After new year’s, we had just a few days left in the studio, and my bandmates started to head home one by one. We had come out ahead on the time equation, actually, we weren’t pressed for time, so one evening I could actually go to bed at a reasonable hour. Other days, however, I would stay up editing the vocals that I had sung that day, on more than one occasion I finished my work at 5 or 6am. We had time to cut three B-sides, covers of Norwegian punk and nu wave classics, where I sung the lyrics phonetically, tho I had also read translations so I could get where the lyrics were coming from. I went thru all the songs and added little touches to flesh them out--trying to stay true to the live-in-the-studio vibe but also keep them from being one-dimensional. I added piano, and harmonies where appropriate. Bjorn added a guitar part or two. One a song called ‘Long Black Hair’ I added backing vocals where I yelled along in certain spots with my main vocal, but yelled across the open strings of the piano with the sustain pedal down, making amazing, endless reverb. By heavily limiting the audio from the mics on the piano, we could bring down the level of my shouts so the subtleties of the piano reverb could be heard more clearly.
We had a big dinner at the home of Jon Marius, our engineer, one evening, with his ms., Anneli Drecker, one of the most talented singers in Norway, easily, who has lately been touring the world with Royskopp. Their kids, and other family, the studio owner, our whole crew, were treated to ‘Finn beef’ or reindeer, flakes of it stewed in a kind of gravy. Yum. We actually went back and worked afterwards, stomachs all poking out.
And then it was done--the last day and nite was spent doing a few more vocals, doing the overdubs on some of the Norwegian punk stuff, doing a couple last minute keyboard parts, and editing all the vocals I did that day. I had a photo session with Paul, a photographer from Bergen who came up just to hang out and do a session with me.
Finally, on a Wednesday morning, I was picked up by Joel at 8 and taken to the airport. I felt like I had survived a kind of endurance test, being isolated and in the cold for so long. But I also felt we had made a great record. I should mention that we had time in the last days to mix 5 songs, so I had a clear indication of where things were going.
But I was thrilled to be going home to see my family, even if it was to be short-lived. I was hardly prepared for landing in Oslo at noon and finding it ablaze in sunshine. I hadn’t seen but a rumor of the sun for the last two weeks so it was a bit shocking. I checked in for my Paris flight and settled into a cafe to chill for the next few hours while I waited for my flight to Pairs, which of course ended up being delayed by about an hour. Murphy’s law makes a last minute cameo.
We landed at Charles de Gaulle and waited quite a bit of time before the bags came. I had time to buy a big chunk of phone credit for my mobile so as to be sure I had ammo for as many sms as I wanted while I was gone on my next trip. I looked at the departure screens at far flung destinations and thought, that’s gonna be me in like 15 hours. Bag came, cab was grabbed and I was home.
There was the ceremony of presents for Aden, hugs and kisses for all. Aden had written some books detailing the adventures of various school-attending rabbits (like Watership down but with breastfeeding for some reason). We had dinner together, played with Aden’s new toys, listened to the Disciplines mixes. I unpacked and packed. Suddenly everyone had crashed. I finished up my business and joined them.
At 6.30 I was up. The house was dark, warm and still. Outside it was snowing, just a little. Paris always looks so good in the snow. I started to get ready for my trip and slowly my family started to assemble. In the excitement, Aden had forgotten to eat her dinner last nite. I ran to our favorite breakfast place, Maison Karrenbauer, which bakes what I now believe are the best pains au chocolat in town. Unf. I caught them at opening time, and they weren’t that morning’s batch, but still, very good. Ran back in the snow to get them to the house, and we enjoyed our petit dej and cafe, and then it was time to go. It was so hard to leave them. Impossible for us to have a proper goodbye. Of course all were crushed, including me, that my visit was so short. School and work were canceled on account of mourning my departure.
I called from the taxi, from the airport, from the plane. I checked in. Cleared security. Headed to the gate, which didn’t have much for chairs. Had another cafe. Boarded. What the hell was I doing?
I settled in on my Gulf Air flight to Bahrain. We flew over Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey--I had a good view, despite sitting over the wing, of the mountains that comprise the frontier of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Baghdad was on the other side of the plane from me, but I could see Basra and then the blackness of the Persian Gulf (night fell as crossed Iraq) dotted by the cigarette-cherry glow of oil wells burning off their excess.
