SINGAPORE: Looking to catch a concert that takes things to the next level? Whether you’re into dance, rock or classical, adventurous music lovers can look forward to three shows that do just that next week.
Among the shows at the ongoing National University of Singapore (NUS) Arts Festival is Vibrational, by experimental rock band The Observatory. It features 30 additional guitar players in a juggernaut of a show. On the other end of the spectrum, The Quantum Music Project is what happens when classically-trained pianists hang out with nimble-minded quantum physicists.
And if you want your clubbing with a side of the unexpected, there is The Henderson Project’s One More Time tribute to Zouk – a mash-up of your favourite dance hits done by a proper orchestra. Ready to tune in to find out more?
Longtime Zouk resident DJ Aldrin (seen here at ZoukOut 2008) has come up with a 90-minute set that’s been transposed into an orchestral score for One More Time. (Photo: Aldrin Quek)
1. ZOUK OUT WITH AN ORCHESTRA
Have you ever considered partying to the music of an orchestra? Well, there’s always a first time for everything.
Iconic dance club Zouk may have already moved to its new home in Clarke Quay, but a throwback concert next week is celebrating its Jiak Kim Street days in a most unusual way.
Instead of DJs holding court, a two-night event titled One More Time will feature a 48-piece orchestra performing a 90-minute set of Zouk staples.
Held on March 24 and 25 at the equally iconic Capitol Theatre, which will be cleared of chairs to become one huge dance floor, the concert is the latest production under theatre company Dream Academy’s experimental platform The Henderson Project. Apart from the orchestra, there are guest vocalists and musicians which include Rani Singam, X’ho, Vanessa Fernandez, violinist Lynnette Seah, longtime Zouk resident percussionist M S Maniam, among others.
Essentially a sound portrait of Zouk over the past quarter of a century, the concert was the brain child of Dream Academy’s Selena Tan and her husband John Pok. Three years ago, the couple had had witnessed a similar performance in London by the Heritage Orchestra, which performed music by drum and bass music legend Goldie. When news of Zouk being sold and moved came up two years ago, they decided to push through with the project, roping in former Zouk resident DJ Aldrin Quek, a longtime friend and collaborator.
Intrigued by the idea, Quek, the show’s artistic director, suggested they take the dance-meets-orchestra concept one step further.
“I thought it would be more fun to make it like a DJ set where the music is non-stop,” he recalled.
Tasked with assembling the tracks for the set – which would later be transcribed into a musical score by music director and conductor Indra Ismail – it was a daunting task for the DJ.
“We had to choose the best of the best of the entire 25 years, but we also realised that not many may have necessarily lived through it all, and only a handful of us would know all the music. So I had to take that into consideration,” said Quek.
The show will not only take Zouksters down memory lane but also through the different trademark sounds of the club’s different rooms, such as the chill out tunes at Wine Bar to the breakbeats and hip-hop of Phuture.
The setlist includes the show’s titular track from Daft Punk, Faithless’ Insomnia and Ame’s Rej, but Quek wants the rest to be a surprise. As for any nods to Zouk’s famous Mambo Jambo nights, he conceded that there will be a Fatboy Slim remix in there somewhere.
“I had to make sure the music flowed together in terms of musical keys, style and groove. We want people to be dancing from the onset,” he said.
And making sure there’s lots of them, too. While hiring an orchestra is expensive, organisers recently decided to slash prices for tickets to the dance floor section (aka “posh pit”) to S$88 to lure more audiences for a proper party vibe. The price change begins at 9pm on Thursday (March 16) on Sistic.
Meanwhile, tasked with keeping the music going is the music director in charge of the 48 musicians playing non-stop. Transposing dance music for the orchestra was just the first part – come show time, Indra Ismail will also be right there in the thick of things, conducting the whole thing from start to finish.
“To be honest, I’m not sure how I’m going to sustain but I have to! I’ve got to go to the gym and be in good shape mentally and physically,” he quipped. “But I have to make sure I have the support of everyone, especially the three drummers who have to be fit and playing continuously,” said Indra.
Added Quek: “A lot of dance music is all loops, electronic, drum or melody loops, so for a musician to play a hundred over bars of the same thing is not easy! I hope they get used to it.”
Despite the physical challenges for the musicians, they promise to make it a memorable night at the Zouk many people have grown up with.
“We’re still playing house music using classical instrumentation,” said Indra. “So no matter what, for 90 minutes, it’s still oomph oomph oomph all the way!”
In 2015, The Observatory performed Vibrational in France with 20 extra guitarists. This time around, they’ve roped in 30 of them for the NUS Arts Festival. (Photo: The Idealiste)
2. FEEL THAT 30-GUITAR ‘WALL OF SOUND’
For their next gig, Singapore experimental rock band The Observatory has roped in students from NUS to help create a massive “wall of sound” with 30 electric guitars.
But during the band’s first meeting with their young collaborators, they had to begin with some rock guitar basics – the need to actually have a guitar strap.
“Some of them were sitting down because they didn’t have any!” recalled drummer-percussionist Cheryl Ong.
The show Vibrational, which will wrap up the ongoing NUS Arts Festival 2017 on March 25, features the band performing with members of the NUS Guitar Ensemble (GENUS) as well as other student guitarists. It’s the second iteration of the show – in 2015, the band performed in Toulouse, France, with the 20-electric guitar ensemble Guitarkestra.
