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‘Suara Naga…’ Live @ Minut Init: An Evening Of Cacophonic Anarchy
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‘Suara Naga…’ Live @ Minut Init: An Evening Of Cacophonic Anarchy

by I. ShahDecember 27, 2015

LAST Monday, the Damansara diaspora of our greater arts community missed out on a truly ballsy expression of grating rebel music which isn’t for everyone anyway. The underdog heroes at your new favourite arts social spot, Minut Init, held court, and our music contributor just had to chip in with a most non-academic observation. Last time we checked, one is allowed to try…

At first gamely observing, then reluctantly, willfully experiencing live the bitter delights of saudara Arrington de Dionyso (truly Dionysian his oppressive sound was), the Olympia, Washington-based avant garde musician and artist who visited KL via Bali recently… was a trip. In itself. To say the least. Bla bla bla. Was it gonna be some twisted, Dadaist incarnation of South East Asian “world” music? Whatever. All I remember is, it was pretty heavy, man.

For someone who candidly professed to the performer earlier that I hadn’t paid attention to any Serious Music that was going on nearby, or anywhere in the world, for awhile, this Suara Naga (Voices from the Dragon) gig was worth dropping by your friendly neighbourhood gallery for. I mean why not?, I thought. What was not lovable about an experimental mat salleh musician–essentially a noise musician–bleating his guts out through a worldly cacophony of original shall we say, dragon sax art, for a precious hour of my so far highly social but unremarkable Monday night? Sound-wise, this was at least bound to blow out my sedate eardrums for the better.

The drone from Arrington’s mutant saxophone was a guttural noise straight from the depths of hell. Rivaling any live didgeridoo sound I had ever heard up to that point, the atonal dirge was far from the pretty, prancing staccato bleeps and cutesy “pa pa pa” jazz runs some others in the audience probably expected. I sympathised with them.

What we got (all 20 or so of us in the cavity, cavity because we were a captive audience and you could not not layan this shit and flake out now, though a few understandably did, early on) was this: Arrington, relatively naked in a beer singlet and drawstring beach pants, unceremoniously started the performance with a beastly growl into a transistor radio, his first victim, before working his electronically-treated saxophone and putting it through the same amplified ugly drone note, which then set the horrific loop into relentless the audience, his last victims, who were no more than a few feet away.

Arrington’s sax was the only instrument in this concerto which could count itself lucky, a friend in comparison to the radio and the myriad other ethnic toys from Indonesia which the artist employed in his John Cage-like arsenal for this particular set. Aside from the vocal (which favoured Bahasa Indonesia as its main linguistic vehicle as Arrington had deliberated), the sax was the star, having been pampered with extensions spontaneously patched on by the performer himself — what looked like an assortment of vacuum cleaner necks, drainpipes, exhaust tubes! — and having been spared the abuse the microphones, speakers and crowds’ eardrums had endured.

The main performer, also a practiced vocal manipulator, then crescendoed with a virtuoso vocal solo disguised as a bastardised do-re-mi rudimental routine which saw him trumpet out note after note out of some demented imaginary scale (which had a bit of that microtonal Balinese gamelan which felt conducive to this kind of thing) from those iron-cast marathon lungs of his. It was all about circular breathing facilitating what a village storyteller has to say. For an artist, this guy had some serious yoga power. Almost like an athlete.

Free-roaming nights of live music tonight aren’t about skill or entertaining requests, and in the moment of Arrington and collaborating musician/artist Corey Fogel of Los Angeles, California (also of the bands The Maeshi, The Curtains and others) stirring up their mid-performance rendezvous with relentless and contrarian non-drumming, I came to love that. Later, anyone who talked to them likely agree that it wasn’t a thought or expectation that as human beings, these abrasive performers weren’t assholes either.

Arrington and Fogel proceeded to play a long continuous set of droning apocalyptic art music from the abyss which defied harmony, and had little mercy for the decibel limits nor the acoustics of makeshift 3rd floor live venues. In your face, pentatonic pop wannabes.

Suara Naga‘s outward nihilism and performance ennui was exactly the kind which rubbed off on you, and yes it did awaken the dark side in me when Arrington deviated momentarily from his default diminished key into a mangled, somewhat faithful faux-tribute to John Williams‘ famous Beethoven-channeling “Imperial March”. It pissed me off. Albeit for different reasons than the poor face-palming chick sitting across from me, all dressed-up for a night on the town as ladies always are anyway, only to suffer the onslaught of such uncompromising sonic wares from a muso who clearly did not give a fuck.

It pissed me off, not because of Arrington’s casual irreverence for Composers like John Williams, but because it made me think of all the falseness in the world of pop ambition, rock degeneration and digital self-serving in a country where poseurs, hipsters and careerists are in bed with each other. Here at least, was a line drawn convincingly and in front of others to see. Minut Init held court to at least one performer who said, with his live set, “you can keep your ambition, closeted or not — I’m here, for the moment, so let’s party” (is there a recording? I hope so). Does it take a foreigner to say the things we are afraid to say?

This was an unapologetic, non-engaging live account of a man howling from the heart. It was an honest display of raw emotion not summoned for theatrics sake, but restrained beforehand, then unleashed upon a prejudiced audience. Sometimes, you think, to heck with aesthetics and correctness and crying salvos of arcing musical beauty…that night, such things clearly weren’t relevant to anything at all. This after all, was art. And it reminded aesthetes like me, that everything doesn’t have to be beautiful all the time.

Not many at all caught this particular one-man revelation but what it does for the local community is that a few of us saw it, including oh-so-busy creative types like me (preoccupied with my own shit), and there is something to be said about that because these kinds of eyewitness tales are the very stuff the great underground music and art scenes of old are made of. In an age when YouTube presence and and viral videos Facebook likes are all that seem to matter, it’s fucking refreshing afterwards to remember and keep believing that sometimes, all it takes is one balls-out live performance to remember any of us by.


Check out what musician/artist-activist Arrington de Dionyso of the US Pacific Northwest and his Malaikat Dan Singa, as well as LA-based Corey Fogel are about, as well as the noisy hijinks and art activism they get up to,  and also at this * sigh * Facebook .

About The Author
Profile photo of I. Shah
I. Shah
Once upon a time a footballer who retired as a teen after a fatal combination of favouritism and having "rocker's legs". Nowadays he's doing alright as a musician who writes about uncool things like peace, love and destiny. Izuan was associate editor for The Daily Seni.
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