While being aurally assaulted at the last night of Goh Lee Kwang’s four-day “Good Vibrations” cycle (described as an “album launch + digital video installation + retrospective concert”), I had the opportunity to mentally confabulate about the nature of music.

I should probably describe the circumstances. There were only a dozen of us in the room -- formerly a dance club (The Disco, of Liquid) and a cinema (Central Market’s old screen) -- for The Annexe’s second iteration of “Solo Sessions”; there was a dead cockroach on the floor (which Fahmi Fadzil gamely pointed out during his Penglipur Lara spiel) and carpet grass in the space nearby (part of Au Sow Yee’s heady “The 4th Dimension” installation). Outside, things were more populated: on the floor above hipsters were nodding their heads to The Otherside Orchestra (it was an album launch); further away, in the car park, a crowd had gathered to watch ROTTW Magazine’s annual band bonanza.

Music, as defined by the kind we’ve gotten used to over millennia, fires its salvos straight into our bodies -- and, while how our brains process vibrations in the air into endorphin-inducing sensations is a question inquisitive neurologists have been trying to answer for some time, the vast majority of humanity listens to Beethoven, The Clash or Carburetor Dung with little need for that kind of foreknowledge.

We either like a deft melody, catchy rhythm or ironic chorus -- or we don’t; enjoyment comes regardless of whether we can reason why, because these things strike something primeval and fundamental within us. The fans of Hujan and Telephony Delivery (who were also playing upstairs) didn’t have to understand the logic underlying their corporate jumping.

Sound artists like Lee Kwang, on the other hand, offer a different phylum of music.

The piece performed for us on this particular evening, an improvisational work created by looping feedback from a DJ mixing panel, was a collection of electronic beeps, screeches, and general white noise; the heavy reverb that echoed these crashes created the illusion that there was a construction site nearby. “They are sounds created from the humming of machine itself,” Lee Kwang said when I talked to him after the show.

Essentially, the artist (and an entire generation of like-minded experimental musicians) was playing a technological item, designed to process music, as if it was a musical instrument. This factoid tickles the cerebrum, saying as much as it does about form, function and the mores of the post-modern age -- after all, “Good Vibrations”, with its tuneless-ness and seemingly random beats, speaks less of biological rhythm than technical calculation. It is a kind of music that would be visceral if you had guts of silicon.

All that rumination happened when I was setting in that darkened space, watching Lee Kwang fondle the knobs and dials of his gear -- and it was his performance, I concluded, that induced such meditations. This was sound art: a rarefied, conceptual creature that offered pleasures only usually palatable with some intellectual exercise. In other words: to like what we were listening to, the twelve of us had to think about why we liked it.

I loved it. I also realised why there were more people out there than inside, with us. It was obvious: using my head was not something I would necessarily want to do all the time. Sometimes you just want to jump.

~~~

Zedeck Siew writes for Kakiseni.

“Solo Session II - The 4th Dimension / Good Vibrations”, featuring the work of Au Sow Yee and Goh Lee Kwang -- with guest performances by Fahmi Fadzil, Jerome Kugan, and Pang Khee Teik -- ran at The Annexe @ Central Market from November 29th to December 2nd, 2007.

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