soundscaping: buona vista
‘Curating’ a neighbourhood-based soundtrack, with techno crystal ball in hand… Well, to be more precise, I’ve put together an ‘ambient’ techno selection/impression of the Buona Vista estate. This is why. Hear hear, the wistful atmosphere of layered, piano-driven melodrama on opening track ‘Landscapes’ – think the neighbourhood’s ongoing, albeit fading, romance with local history like the colonial spectre of Portsdown Road, the Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) railway ‘terminal’ and one cemetery sitting pretty amidst HDB flats. At the same time, though, she remains unspared by the clutches of technological advancement. Hypothesis: the sprawling one-north project, experimental procedure: to be mapped out by punctilious electronics that lie in wait for the listener.
Nonetheless, this mixtape’s first trace of the ‘electronic’ is of a rather deviant strain. While suitably steadfast and pulsing, Thomas Fehlmann’s composition also lays the groove on thick, much like the thigh-high vegetation I plow through en route to the KTM line. It is a welcome dose of buoyancy that well and truly jumpstarts this inaugural Soundscaping excursion. Fehlmann’s incisive chord changes, complemented by my footsteps crunching on the railway gravel, constitutes the very first sense of detachment yoking human, environment and music together.
I pause to think of what a great ‘travelling’ song this would make – its quaint reverberating notes eliciting the view from a train carriage speeding past countryside topography. Then again I was, after all, gazing into the distance down the endless rails. It is an idyllic stupor that has vanished forever, since the KTM ceased operation on the 1 st of July and with our government moving to expand the nearby one-north district. With the ‘science, technological and business’ development slated to encroach over 200 hectares of Buona Vista, many an accusing finger will undoubtedly point to its presence as the reason for her diminishing rustic tranquility. But my introduction to this monolith of capitalism kicks off pleasantly enough: Gold Panda’s chiming breakout salvo of ‘Snow and Taxis’, shepherding me on clouds of glistening glockenspiel into the entrance of Biopolis, the biomedical faction of one-north.
But such benign lull only reveals itself as a harbinger of the bleak: the tune’s repetitive, clipping four-to-the-floor beats, soon trigger an aura of charged unease as I navigate the bare streets and paths. The research facilities of Biopolis loom large over restaurants and other recreational outlets in a supposed bid to foster ‘community’: I think I spotted maybe two people walking around, and out of about five eating places, one table serving early dinner to an expatriate family.
As I survey the dune-like curvatures of buildings christened Matrix and Nanos, the next track mixes in on an equivalent vein of blissful textures juxtaposed with stiff machine rhythms. This conflict mirrors the split personal impulses on hand – a desire to leave everything and escape into euphoria, or stand vigilant and confront the urban pressures ably supplied by our nation… With that and the evening sun slouching ever lower, I leave the mini-metropolis behind for the interlocking one-north park and its quiet residences, only to be greeted with more near-desolation.
My trek toward the inviting wilderness of Portsdown Road is accompanied by British wunderkind Clark’s microscopic opera ‘Night Knuckles’, which sparkles into life like a swarm of bugs scuttling about, wheezing under the weight of bells they wield. Beyond the apparent naiveté of sound, ‘Knuckles’ also accommodates a crafty arrangement of unresolved loops; fissures of mounting suspense that amount to a mind’s eye of empty, utopian space. Which, by entire chance of course, was what lay all around me, though soon to be occupied by Mediapolis, one-north’s digital media wing which will extend right onto the doorsteps of the historic Portsdown area.
A grim moment is an opportune one for Brian Eno himself to show up – that’s the chief pioneer of ambient music right there, armed with ‘Always Returning’. Extolled in some hushed whispers as a definitive piece within the field, it induces a depth of serenity befitting the scene of Portsdown’s green, open stretches. Taken in together with the banyan flora and its host of fauna – the odd hooting cockatoo or cicada drone – it adds up to an atmosphere of aural-visual quietude and a resulting wave of inward immensity. For a while at least, there is a magnified sense of individuality; no concern whatsoever about vanishing in the swamp of the common, nor the sanctity of my beloved music capitulating to the excesses of wretched pop culture.
