Rabu, 26 Oktober 2011

Korine Conception - Glow in Transparancy Aurora

Band dari kota Medan ini berhasil meracik dreampop, ethereal, ambient, nu-gaze, hingga slowcore, begitu jernihnya. Berikut artikel mereka dari wastedrockers dan link unduh album perdana mereka, Glow in Transparancy Aurora.  

Korine Conception adalah sebuah band dreampop / shoegazing asal kota Medan. Saya pribadi sampai berkata dalam hati: “anjrit, dari Medan ada juga ben kaya’ gini!”  Band yang terdiri dari enam orang ini berdiri sejak tahun 2003. Sudah merilis beberapa buah single kompilasi. Hingga akhirnya di awal 2010 ini mereka merilis album debutnya yang berjudul G12low In Transparancy Aurora di bawah BFW Recordings; sebuah net-label khusus musik-musik indie-rock / electronica / experimental asal Manchester, Inggris.


Seperti umumnya formulasi band-band dreampop, musik Korine Conception menggunakan kord-kord minimalis yang dilapisi oleh melodi-melodi ethereal guitar dengan efek flanger-delay kadar dosis tinggi, droning string-section dari keyboard, noise-feedback gitar sebagai latar dan whispery-falsetto vocal. Secara musikal, konsep yang Korine Conception tawarkan bisa kami nikmati dengan baik. Lagu-lagu kontemplatif di album Glow In Transparancy Aurora nampaknya harus didengarkan pada waktu luang. Jadi, coba cek these Medanese shoegazers! (Dede - wastedrockers.blogspot.com)

Glow in Transparancy Aurora
Download Link

Jumat, 21 Oktober 2011

Hoarse Tour 2011

Sebuah tur bertajuk Hoarse Tour 2011, siap melabrak tiga kota dengan penampilan tiga band yang mengusung musik tidak populer dan anti-rock. Bising mengincar Bandung, Jakarta, dan Yogyakarta.

HOARSE TOUR 2011, begitu kami menyebut rangkaian tur tiga kota ini. SORRA (Bandung) akan menjadi tuan rumah pertama pada tanggal 4 November 2011, disusul oleh BAREFOOD (Jakarta) pada tanggal 5 November 2011, dan ditutup dengan jamuan dari NERVOUS (Yogyakarta) pada tanggal 12 November 2011.



Timeline:
1. Jumat, 4 November 2011
Braga Cafe, Jl. Braga no 15, Bandung
bersama Neowax, Veskil

2. Sabtu, 5 November 2011
Bara Futsal, Jl. Falatehan No.68 Blok M, Jakarta Selatan
bersama Damascus, StrawberryWine

3. Sabtu, 12 November 2011
Wadjah Coffee, Jl. Wahid Hasyim, Condongcatur
bersama Talking Coasty, Anggisluka

Your call. Either way, we welcome you.

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Selasa, 18 Oktober 2011

Black Mustangs

Black Mustangs, hanya hidup sejenak di skena musik ibukota. Mengusung seminal shoegazing khas daratan US dan UK di era 90-an, berikut ulasan band ini oleh wastedrockers, plus pranala unduh dari satu lagu mereka berjudul Now is The Time.

Lagi-lagi Wasted Rockers menemukan band lokal yang bagus! Kali ini datangnya dari Jakarta. Mereka adalah: Black Mustangs (www.myspace.com/blackmustangpsychedelic) adalah sebuah band muda asal Jakarta. Memainkan psychedelic-rock dengan cita rasa band-band Inggris era 90-an yang kental.

Band yang terdiri dari enam personil ini mengambil pengaruh musikal dari: funk, psychedelia, rock n roll, (sedikit) shoegazing, (sedikit) raga-rock & madchester. Mereka adalah Jonathan Pardede (Guitar & Vocal), Dimitri Dompas (tambourine and back vocal), Bernadus Fritz (guitar), Andreas Hura (drum), Bhisma (Guitar & Back Vocal).

Black Mustangs
Mungkin apabila mereka muncul di era 90-an bakal disebut orang-orang sebagai “Britpop”. Ya, di musik Black Mustangs kami mendengar pengaruh dari musisi-musisi macam: Inspiral Carpets, Oasis, Kula Shaker, Swervedriver, (late) Ride, (early) Charlatans UK & (early) The Stone Roses. (Dede - wastedrockers.wordpress.com)

Too bad, setahun silam, mereka menyatakan telah bubar di laman facebook. But don't worry, berikut link unduh dari lagu Now its The Time. Enjoy the ride!

Minggu, 16 Oktober 2011

Bleary Eyes

Salah satu band shoegaze senior di Bandung bersama Themilo, Bleary Eyes seperti sebuah kabut yang menyelimuti kotanya. Begitu dingin dan misterius.