Towards the end of our flight, both the guy sitting next to me and I took off our headsets, and had the chance to chat briefly. He was Bahraini but had until recently lived in Paris. He had traveled a lot, never mentioned what he did for a living, but he had things to say about all the places I was going, and offered me much encouragement on my tour. I walked into the terminal--we were a little bit late, but still OK for making it. Not many seats or much to do by the gate. Europeans, Indians, Arabs, Nepalese, Americans all waited for their flights. Bahrain was comfortable with being a crossroads at the center of the world. In fact, I really wanted to stay, the place has, at least in the airport a friendly and cosmopolitan vibe. I have a real fascination for the Arab/Middle Eastern world, and hope to visit it--I have been working on a few things to that end.
Anyway, got on the next flight, and as soon as my dinner was consumed I went to sleep and got in some decent hours. No breakfast for me, so I kept sleeping til we were on the ground in KLIA.
KUALA LUMPUR, 1/8
Kuala Lumpur Int’l, as I have noted before in this blog, is an awesome, big, gleamingly modern airport. Again, I wanted to just wander around, just as a mall it’s fantastic--and it happens to offer airplane rides. Fantastic. No problem with the formalities, Malaysia is very liberal in its immigration and happily awards almost all nationalities a 90-day tourist/business visa on the spot. How reasonable--why can’t they all be like that?
Soon I spotted Jay, as I came out of the customs, happy to see a familiar face. Jay is a local musician and my main contact for organizing this tour and the release of The Disciplines album here, since Amar from the label doesn’t speak super English. Amar was there, tho, and also Ili, who recently got her master’s degree in music biz stuff in the UK. Ili is super organized and a great translator, and between the three I knew I would be well taken care off. Our first order of business was to nail down this MRI that I needed to get done. Prescribed by my French doc, to check up on some things that have been bothering me, innards-wise. Not covered by my US insurance, an MRI in Paris is gonna run you about $1000. No thanks. It was cheaper in Norway, but with the holidays, it was impossible to organize. So, I had asked everyone here in Malaysia to do the footwork if they didn’t mind, and they found out where to go, a small hospital. I knew not to eat beforehand, so I skipped breakfast on the plane and of course all thru the airport I was bombarded by sights and smells of yummy food. And I oh so wanted cafe. This was serious eastward travel, the kind the worst type of jet lag was associated with. Naturally at the hospital there was a lot of waiting and going here to get this paper and that, a consultation with a local doctor was required, and then I was free to have the MRI. This means laying in a tube with weird noises--I was sure it was very monotonous techno, but maybe it was the machine?--for a very long thirty minutes, arms held back over my head to clear the space near my abdomen which was being scanned. “Don’t move, OK?” they said. Luckily the tube has a little AC blowing and gentle light inside. I was in a kind of smock, and were it not for the abnormal positioning of my arms, I thought, I could sleep here. mmm. Then it was done. I dressed, paid (medicine is free for Malaysians but as a foreigner I still paid about $300 for experience, but again, that’s 75% off the Paris price). Importantly, now I was free to EAT and we went to a place nearby. Ahh. At this place you look at a menu with pictures of the items available arranged in little plates of 5, but it’s good to know that when you order you only get one--and some of those things are things that will appear in your soup, and only one at a time at that. I had one fish in a chili sauce, and then the soup, with one giant okra, one slice of eggplant, one chunk of tofu, one small fish cake. For thirst quenching I had a barley drink--little grains of barley in water (or perhaps coconut water?). Now, I am one of those people that does it all wrong--when traveling I eat fruit, have ice in my drinks. I try and avoid roadside food (unless it happens to look especially delicious). I have had remarkably few bad experiences with food around the world, and these are evenly distributed between all the continents I have traveled (except so far nothing has befallen me in Australia/NZ). Malaysian diet--which rotates Malay, Indonesian and Chinese dishes most commonly--is always spicy and thus good for chemically roasting the bad guys that might hop along for the ride.
Oh, while we were waiting in one of many waiting rooms that morning, Ili managed to sort out a show for me in Jakarta, just like that.