Deeper into Portsdown, I spy the vintage black-and-white bungalows that make up the district’s oft-lauded ‘stuck in colonial times’ status. I for one have little interest in such a notion, none more so than the establishments and their inhabitants. I have no wish to be in the talkative and fidgety presence of a kid playing with his golden retriever, and the visceral shoegaze of Syntaks’ ‘Mistral Moon’ sequesters me to more natural, tasteful milieu - like a row of prickly shrubs. The song’s jubilant refrain, far-off bursts of distortion and revving guitar FX stir a sudden, acute desire for insentience and freedom from physical burden.
Just when ‘Mistral Moon’ hits a mid-flight breakdown, a deft segue launches into Pale Sketcher’s synthesized blue yonder. A stunning, stretched-out opus of romantic despair, it hints at an Arcadian brilliance that extends for what I wish could be eternity. The male vocal mourns of “can I go now”, at present, internalised and translated into a personal decree – to face potentially rigorous prospects with courage, to step out of the indulgence of domestic life…
Yet, as I draw closer to Wessex Estate, (mostly) all I can think of is the promise of a full pint of chilled beer at the final stop, Colbar. Resonating like swishing quaffs of lager are the opening splashes of rain puddles and wintry percussion by Donato Dozzy… Luckily for this article, the Italian producer’s aptitude for harmonic drift resurrects the mood of meditation, further kept in check later by more poignant sonics from the contemporary electronic talents of Samuli Kemppi and Abfahrt Hinwil. Their efforts embody a clear meeting of minds between ambient and techno, which at present, births an experience of emphatically wandering and hypnotic quality. It is music that provokes a lattice of dissociated sentiments and reflections, thinly trussed together by the divergent memories they summon.
And so it is as I step off Portsdown into Wessex, my brooding train of multiple quarter-life-crisis worries snapped by the animated prattle of a group of international school students getting all excited for their big Saturday night out. Ah, to be young again, and the futility of wishing so: the post-rave acid despair induced by Scan X and The Future Sound of London, backed by the enveloping darkness of nighttime, lends a fair bit of disquiet to the closure of my journey.
But as I enter Colbar – short for Colonial Bar if you haven’t guessed – I am arrested by the ambient techno songwriting masterpiece that is Orbital’s ‘Halcyon + On + On’. You know it as that catchy electronic ballad at the end of Mean Girls. But as my very introduction to the genre – ok, idea – of Techno, ‘Halcyon…’ symbolises, each and every time: an appeal to open both heart and mind, to appreciate the possibilities of the daily and the value of the commonplace. ‘Halcyon…’ is that ghost of the most exceptionally sad and ethereal girl by my side, sighing into my ear… Her human presence, eventually jeopardized by the introduction of that pivotal but computer-generated bassline in a vivid re-enactment of the archetypal schism within the electronic dance music aesthetic.
It is a struggle for equilibrium between utopian and dystopian pulls – the ebb and flowbetween growth and decline, speed and sedation, pleasure and panic, digital and analogue, reds and lights, dark and pale ales – along with all the other queasy tensions within which we survive. Satiated with fried chicken and King Goblin brew (dark, by the way), I experience a surge of gratitude for the very existence of music. Each time my past, present and future whirl before me, and my knees begin to buckle, I know I can count on the fundamental optimism in tunes like ‘Halcyon…’ to remain as my guiding light and steadying arm.
Colbar is in a festive mood tonight. She hosts a party full of dignified-looking old people, with the proprietress herself in attendance. It’s the liveliest thing I’ve seen all day, and as the venerable lady raises a boisterous toast, I am inclined to lift my bottle too – and why not? Life, as it is, holds full of hope and promise well worth celebrating… now cheers to everyone finding their personal Halcyon.
Music Curation & Words by Justin Ong
This is an original draft. The edited version can be found on poskod.sg