Satu lagi band shoegaze yang bagus, namun hampir tak ada informasi yang cukup untuk dijelajahi suguhan musiknya. Pelakon Bleary Eyes sama-sama misteriusnya. Untung, Aduy, personil Jellybelly membantu informasi siapa gerangan personil band ini, tak lain Martin (drum), Hendra (gitar), Temmy (vokal, gitar), dan Reva (bass, vokal).

Band shoegaze lawas di kota Kembang ini menampilkan musik yang meruang oleh efek-efek modulasi, dan berbalut fuzz distorsi seperti Slowdive dan A.R. Kane. Sayangnya, tak seperti kompatriot satu kotanya, Themilo, Bleary Eyes justru sama sekali belum memiliki sebuah album penuh. Yang ada hanyalah materi demo yang terserak di hard disk, alhasil tidaklah banyak yang mengenal band ini (khususnya di kota-kota selain Bandung).

Bleary Eyes
Untungnya, tersedia empat lagu Bleary Eyes siap unduh dari hasil sindikat berbagi file perkoncoan, terdiri dari Unrequited, sisanya hanya berjudul Track 1 (Untitled), 2 (Rain Wash Away the Pain), dan 3 (Pleasure to Lie) - biar afdol, sekelar unduh, rubah track tanpa judul dengan keterangan judul diatas. Dan Temmy merestui berbagi file ini untuk kita semua!


Download Link

Kamis, 13 Oktober 2011

Lazysofia - Up in The Air

Mereka hanya berdua. Keduanya pria. Meracik senandung bising di relam kota Bandung yang sejuk. Hasilnya, sebuah EP berjudul Up in The Air yang telah terilis baru-baru ini.

Sebuah link lagu di soundcloud berjudul Lying Under the Sun di laman facebook, betul-betul mengagetkan saya. Betapa tidak, lagu itu menghantarkan serangan tremolo dan fuzz secara bersamaan. Mirip apa yang dilakukan band Moonshake lewat lagu Gravity, namun lagu milik band bernama Ladysofia ini terasa lebih intens. 
Lazysofia's EP - Up in The Air

Ladysofia terdiri atas dua pria bernama, Raditya Nugroho (drum) dan Thresia Sandra Desfika (gitar, vokal). Berdua, mereka meramu materi dengan bantuan loop dan sejenisnya. Dibawah bendera label Bah! Records, band yang mengambil nama Lazysofia dari karya seni teman mereka, merilis sebuah EP berjudul Up in The Air.

EP yang berisikan dua lagu, berjudul Up in The Air dan So Lazy (sayangnya, Lying Under The Sun tak masuk rilisan ini) menjadi materi salam hangat kepada pendengar baru Lazysofia. Kebisingan khas band shoegaze klasik seperti My Bloody Valentine dan The Charlottes, tampak kentara di mini album ini. Sedikit beringas dan berbahaya.


Lazysofia with Inel (their additional mus.)

Bagi yang penasaran, bergegaslah membeli EP Ladysofia berjudul Up in The Air yang hanya dicetak terbatas, 25 kopi, seharga Rp15000, dan bisa dibeli/order di Omuniuum, Ruku/Kineruku, dan Ruang Kecil (For International Order)

Minggu, 09 Oktober 2011

Poptart

Jebolan legiun band-band Sinjitos di era awal, Poptart menampilkan geliat shoegazing ibukota di pertengahan 2000-an. Tak terdengar lagi kabarnya, band ini menyisakan remah-remah materi yang menarik untuk disimak.

Minimnya informasi tentang band ini di dunia maya, bahkan untuk dokumentasi foto profil personil Poptart atau aksi mereka di atas panggung sekalipun. Mungkin karena band ini hadir di era friendster, dimana posting foto ataupun pamer materi tak semeriah saat ini lewat facebook (laman mereka di myspace pun nihil). Yang ada pun hanya sebuah page multiply Poptart yang berisikan informasi secukupnya saja, dimana para pelaku Poptart adalah Ato (gitar), Louie (gitar), Uwie (bass, vokal), dan Ricky (drum). Sang basis adalah staf label Sinjitos dan basis Santamonica, dan bagi yang suka latihan di studio Sinjitos, tak akan asing melihat wajahnya.


Ricky
Ato & Louie
Uwie









Meski begitu dari materi musik, Poptart menampilkan shoegazing klasik yang tersarikan dari band-band fuzzy seperti Chapterhouse, Ride, Revolver, hingga Adorable. Serunya, beberapa materi memiliki lirik bahasa Indonesia, satu hal yang jarang ditemui di band-band shoegaze lokal lainnya. Dan, tidak terkesan maksa dan janggal. Sayangnya, tak ada dokumentasi aksi live band ini, dimana pasti banyak yang belum pernah melihat wujud Poptart dengan mata sendiri.


