On Saturday 19 August we’ll be showcasing our new album CONTACT at Kent Ridge Alumni Family Day, NUS’ annual homecoming to welcome alumni, students, faculty, staff and their families back to Kent Ridge Campus. We’re performing with Brannlum on keyboards and Kids with Laptops on visuals.
More about the event –
Held at the University Town, participants will get a glimpse of modern campus life, enjoy carnival activities, network with students and alumni at the Faculty booths and be entertained by stage performances by fellow alumni. The festivities will culminate in the largest outdoor movie screening on campus of a popular animated film, Trolls.
Date :
Saturday, 19 August 2017
Time:
5.00pm – 9.30pm (our showcase starts 7.30 pm)
Dress Code:
Colourful and Casual!
Theme:
Colours-on-the-Green
Map
Full schedule
Time
Main Stage
Stephen Riady Centre
Education Resource Centre
Town Green
5.00pm
to
6.00pm
· Festival Drummers comprising members of the NUS Alumni Orchestra and
NUS Wind Symphony
· TO Ensemble
Alumni Art Exhibition
Alumni-Students Volleyball Challenge
Student Life Fair
Battle of theAlumNUSFoodpreneurs
Faculty Networking Booths
6.00pm to
8.00pm
· Jonathan Leong & Pennylane featuring Stasha Wong
· Kapap / Modern Street Combatives Self-Defence Demonstration
We played live at the NUS Arts Festival launch on 10 March at University Cultural Centre followed with an electrifying evening of Japanese mashup DVJs, Cobalt Bomb alpha Omega, together with live artist Ai*Madonna. Also featuring music by NUSElectronic Music Lab members Brannlum, Axiam and alumni The Kids with Laptops. More photos at the Electronic Music Lab website
On the afternoon 4th March 2017 City Music (Singapore) kindly invited us to their showroom as part of their City Music Live series, where we performed old favourites and previously unreleased songs, and answering audience questions about songwriting, sound design, arrangement, production and working with international labels.
Everyone who came also enjoyed 15% store-wide discount after the show!
Here’s a Facebook Live video recording from the show, courtesy of our hosts and synth sponsors City Music – our finale song, I Don’t Belong Here.
Friday 10 March at 19:30 to 16 March at 18:00
Alice Lee Plaza, University Cultural Centre (National University of Singapore)
Launching on 10 March at Alice Lee Plaza with an electrifying evening of Japanese mashup DVJs, Cobalt Bomb alpha Omega, together with live artist Ai*Madonna will start the countdown to the Arts Festival’s opening show. Join us for an evening of dance, live painting, and electronic music by NUSElectronic Music Lab alumni Cosmic Armchair, and The Kids with Laptops.
If you’ve never watched Cobalt Bomb alpha Omega and Ai*Madonna before, they have to be seen and heard to be believed – combining large format live painting with digital video effects and blending music videos that can span Bollywood, J-Pop, Disco, Eastern European rap, Euro-dance and classic rave.
Our second #synthpop#electropop show in #Japan was Saturday 3 December at Treasure River Book Cafe in Chiba with our talented Japanese host artists Cobalt Bomb Alpha Omega!
Many thanks to our hosts cobalt bomb alpha omega and Treasure River Book Cafe for hosting our second show in Tokyo on 3 December! If you’re in Tokyo on 3 December please drop by for music and good curry!
Announcement in English
That Togo curry is back!
Chiba ‘s techno curry which finished good – bye last year in 2012 has revived .
This time the appearance is from the Singapore first electro-pop duo Cosmic Armchair. Yoshino Yoshikawa who just released the album “Event Horizon” from Zoom Lens also appears in the DJ set. Furthermore, the cobalt bomb αΩ which drops BOMB in the world also complements the umami of curry with DJ & VJ.
Treasure River Book Cafe certainly does not change.
This time curry from Karocurry from the Yachiyo curry kingdom. Challenge the Challenge to the Chiba curry freak. On December 3 when Singapore’s flag is established, please celebrate with Togo curry!
Live: Cosmic Armchair (from Singapore / Alfa Matrix) Http://www.cosmicarmchair.com/
DJ: Yoshino Yoshikawa (Zoom Lens / Maltine Records) Https://yosshibox.com/ Togo Turn (EBM Never Stop!)
