to me.

Hmm...think I'm looking at more meaningful doodling, i.e. something that looks like some form. Haha...well, just doodling. Abstract art maybe? Also, I'm trying to integrate into the arts community...maybe join some arts circle or social group. Found 1 though, see how'll it turn out.

Besides artsy stuff, guess doing fencing is a new thing too. I'm not the sporty kind (a bit lazy lah) so yah, at least I"m doing some form of sport.

I've been wondering, as consideration for my career path, have been thinking of specialising in the arts field. As I thought further, I felt that actually I'm more interested in become an 'artist' than an arts librarian. But if I ever get to specialise, probably it'll help me know more about the arts scene in Singapore.

Hadaka: K series - Day 3

Day 3 - compared with the past 2 days, tonight's performance was a milder-toned session.
In a way, it sounded to me like ripples & waves (the flow of it), like the sea...maybe it's because of the recent tremors, but somehow, the peak of the sounds made me think of tsunamis/tidal waves while in between it was the quiet nature of the sea. Some parts also sounded to me to be darkness personified.

So what has come out of this 3-day experience? Well, all 3 days were so different in the way the sounds were played and personally, I think I liked yesterday's performance best.
Let me attempt to link the 3 days for me: the 1st day was like "chaos", while yesterday's was more interplay and something like exploration of new life? Tonight's was more like a rounding up of life's ups & downs and maturity. Probably have more thoughts with more reflection. Hmm...well, I guess it was a whole new experience...One must try new things.

Hadaka: K series - Day 2

Today's performance was quite different from yesterday's. I'll just give my own impression of it. Others might have differing views about it. The performance had 3 parts.

Part 1
You hear a myriad of sounds where I recognised some to be mundane/everyday sounds we hear like water running. Anyway, 5 artists for this part. Also, amidst these, I felt some suspense or maybe some sense of possible culmination at some point, but not in a strong way. In a way, I could close my eyes & "feel" the sounds.
I realised that this sound art thing is really about how one interprets or feels the sound. Maybe there's no explanation, just blending and improvising as it's not really a definite form at that point of time; like how it's written in the programme, "uncurated". Hmm...maybe I'm getting it?

Part 2
In part 2, a different set of 4 artists took the stage in a rather different aspect. Each produced 4 distinct sounds - one "sang" some ghostly murmurs...not really chanting, but it gave you that Asian traditional feel. Then, another artist (Chee Wai) used the crisp, clear sound of the piano, which gave you a western, classical perspective. Then we have Atsuhiro with his optron which gave "electric" sounds. One other produced sounds that were sort of pan-background (some parts involved the static sound), but seemed like a buffer among the rest...I don't know how to describe the effect it gave in relation to the other 3 sounds.

Part 3
Finally, in part 3, all came together, i.e. part 1 & 2 combined, which is the culmination of all the sounds.

It's really interesting how they coordinated the timing to be exactly 1 hour for both nights. Tomorrow's the last night. See how it goes.

Hadaka: K series - Day 1

I bought a 3-day pass to experience this sonic art programme held at Esplanade. It features up to 9 Asian sound artists exploring and collaborating in an interlayed experimential production of sounds.
Well, I took an interest partly because 1 of my acquaintances, George Chua, was performing and I thought, why not hear out what his being a sound artist is like. Another reason was this year, I'm exploring new sounds and genres of music...although I don't really consider this music, rather a sonic form of expression.

So, what's my impression of Day 1? Hmm...I admit I'm really new to this and honestly, I'm quite clueless as to what to make of tonight's session. But I'm curious. It's really my 1st exposure to such a performance of sound mixing involving so many artists (9 tonight) and each having their own performing methods and styles. Wonder if anyone can do some explanation about this kind of performance to me?

1 thing that really made me wonder was how the light-sound display came into play in the whole picture. Maybe there were too many different sounds so I couldn't really make out how/when it came in. Let me try to describe the light-sound display by 1 of the artists. He's Atsuhiro Ito who uses fluorescent lighting in the creation of an original musical device called the optron. How it plays? You've got to watch him use it to understand fully...he uses a fluorescent light tube hooked up to some sound board and he uses some foot pedals too. He uses his hands to control the lighting and movement of the tube to produce sound and flashes of light. Hard to describe & I really don't know how it works, but then you can see the partial light-ups, which reminds me of a science demo during a visit in my school days where the instructor showed how one could control the lighting up of a flourescent tube even just part of the tube (something to do with ions?), even when it's not connected to electricity.

The sounds altogether were really loud (ear plugs were provided just in case). I tried to close my eyes to get a more focused sound reception, but it was simply too intense when all 9 artists were working it at the same time. It was a whole hour of this display.

I realised too that I'm so familiar with picking out sounds (of instruments) in a classical setting that I'm not used to trying to pick out sounds like 'who's playing now' in tonight's performance.

Well, let's see what tomorrow holds.

Fauxliage

Was browsing emusic.com recently and discovered this.

"Fauxliage is the first full length collaboration between former Sixpence None the Richer singer, Leigh Nash, and Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber of Canadian ambient pop outfit Delerium."

I kind of like the electronic ambient music, rhythm and the voice.

Check out their myspace spot.