REBEL DANCER ~ A film tribute to Ramli Ibrahim

Produced & directed by Uttam Kumar Thangiah & Alois Leinweber in 2003

[First posted 3 December 2014]

BIRTHPLACE RECLAIMED! (reprise)

Freestyle dance music commissioned by Chandrabhanu (Bharatam Dance Company, Melbourne) in late 1992; world premiere in January 1993 @ PJ Civic Center. 

Composed, performed & produced by Antares & Friends 

Minah Angong (vocals); Sunetra Fernando (vocals, rebab & percussion); Rafique Rashid (sequencing, percussion, vocal effects, engineering & mixing); Tim Bremser (12-string guitar, drum programming, percussion, vocal effects & mixing); Antares (shepherd's flute, Balinese flutes, synthesizer, didgeridoo, percussion & vocal effects) 

Digitally remastered in September 2012 by Thomas Smorek

As the title suggests, this choreographic work attempts to chronicle the loss of innocence every individual and every community experiences when the spurious concept of "progress" encroaches and transforms the land into an eco-systemic and psycho-emotional hell. From Dreamtime to Machinetime; thence a period of spiritual confusion and intense questing, followed at last by not so much a return to an imaginary pristine past - but a reconciliation with present reality, wherein ancient and modern realities begin to ecstatically fuse, thereby generating a fresh creation.

Sometime towards the end of 1992 I was contacted by celebrated dancer-choreographer Ramli Ibrahim (founder & artistic director of Sutra Foundation) who asked if I was keen to take on a commission to produce 30 minutes of music for Chandrabhanu, a Melbourne-based master of the Bharatanatyam.

Of course I said yes and soon a meeting with Chandrabhanu was set up. He had in mind a freestyle contemporary choreographic work titled Birthplace Reclaimed which he wished to premiere at a dance festival hosted by Sutra at the PJ Civic Center in early 1993.

I immediately got to work on the music, visualizing a circle and 4 cardinal points - an ancient symbol for Mother Earth. 

As Chandrabhanu had only a limited budget, I was unable to rent a professional studio for the task. So I recruited Rafique Rashid as a musical conspirator and sound engineer. He was living in Kuala Kubu Bharu at the time in a shophouse and had a workable 4-track home studio. He called it Batorvilla Studio (inspired by Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital after which he had named his comic-book alter ego).

At the time we had Tim Bremser - an Enochian magickian, visual artist & musician from Winnipeg, Canada - living at Magick River. Tim owned a 12-string guitar & a TEAC 4-track mixer-recorder which could be tandemed with Rafique's Akai 4-track. Sunetra Fernando, taking a break from her ethnomusicological research in gamelan, showed up one day & was promptly recruited.

Perlis-born Chandrabhanu arrived in Melbourne in 1971 to study social anthropology.

Minah Angong at the Sarawak Rainforest World Music 
Festival in August 1998

To explain what I had in mind, I drew a chart dividing the music into four movements: the first movement (Dreamtime) would depict an idyllic, edenic way of life, interrupted by the advent of industrialization (Machinetime, second movement). 

The third movement (Spacetime) would represent a period of confusion born of the conflict between inner and outer realities. Finally, a reconciliation of past and future, a fusion of tradition and innovation, paving the way for us to reclaim our birthplace.

Rafique and I had already experimented with dropping Minah Angong's cold voice on top of an instrumental work-in-progress. The result exceeded all expectations and augured the beginning of a rewarding musical collaboration called Akar Umbi.

A ceremonial singer from the indigenous Temuan tribe, Minah Angong had been taught the song "Burung Meniyun" by her late husband, the headman of Gerachi Village. It felt so right that we should incorporate the indigenous soul into Birthplace Reclaimed.

We had to record at night because Batorvilla Studio wasn't soundproofed. The traffic noise was too intrusive during the daylight hours. Sunetra was learning to play the rebab, a two-stringed violin introduced to Southeast Asia by the Arabs. It sounded great passed through a guitar effects box. Getting the mix right was crazy work, with both Rafique and Tim handling the crossfades and controlling levels with both hands on two different 4-track decks.

