An Acquired Taste

One of the most nostalgic thing about the snail-mail underground days, is probably the excitement of buying recorded things that you just can’t be sure whether you’ll like or not, until it’s turning on your  audio player.. It’s one of those things that are just impossible to guess or fathom from flyers, band photos and assorted bad-ass bullshits on interviews. 

Something that takes weeks if not even months to get your hands on and yet still not knowing how it’ll turn out even then. Not until it spins on your tape deck or record player. Hell, nothing beats that excitement as far as this old fucker’s concern.

Of course, every now and then, you’ll end up buying shits you wish you hadn’t. Shit, you might just as well end up getting ripped-off clean. However, there might also be some of those intriguing moment when you’ll bumped into stuffs that grows on you, little by little, sometimes even years after. 

Those ‘acquired taste’ types of goodies that, in hindsight, you’d feel lucky of betting your measly allowance money for it.

The End

Why do we put so much concern about the way things ends? Celebrate the ending of a year, a season, a cycle of time. What the fuck for? 

On the other hand, when thing end it does imply that they really do cease to exist. Now that’s not such a bad reason to celebrate. But to celebrate the end as a sign of the beginning of something else is just ridiculous. 

Mr. Weedick

Can’t really recall where I got that picture from. I’m naming it the ‘Weedick-bear’, just so a good enough reference can be made to the said picture. And what Mr. Weedick is reminding me about (with his handsome attire, green cock and all) is about uncanny music.

Does uncanny means original? Maybe. Maybe it just means being excessively creative, more so than the average underground-Joe. All I know is some underground bands really are as uncanny as you can ever get, to the point of being highly unnerving and I just freakin’ love it when they are so.

Take the Italian Black Metal anomaly, Necromass for example. Their 1994 debut ‘Mysteria Mystica Zothyriana’ is anything but orthodox or mainstream. It sounds as baffling and unnerving now as it was when I first heard it in ’94. This shit is sick and haunting without even pretending to be so.

The unnerving Mysteria

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the underground had also spawned Singaporean Eternal Oath. While their two demo tapes have shown signs of weirdness, their 1998 cassette EP ‘Ar Est Celare Artem’ just put the whole weirdness things to a completely new level....

Sure, there are those ‘normal’ Black metal parts, but then there are also those “Mr. Weedick has a flower up his ass” moments that are just too weird to describe. We’re talking weird clean vocals and an assortment of even weirder keyboard tunes here, plus an out-of-the-blue, freaky choice of South East Asian traditional musical instruments (i.e. goddamn Indonesian bamboo angklung, for crying out loud).

Can’t think of a better soundtrack for a big black bong or Mr.Weedick’s decapitation.

Singaporean weirdness galore