DJ & VJ: cobalt bomb αΩ (Maltine Records / Aki Party – Dance Party for Geeks / Inage)
Curry: Korocurry (from 8chi4)
We recently uploaded our current single, I DON’T BELONG HERE, to the two leading online mastering sites, LANDR and EMastered, to see which one would do a better job of mastering* our music. Both sites use proprietary artificial intelligence and algorithms to do the job automatically, at a fraction of the time and cost of human beings. Ideally we prefer to give our music to a good (human) mastering engineer with experience in our genre, but we wanted to explore if these automated sites could do the job for a quick demo.
(* ‘mastering’ is the final part of audio post production before releasing the song, where the final mix is processed with EQ, compression, limiting and other enhancements, and makes it sound professional)
The results between the sites are close, so you should listen to the examples and decide for yourself, preferably on good headphones or speakers (not earbuds). You may also want to compare the loudest parts where the beats kick in.
What you hear below is the original WAV file without mastering, as a baseline.
What you hear next is the result of uploading the WAV file to LANDR.com
Compare it with the result of uploading the WAV file to EMastered.com
Finally, here is the version that is available for you to buy in the Alfa Matrix store (hint, hint)
So , which one do you prefer? Please tell us in the comments.
Fri & Sat 18 & 19 March 2016
Time: 8pm (doors open at 6pm if you would like to tour the Baba House
Venue: NUS Baba House, 157 Neil Road (click on link for map)
Tickets at $12 – Discounts & concessions available at bit.ly/CFATIX
As we get closer to our special event Digital Dondang Sayang, combining traditional Peranakan music with our electronic pop and experimental electronica, we’d like to share with you the story of how this piece of previously unknown music history finally found its way into a show …
MANY YEARS AGO, when Ben was a little boy, his grandfather gave him a green plastic folder. Opening the folder, he found a collection of yellowed note book pages, with poems written on them. Some of the poems were handwritten in fountain pen ink, while others had been typed on a manual typewriter, and all of them were in Baba Malay (the Peranakan patois).
“These pantun (Malay poems) were written by my father, your great-grandfather,” explained Ben’s grandfather. “They can be sung as part of the Dondang Sayang (Peranakan song form).” Both grandfather and grandson had spent many afternoons watch Dondang Sayang shows on TV.
One page of pantun by Ang Kay Teong, handed down to his great grandson Ben
Years later, as Ben developed his own musical expression, as Principal Tutor of the NUS Electronic Music Lab and also producer / remixer of local synthpop duo Cosmic Armchair, the pantuns continued to sit in their folder, on a shelf in the Cosmic Armchair studio. He had a general hope of someday having the poems performed, but he had no idea how that would take place. Until Mary Loh from NUS Centre for the Arts asked Cosmic Armchair if the duo would be interested in performing at the NUS Baba House on Neil Road as part of the NUS Arts Festival 2016.
A series of referrals got him in touch with Frederick Soh of the Gunong Sayang Association, the Peranakan social club that has been performing dondang sayang regularly in Singapore. Frederick was surprised to find this collection of 580 previously unpublished poems, and that started Ben on a quest to find out more about the history of the poems and of his great-grandfather, Ang Kay Teong.
Little is known about Ang Kay Teong, who passed away long before Ben was born. Apparently he was a statistician who worked in the civil service, and not known as a poet. His family knew him primarily as a strict and short-tempered patriarch, who would physically punish his children or grandchildren if triggered. There are only a few photographs that remain of him, one of which shows him shirtless and muscular (he lifted weights) at the beach in the 1940’s.
None of these pieces pointed to his prolific output of poetry, nor did they fit with the stereotype of an early 20th century poet. According to Ding Choo Ming, writing in the article “The Malaysia Baba Pantun Database” ( Sari (2004) 159 – 165 ),
“[The poems] were recited and sung in ceremonies and festivals, often accompanied by musical instruments and some were even published in books and newspapers. … In general, all the baba authors, numbering about 60, were highly respected personalities, and are considered by many as superb examples of inspired secular poets of the highest standard.”
Whereas Ang Kay Teong was unknown, unpublished, and generally not known to have participated in ceremonies or festivals. Did he write in secret? How many other hidden poets were there from that generation, whose poems were not faithfully preserved till the current day, and are now lost to history?
Why did he keep his passion for poetry so private? From the lens of our 21st century perspective, replete with social media and multiple platforms for self-publishing and self-expression, the idea of keeping 580 poems out of sight seems alien to our culture that expresses every little thought online. But even today, there are hidden poets (and musicians) who are creating works that may never see light of day. And who knows, that unfriendly civil servant that you met today — could be one too.