After lunch, I changed more money to offset the Ringgit I had blown thru at the hospital. However, other than that trip and a visit to a net cafe, I have been forbidden by my hosts to pay for anything--meals and drinks have been covered. So, I pretty much have all that Ringgit in my pocket now. Then we had a coffee--a ‘white coffee’, lots of condensed milk and sugar. Cold. By now it was about 3pm, we checked me into the hotel and I begged off soundcheck. So I did the stupid thing and took a one-hour nap, and that was gonna cost me dearly in the next 24 hours. I had just given entry to the forces of jet lag, and they wasted no time in conquering the fortress of my alertness. I admired the 13th-floor view, showered up, shaved, felt pretty good. Hotel wifi wasn’t working so I went to a net cafe and reached out to my peeps, then came back to the hotel in time for dinner. We chose the restaurant in terms of wifi, but the food was awesome. Arriving at the venue, the Cloth and Clef (for its interest in fashion and music), I was greeted by friends and fans, and felt great. Oops, I forgot my capo, so I walked back to the hotel, doing interviews with local journos on the way up and the way back. Back at the venue, There was an acoustic duo playing, the female singer had a very good voice, actually; then Jay played, then a little set from Couple, friends of mine from last time. I checked out Jay’s Squire Jazzmaster and upon touching one of the strings, it broke instantly, so I changed the top three strings and then it was showtime. Now, the C&C is on the main drag of Bukit Bintang, which is the most happening area of nightlife in KL. The whole place is cocktail bars, cover bands, all kinds of noise; every place has a patio with music going full blast. And Malaysians are loud talkers in general. But the 40 or so hardcore listeners around me came in close, and I could communicate with them no problem. The other 30 odd people in the (tiny) place were also listening, but since the place is so cozy, they didn’t feel the need to stand. However, when I sang off the mic, since the club has such a multilevel, windy layout, it was hard for the people in the other areas to know what was going on. So their ambient chatter went up a bit. But still, I could do my thing. And, a few people there were singing along, which was pretty amazing.
After a while, I looked for some variety to my show, since there was no keyboard. So, I dragged everyone out onto the patio and used Jay’s acoustic to play a couple of songs--insane, since this was going out the loudest place imaginable--a cover band was blazing away across the street, Cuban music was playing full blast next door, cars were going by thumping techno. Still I shouted and did my thing for a couple of songs, and people loved it--it might not have been the greatest musical circumstances but it was kind of a happening--people stopped on the sidewalk and listened, too. Then I took everyone down into the sunken area next to the stage and did a couple of songs (a first ever rendition of a new Disciplines song ‘Take Off That Halo’) and then ended up by the bar, and finished the evening with two final songs on the noisy patio. People loved it, and it was fun, and definitely off the wall, but still musical (mostly).
And that was only part of the night--next we drove to a huge disco called the Zouk, and in one of their smaller rooms (but still a decent sized bar) called Barsonic, which was having their indie rock nite, I DJd for an hour--interspersing my choices with requests for Stone Roses and Oasis. I had a good run playing Arctic Monkeys, The Long Winters and something else back to back that actually had people dancing. They didn’t dig the hip hop I played that much, and one guy kept asking for Chris Rea ‘Road to Hell’. But, hey. Then I was really done...I had been suffering that lead-blooded jet lag for awhile, but now....it was serious. They took me back to the hotel, I had a call from Dom, and then I paffed.
Obs: I was amused that in an advert for a net provider, as is typical, “broadband” was in italics as a foreign word, but “wayalas” was as if it was completely Malay in origin.