Berikut tiga materi Poptart dari sindikat berbagi file perkoncoan,  berjudul Fuga, Biar, dan Klise, dan diijinkan pendiri Poptart, Uwie. 

Download Link

Selasa, 04 Oktober 2011

Diamond Gazers by Jude Rogers

Jude Rogers, kolumnis dari The Guardian menulis sebuah artikel menarik tentang hantu shoegazing yang kembali bergentayangan dan urusannya yang belumlah kelar setelah lebih dari satu dekade silam. Blak-blakan, apa adanya dan sesuatu banget :P Enjoy!

At the start of summer 2007 a supple, shimmery thread started darning itself through a long line of euphoric-sounding albums. From Maps to Blonde Redhead, Mahogany to Deerhunter, Asobi Seksu to Ulrich Schnauss, you could hear the heady, woozy influence of a style of music that had been a byword for naffness and overindulgence for the past 15 years; a type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he "hated more than Hitler". Names like nu-gaze, stargaze and shoetronica were used to describe it, names that couldn't quite hide the scene that dared not speak its name. For shoegazing was back - the sound of jangly indie fed through layers of distortion, overdrive and fuzz; of delicate souls turning themselves up to 11. In Summer 2007, bands, clubs, Mercury prize-nominated albums, films, and novels are all proud to claim it as an inspiration.

Richey Edwards on shoegaze: "hated more than Hitler"

Why shoegazing and why now? "Because it's time to be adventurous again - and it's time to reclaim the music from the term," says Nathaniel Cramp, the cheerful, bearded promoter of Sonic Cathedral, both a shoegazing club that travels around the UK, and a record label. The term is the first problem: it began life as it remains - a derogatory word coined by Food Records boss Andy Ross in 1990, co-opted by the NME to describe bands like Slowdive, Chapterhouse and Moose, who would stare at their pedals through their curtains of hair rather than engage with their fans when they played live. "It wasn't very fair," says Neil Halstead, formerly Slowdive's shy teenage frontman, and now the leader of country band Mojave 3. "The live shows were far from fey. They were about the energy of the experience, about sheer volume, and about taking a quantum leap. It's was about getting excited, getting stoned, but the same time it was about being geeky - something that wasn't rock'n'roll in any respect."

Groups like Ride and My Bloody Valentine were the big bands of shoegaze, and were fiercely anti-rock in their music and their outlook. "We didn't want to use the stage as a platform for ego, like the big bands of the time did, like U2 and Simple Minds," says Mark Gardener, then Ride's lead singer, and now a solo artist. "We presented ourselves as normal people, as a band who wanted their fans to think they could do that too." Ride managed to take this to another level in February 1992, having a top 10 hit with the eight-minute epic Leave Them All Behind.

Ride, choosing to be normal people
So what went wrong? Indie's dance revolution harmed shoegazing early on, bands from prosperous Thames Valley towns such as Oxford and Reading being easily mockable, and less exciting, next to their druggy and arrogant Madchester rivals. From 1992, grunge started bovver-booting its presence all over pop culture, its pessimistic lyrics and musical sparseness utterly at odds with shoegazing's lush, languid optimism. "We had no chance after grunge," says Gardener. "We were the opposite of greasy smack-takers from America. We were nice boys - and nice boys on the wrong kinds of drugs."

But 15 years later shoegazing has become hip again. Cramp thinks the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation in late 2003 - curated by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields - speeded its return, and his club's mission is to contextualise shoegazing in terms of its influences and inspirations. "You'll just as likely hear Syd Barrett and Ladytron as you will Swervedriver and Moose. It's music I know people in Ride T-shirts with fringes will like - although they're too old to have fringes now, they've receded too much - but also music younger people will find exciting too." He mentions one of Sonic Cathedral's latest signings, Kyte, a band of boys in their early 20s who'd never heard shoegazing records until Cramp played them some, and Manchester's Working for a Nuclear Free City, who came to shoegaze through the ambient music of Brian Eno.

James Chapman, the 28-year-old bedroom musician behind Mercury prize-nominated Maps, likes this idea of putting shoegazing into context. He was only dimly aware of it as a child. "To me, shoegazing is just a stage of psychedelic music. I hear late 1980s dance in the music of that time, but also a lot of the late 60s psychedelic folk scene." These influences were also flagged up by bands at the time: Shields said that dance music was the inspiration for his band's biggest album, Loveless, while Gardener and Halstead still love the Byrds, the Doors and the Velvet Underground. Chapman thinks psychedelic music of either the dance or rock kind is always exciting to experience live. "I want to make music and play music that has the same effect on someone as My Bloody Valentine had on me - making people want to join together and escape themselves."