When Chandrabhanu heard the fruits of our nocturnal labors, he instantly liked it. Then he asked if Minah Angong would be able to sing "Burung Meniyun" live on stage. She had never performed on any stage, as far as I knew, but we decided to give it a go. Rafique would produce two versions of the music - one with Minah's voice mixed in; the other without, so it could be used as a minus-one for her live vocal. We took Minah to the technical rehearsal and put her to the test. She passed with flying colors (after a false start owing to nervousness) and wowed the packed hall on opening night.

Minah Angong with Antares & Chandrabanu (costumed as a shaman).


[First posted 18 December 2014, reposted 8 July 2018 & 11 April 2019]

Behind The Scenes: PROJECT LAZARUS (repost)

In March 2007 I bumped into Daniel Tang (left, disguised as a brain surgeon), an old friend who used to work in Rediffusion as an audio engineer and who is now a senior partner at AddAudio in Petaling Jaya. I mentioned my desire to rescue hours of music from analog oblivion and Daniel impulsively offered his expert help with digitizing my archives.

Despite a very busy schedule, Daniel put in laborious hours lovingly removing mold from 20-year old acetate recordings - some on ¼-inch open-reel, the rest on compact cassette. He was assisted by film editor Kate James, whose patience proved a great asset when it came to manually unwinding and respooling yards of fragile acetate.

The project was delayed by weeks when Daniel discovered that their old Studer A-807 MKII open-reel deck needed repair and realignment before it could be used. Fortunately, Daniel had the foresight to document the painstaking process by snapping these images which he later uploaded on Picasa.

There's no way I can adequately thank Daniel Tang (and Kate James) for helping me raise my music from the dead, thereby making it available to posterity. Daniel's photos below show how the musical resurrection was accomplished...

Tools of the trade: ¼-in. splicing tape, Ampex 10in. metal spool, 3M 6in. plastic spool, Isopropyl alcohol in red bottle & paint brush.

¼-inch open-reel master with most of the tape unwound 
(the tape had not been wound on a metal spool and the yellow leader was where 
the tape had split into two separate sections). It was a tedious 2-3 hour job 
to rewind the tape by hand so as not to damage the edges of the fragile magnetic tape.

Re-inserting the core of the spool: sections of the tape were carefully removed
and old splices were inspected to make sure they still held, a process that took hours
(with many coffee breaks in between).

Winding the magnetic tape by hand using sheets of paper to keep the edges from being damaged.

Film editor Kate James kindly volunteered her help as angelic tape rewinder -
or Daniel would have been stuck all night in the studio!

Studer A-807 MKII 2-track deck on slow wind to keep the tape spooled as smoothly as possible. This was done multiple times to compact the spooled tape before actual playback
and digitizing could proceed.

Tape oxide residue on the Studer after playback of a 20-year-old reel.
The heads had to be repeatedly cleaned with Isopropyl alcohol.

The 1988 "Padang" recording (a 30-min contemporary ballet commissioned by Ramli Ibrahim) arrived in its original Rediffusion box. Incredible to hear an audio master from 20 years ago,
still pristine & sounding great!

A hand-written note from Antares accompanied his moldy open-reel masters...

Oh no... here we go again! Thank goodness this one was still attached to its core...

Good exercise for the wrist - like a 2-hour meditation on time and eternity.

Some of the outtakes still sounded magical, so Daniel decided to digitize all of it.

A Digital Audio Research OMR 8 audio workstation was used
to digitize the audio from the Studer ¼-inch 2-track recorder.

The first digital re-issue of the Antares Musical Archive will be my 1986 2nd Coming album. For more info, please click here.

[First posted 10 August 2010]

IBRAHIM, THANKS FOR PRODUCING SUCH FINE OFFSPRING!

[From Aljazeera]

My 1-minute review:

Khairy was his usual arrogant, overbearing, smug, cold-blooded and utterly obnoxious self.

Denison came across as sympathetic and reasonable but totally impotent.

Zaid is looking better and better by the minute. Let's be thankful for some clarity, compassion and genuine intelligence in our midst.

Fauziah Ibrahim is simply SMASHING! What a woman... WOW!!!