MALEKA, 1/9
What people eat for breakfast here is pretty much what they eat for lunch and dinner--noodles, rice and chili or curry things to put on top. In other words, AWESOME. I hit the hotel breakfast spread and then got my act together upstairs, then came down and there was Jay, and soon was Amar and the tiny Suzuki mini (and this is not a marketing euphemism). And their friend Adam. We stuffed my suitcase into the back and drove to what was meant to be a famous chicken rice place. Chicken rice is a Chinese thing that is ubiquitous in Malaysia, at least as far as I’ve experienced it so far. You have rice, then a piece of chicken (you have the choice of steamed or roasted). The chicken has been machete’d into slices that run counter to the bone, so you have a cross section of chicken in each one. Then you have a little bowl of broth, which you pour little by little on your rice (and add habanero sauce to, uh, taste) But, there are also other dishes offered--I chose some kind of greens, and Jay some calamari, and all of this was superb. So, between a belly full of yummy food, a two-hour ride in on a hot sunny day, and extreme jet lag, I totally crashed into a druggy, muggy dreamscape, where I was never sure if I was awake in the van or dreaming about being awake in the van). I stumbled out at the apartment hotel in Maleka, contacts glued to my eyelids. Maleka, or Malacca to you tubobs, used to be the dominant seat of commerce and empire in the region. There was a badass Sultan being cool and ruling here, then came the Chinese; a century later the Portuguese; a century later they were supplanted by the Dutch, and some wars and what not later, the British. The Japanese paid a visit in the 1940s, the British came back--all the while Maleka was HQ. Then independence was granted in the 1950s (the proclamation signed in what had been the British fat cat clubhouse) and all of a sudden KL was the joint. Maleka is still important, a city of some 700,000 people--most of them trying to sell you a plastic hat or give you a ride on a pedicab that blasts techno at volumes that make a mockery of physics. But mostly it is a kind of museum, in a way. On the flat land along the river, streets lined with touristy shops full of--stuff?--are the thing. You head up to a prominent hill and see that the Euros had no moral problem taking the high ground for themselves--tho it should be noted that the sultan had built his huge, pointy wooden palace down the hill pointing towards the water (now further away thanks to a modern land reclamation project that has squeezed perhaps a couple hundred identical row houses onto the new surface). On top of the hill you find the British HQ, Roller still in the the little prissy-ass carport out back. Then the old church, built by the Portuguese when the only thing Columbus had sailed so far was his rubber ducky. The building is roofless and crumbling, but the heavier slabs used for covering graves are still there, and have been uprooted and leaned on the wall. You can see how the Portuguese couldn’t be bothered to write in Latin after the first few years, or just forgot how, and how the Dutch language evolved (de-volved?) in spelling over the course of their stay. Women and children died quicker than they could be manufactured, and men, well, they died too, eventually.
There was activity galore--lots of tourists (mostly local ones--this area is Malaysia’s Independence Square so a required school trip stop) and a huge field where noise was being made in great quantities, it seems they were setting up for a big event there. The summit of the hill affords a very good overview of what the city is up to; even if you can’t exactly interpret all the frenzy, it’s still great theatre.
By now it was about 6pm, so we went to a little food enclosure--open space with plastic tables, surrounded by food stalls. A central command center provides drinks. One of the many things I love about Malaysia is that food is always accessible, and always delicious. All hours, all days. Before I went to bed in KL I looked down on the street below and could see all the restaurants on my street going full tilt, it was about 2am at that point. This place was just getting going at 6, the open air places don’t serve lunch in the blazing sun, generally. Not knowing what was available, it looked like there was hardly anything to eat, but suddenly a table near us had all this great looking food coming, and I gave my official OK--I ordered, noodles and tofu and shrimps in curry sauce--I asked for it hot which is sort of like asking for rude service in a Parisian brasserie. It’s like, duh, gringo, what do *think* you’re getting? Being a hospitable people, they of course obliged. I picked the chili slices off the top of the bowl and just in proximity the things were, like, completely radioactive.
Then we spent some time at the hotel, catching up on email (which was cool, as it prevented me from being tempted to take a nap). And then, we headed to the show. This show was super punk and really...inspiring. Held in a rehearsal place, there was room for about 45 people, maybe a bit more if everyone was standing but most people chose to sit on the floor. There were little tiny white bread sandwiches available, kind of school or church vibe in how wholesome it was. It was just about the music. All young kids here. Jay was playing when I arrived, and then I played. Of course, closed in like that I needed no mic, except when I played the little Yamaha keyboard I sort of used the mic on occasion. So, people totally listened, although, being kids at both shows, the audience I know in Malaysia has a tendency to giggle at weird moments, but after the initial time, I know not to take it personally! Also, if someone gets a call, they just take it. It’s not a big deal there. Well, it was a great show, and being an hour in length, it was so easy...then the headlining band, Khottal, a local band set up. Definite Arcade Fire vibe--but really really good. Three drummers divide duties, standing and beating either a floor tom, a big bass drum or snare and cymbals. There’s a bass player, two guitarists, a keyboard player, an accordion player, a Melodica player, a glockenspiel player, and a singer. They have some super beautiful songs. I watched for awhile, then I needed to sleep. In this heat, with spicy food, and Malarone malaria meds, I have the weirdest dreams....I could use even more....
Love
KS
on the highway to Singapore.
