The indomitable musician and composer Hardesh Singh was recently described to me as a sort-of new-media mogul. There is some reason for this: one of the projects he’s been working on is Popfolio, an online entertainment (music, for the moment) community / conglomerate with no small amounts of potential. It’s in private beta, as yet — but you can buy music (Jerome Kugan’s “Songs For A Shadow”); add its money-making music-player, Poptopus, to your blog; and watch “The Fairly Current Show” on PopTeeVee.

Those tireless boys, Fahmi Fadzil and Mark Teh, are behind that last one. (Fahmi’s brother Fikri is also part of “The Wknd Sessions”, a music show whose first episode has been edited but not, as yet, posted online.) “The Fairly Current Show” is a weekly interview programme “focusing on current and quirky affairs in Malaysia … Upcoming guests include Adrian Yap, Shanon Shah, Jacqueline Ann Surin, Pete Teo and Yasmin Ahmad.” Their debut episode, which features landscape architect and gallery owner Ng Sek San talking about the cutting down of Lucky Garden’s 40-year-old angsana trees (interesting because DBKL is, surprisingly, not the bad guy here), seems to work better as a podcast-conversation-running-in-a-background-window more than something you’d watch. I relate to the title, which is an aspiration that I strive (and nearly always fail) to achieve.

Free-associating here, I’m reminded that Mark, back in the early early 2000s, produced WOW FM’s “The Very Moody Show”, a three-hour-long slot hosted by Huzir Sulaiman playing a fictional disc jockey. One of those three hours was an interview segment; it had a guests list that included “NGO types, taxi drivers, and Hishamuddin Rais.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.