For the Singapore show, The Observatory will be performing tracks from their albums August Is The Cruellest and Oscilla. Their guitarist collaborators will come in for the second half to perform in some of the songs as well as the newly composed titular song. Helping out in the performance are band alumni, guitarists Victor Low and Dharma.
Rehearsals began in January, and it has been a steep learning curve for the students, said keyboardist Vivian Wang.
“They all had guitar backgrounds, but some of them had never played the electric guitar; we’re not playing standard tuning and there’s all these complicated time signatures they have to deal with. But they’ve worked hard at it – we keep telling them to just loosen up, use your ears and don’t rely too much on a score,” she said.
It helped too that some of the band members knew where the students were coming from. While lead vocalist-guitarist Leslie Low and electronic musician Yuen Chee Wai learned the “DIY” way, Wang and Ong are classically trained musicians.
“I came from a classical traditional background,” said Ong, who also plays for experimental Chinese traditional music trio SA. “When I look at them, I’m reminded of myself. I keep telling them I understand their worries about following a score and that it’s difficult to go past that barrier, but I just tell them to let go.”
So just how does a “wall of sound” sound like?
“The idea was really to make a performance that you don’t just hear in terms of volume but you really feel it in your chest and stomach,” explained Wang, who cited other groups that have done something similar, like American guitarist Rhys Chatham with his own 100-guitar orchestra.
She continued: “Imagine six vibrating strings on one guitar; 34 guitars, which are all different; that’s 204 strings vibrating and amplified, plus drums and voice and other things. It’s not about busting your ear drums; we want to have an enveloping kind of feeling when it comes to sound.”
The idea of using multiple guitars to create a layered sound experience was partly inspired by the band’s earlier experiments gamelan music, where sometimes the same notes are tuned just a fraction apart, creating a vibrating sensation called the “beat frequency”.
Wang added: “It’s like a pantone chart where there’s not just one type of yellow or blue but a whole range of them – so when you play, you’re going to get this richness of tone and sound, and you literally feel the vibrations.”
The gamelan experiments also opened their eyes (and ears) to the notion of “playing slightly off”, which they hope can also be heard in Vibrational.
“When you watch a gig, you don’t want a perfect CD quality performance right? You want to see the musicians kind of teetering on the edge of falling apart, struggling to vibe with the audience. (Vibrational) is a little bit like that,” said Wang, who revealed it will also be their last show in a while, as they take a hiatus to plan for their next album.
“I think when sound is imperfect and there’s such a rich wall of it, things become much more exciting. It’s going to excite your ears a lot more than a perfectly crafted, sanitised concert you can sip tea at.”
Experimental piano group LP Duo will be performing “hybrid pianos” that are plugged into a computer generating quantum mathematical equations – all for your listening pleasure. (Photo: LP Duo)
3. LEARN QUANTUM MECHANICS WITH PIANOS
It’s not every day you decide to watch a piano concert and get a lecture on quantum physics as a bonus.
But that’s what you’ll get when you catch The Quantum Music Project (QMP), which will be held on March 21 and 22 as part of the ongoing NUS Arts Festival 2017.
Belgrade pianist group LP Duo will be performing experimental pieces on specially-modified pianos, while at the same time, physicists will also go up onstage to explain the relationship between music and quantum physics.
The Singapore concert is the latest concert-presentation under this unique multi-disciplinary project involving musicians and scientists. It began in 2012, with sound engineer Dragan Novkovic and quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral thinking up of ways to collaborate and hang out beyond “playing guitars and drinking beer,” quipped the former.
Hitting upon the idea of a project that combined their two disciplines, they roped in LP Duo.
Bespite being fairly adventurous and award-winning musicians themselves, the pianists admitted it took a while for them to get it.
“Dealing with laws of quantum physics? That was very difficult to imagine in the beginning. But things such as a particle existing in the same moment in two different spots or similar quantum phenomena are very inspiring to be presented through sound and music,” said LP Duo’s Sonja Loncar.
So what exactly is the link between classical music and quantum physics?
“Math, physics and acoustics are fields where these meet very easily,” said fellow LP Duo pianist Andrija Pavlovic.
“There were a lot of experiments by many classical composers from the 1960s, but we’re taking it a step forward. We decided to create and play the music of the 21st century, combining acoustic pianos with analog synths and also digital sounds; while the physicists are doing simulations of the quantum sounds, which we then manipulate.”
For the concert, each key in the two grand pianos used is connected to a specific sensor, which feeds into a computer that alters the sound produced.
While QMP did something similar at the Keyboard Days Belgrade Festival last year, the hybrid-pianos will actually be making their debut at the Singapore concert. (NUS Centre for Quantum Technologies’ Andrew Garner is also highly involved in QMP.)
In a way, their show here is a dry-run for much bigger things for the project. In September, a full-on premiere of their multimedia show will be held in Copenhagen, which will then be followed by a Europe tour.
“And we also really hope to be able to bring the full show here in Singapore in 2018. That’s definitely one of our primary goals and these concerts are an important step to make something like this possible,” said Novkovic.
So what if you’re a music lover who knows next to nothing about quantum physics? Don’t sweat it, said Loncar.
“There is no need to be specially prepared, because one of the main goals for us is to present the laws of quantum physics in a way that everybody can easily understand.”
And if you think they’re pretty intense and serious folk, well, there’s a video floating around on YouTube of them playing blindfolded.
“That started as a joke at one concert, because we wanted to present our virtuosity – but Dragan and Vlatko were inspired and found a connection between that and the quantum world. Come and see the show!”