Ulrich Schnauss, the 29-year-old DJ whose dreamy second album Goodbye came out in June, thinks this escapism is vital to shoegazing's appeal. He comes from the north German outpost of Kiel, a dull town that he saw as the equivalent of Reading, home to Halstead's Slowdive. "Too much music these days is about how bad these towns are, about everyday life, and all the dull details. Shoegazing is a way out of that - there's melancholy in it, but lots of heaven there too." He thinks people connect with dreamy music more in times of world crisis, and points out how psychedelic music has flourished during the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. "It's music that offers a much more profound way of trying to cope with a bad world, isn't it? Offering hope rather than breaking your guitar and shouting 'fuck you!'"

Ulhrich Snauss, "i'm in heaven"
Andrew Prinz of New York's Mahogany, who have played to huge crowds in North and South America, believes the romantic nature of the music has universal appeal too. "All the imagery on the original records was about love - all nature and kissing, subjects that could be really wet. But with these washes of sound, they become really electrified and erotic - and everyone wants to hear music that's electrified and erotic."

Shoegazing is also spreading beyond the CD racks. Eric Green, a young film-maker from Los Angeles, is in post-production on a documentary about shoegazing and the music that preceded it called Beautiful Noise, in which he interviews fans of the genre, including Trent Reznor, the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and Billy Corgan. They were willing to talk, he says, because there wasn't a shoegazing backlash in America; the music was seen as part of an ongoing heritage of experimental rock, which fed into later genres like space-rock and post-rock. "But I decided not to use the word shoegazing in the film in case it upset anyone," he admits. "And because someone had said to me, 'The word "mafia" isn't in The Godfather, you know.' So I left it out."

First-time novelist James Buckley was braver, calling his book Celebrate Myself, after another mocking NME name for the original shoegazers, The Scene That Celebrates Itself. It tells the story of a self-righteous MBA student who's also into shoegazing music. "The business world and shoegazing both attract intelligent idealists," he says. "And a lot of those bands were university-based." He has met a lot of Ride fans in the City, and says he sees plenty of men from the trading floors at the back of gigs.

Still, images like these won't help change the minds of detractors. It doesn't help that Alan McGee, the man who signed Ride, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive to Creation, is its most vehement critic. "Bloody nonsense. My Bloody Valentine were my comedy band. Ride were different - they were a rock band, really, a fantastic rock band - but My Bloody Valentine were a joke, my way of seeing how far I could push hype." Although he said Shields was a genius in the Guardian in 2004, he now says, unconvincingly, that the revival is just people still buying his lies.

Alan McGee, "MBV were a joke!"
But the fans don't agree - they see this music as theirs. "This music is the opposite of hype," says Schnauss, vehemently. "It's about genuine emotion. It's about standing at a gig or walking around with your headphones on and being completely transported. It's about that kind of beauty." Or a Chapman neatly puts it: "It's all about music that doesn't stare at its shoes. It stares at the stars."

Terjemah ke Bahasa

Minggu, 02 Oktober 2011

Elemental Gaze - Let Me Erase You

Band kota Kembang ini telah wara-wiri sejak pertengahan 2005. Menjadi pembuka tur Mono di Malaysia, Elemental Gaze termasuk segelintir band indie yang cukup sukses go international.

Dari sebuah blog musik lokal terkemuka, terkisahkan anak muda bernama Fuad yang gandrung musik-musik seperti My Bloody Valentine, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, M83, dan Sigur Ros. Ia berandai memiliki sebuah band yang disesaki oleh aneka pesona dari band-band tersebut. Gayung bersambut ketika ia sampaikan ide ini kepada teman-teman terdekatnya. Dan lahirlah pada tahun 2005, sebuah band bernama Elemental Gaze, berkonsep nu-gaze yang temaram.

Elemental Gaze

Pelaku musik Elemental Gaze yaitu Fuad / Asu (loops, song writer, keyboard), Lutfi (keyboard, guitar, soundscape), dan  Bilan (vocoder, groovebox, effects, ambient). Trio ini meracik sebuah fusi elemen-elemen dasar shoegazing, khususnya dreampop, ambient, dan ethereal, dikemas ulang dalam gempita electronic. Bisa disebut juga mereka sebagai salah satu pionir kreasi musik nu-gaze di tanah air.

Band ini juga selalu memadukan visual arts dalam setiap aksi panggungnya. Kabarnya, seorang musisi elektronik dari UK memuji kreasi musik mereka, ” This is unique musical characters of the band and his performances”.

EP Let Me Erase You
Berikut ini, Luthfi Kurniadi memberikan link unduh untuk kumpulan materi EP Elemental Gaze berjudul Let Me Erase You (2008). Selamat menikmati!

Download Link