astralbeats

COUNTESS: Should I throw myself in the river?

Which is colder, the water or her heart?

— Lulu, Act III

Poem #3

I gather up

each sound

you left behind

and stretch them

on our bed.

each nite

I breathe you

and become high.

Sonia Sanchez

This place has gone the way of expired strawberry jam. I am now active on

http://www.myspace.com/singaporecherry

or on facebook as POPMYCHERRY

~Hakuna Matata says:
i love Don't Cha
~Hakuna Matata says:
and Hips don't lie
for[e]sight says:
*chokes ur neck*


## what's wrong with pop? ## :p

Caught Laurent Garnier over the weekend - an amazing set which went from tech-house, techno, breaks, drum&bass to reggae and dub.

Richie: Hey Magda guess what?

Madga: Er, don’t tell me, Ricardo just bought a new t-shirt?

Richie: Yeah probably but that’s not it! I was gonna say someone is coming round to visit later!

Magda: Oh no……it can’t be….not Sven….

Richie: Yep! He’ll be round any minute now!

Magda: Damn, I just managed to get the floors clean from his last visit….

Theres a knock and the door bursts open……

Sven: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!!!

Richie: Hey Sven!

Sven: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!!!

Richie: Hows it going Sven?

Sven: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!!!

Magda: What are you trying to say Sven?

Sven: Hahaha You minimalist fuckers! Where is the BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM?

Richie: Hey Sven where you been the last few days?

Sven: I have been touring and saying BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!! Also I went for a massive curry last night. My fucking ringpiece aches like a mothefucker today also!!

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Magda: oh no, here we go again…….

Sven: So Magda my boy, what have you been up to the last few weeks? BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Magda: Sven, im a girl.

Sven: Oh you are? Oh fancy a fuck then? BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Magda: very funny! Like id want to fuck an old man with questionable bowel control….

Richie: So Sven what you got for me today? Find anything interesting on your travels?

Sven: Sure Richie – I got this CDR here for you of the latest Ubercoolische techno. (Puts on a cd)

Heres a new one its called BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Richie: I think I heard it – does it go….. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! by any chance?

Sven: Yeah that’s it – ok how about this? (puts on another cd)

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Richie: Its not very minimal is it?

Sven: Fuck you minimal - BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! is Ubercoolische now! Oooohhhhh fuuuuuuuuuck

It felt like time travel.

He picked me up from Oakleigh Station where I used to wait for him. The taxis were lined up in the same way like they had been parked there for the past 5 years. School childrens and scruffy teenagers tumbled out from the station to the complaints of old women with a grudge against everything in the world but their own births. They vanished into the surroundings as I got into the car and looked at him. He smiled. We smiled.

"So, how are you" I wanted to ruffle his hair
"I'm fine." I feel like I'm talking to a clone
"That's good" This is really odd...Its the same feeling I get when I am viewing musuem exhibits

We checked on each other just like how we usually do on all those long distance calls except I was back in time. Talking to him and hanging out like the past 4 years did not really happen but it did. I'm different but he seem to be the same. We reached the house and Harley the doggie greeted me just like it used to be like. His sister looked up, said hi and went back to typing on her laptop. His mom said come eat and I sat down. There wasn't a huge deal of sooooo howwww haveeee you been. The word vintage kept popping up in my head and I sniffed the air for a musty scent. There wasn't any. The television was showing Neighbours at the usual time - 7pm, I could't recognise any of casts but the plotline was the same.

We had dinner and we walked into the bedroom just like before. He had the same photos on the corkboard...of the entire bunch of us laughing and doing silly poses at the airport looking absolutely gleeful. "You still have those photos up there!?" "Yea..."

I didn't know what to say. I was surprised, happy, sad, worried, curious, nostalgic, regretful, appreciative, apologetic...all at the same time. I wanted to ask why but I didn't. Perhaps it was just one of those things which you put up on your walls and they become the wall and you don't really notice it.

"I'm seldom at home anyway, usually at hers"
"Oh ok, just worried that she'll scold you for not taking it down"

He didn't reply or maybe he didn't even hear it. The line was said and like our relationship or what's left of it - it didn't matter anymore. It's just like the photo on the wall, part of the wall, sitting with faded memories and musty scents, forgotten moments and a thin glistening thread of what was once a beautiful relationship with much laughters followed by the heartbreak.

2001
I can't live here
You can't go there
There's the ocean inbetween
We will be friends
As simple as that
I said

I haven't been posting for a long time but that's only because I've been fucking busy. Busy with work. Busy with gigs.

I'm in melbourne now , having a holiday.

It's great and really relaxing but it also makes me question alot about the past 3 years.

Boutique is back this Wednesday. I think I'm playing at 9pm or was it 10pm?

In a whirlwind pitched down to -3, everyone is moving as if they are tiny figures in the 4th dimension in a cheap sci-fi movie. The predictable scene when someone running away and the suspense is inversely proportionate to the speed. We get into that space in life sometimes and it always seem to hint of some big change and rebirth. Seemingly.



Last week I was in London and managed to catch Koop's live act at Cargo. For music so soulful and lush, you would not expect its producer to be two fat men wanting to be ballerinas...actually come to think of it, it's probably the reason why the music IS soulful and lush.

It was a good gig with the two guest vocalists holding the audience together with such showmanship and passion that even the usually quite soul-less me felt the immense need to be moving my feet. I think I will get Koop's second album although instinctively it sounded pretty much like the first. Gilles' set after was much darker than expected but we enjoyed ourselves all right and I made a new irish friend who sent me jazz tunes over the next couple of days. I did wish that there was copious amount of drugs rather than alcohol especially as we partied late into the night, tumbling our way to another dodgy bar further down in Shoreditch. They charged us 5 quids on the door and another 5 for a glass of wine and everyone else around us had rolling eyes but us. HMMPH.

That's one night in London for ya.

AMIT IS COMING TO SINGAPORE NEXT WEEK!

He is one of the reasons why I'm into drum&bass. "Roots" encapsulate what I love in music, deep dark and dubby, nudging the listener into a strange hypnotic tunnel.

Watching out for all of commix's productions too. Neatoo.

It is true. It does and it brings along an entire catalog of guilt trips you can go on. Such unease of the mind. It should never be encouraged.

Zoom~Zoom~Zoom. What was the car brand for that ad with the jingle or song? I can't remember but for the past few weeks I had been tuning myself to be like a little supercharged car zooming through tunnels. Life got a little smaller and more compact but the extra energy went to gigs after gigs. After the Four Tet gig in Hong Kong, there was the United Visual Artistes gig. It felt so relaxing dropping hot hits like 3am eternal, shannon - let the music play and emf - unbelievable that I am developing a bad habit of dropping and not mixing. Hence, I've said yes to playing a full drum&bass set @ Sample/Homeclub on the 13th.

We went to Shameless after and as I sat on the couch listening to the locked grooves and catchy melodies over the rolling beats, I realised that my love of rollin percussive in-your-face techno bear a lot of similarities to the current affairs of the heart. No longer intense but full of sentiments and memories which makes you breath slowly and embrace yourself a little closer than you would normally care to.

p/s: I fxxking hate those banner ads at the side of the screen.

I'm back! All alive and well from the Four Tet gig which went extremely well. I think it's actually the first time that I'm playing to a fully packed dancefloor and people were dancing and cheering! Woot!

And even before I have the time to develop my photos from the HK gig. Guess what? This coming Sat, PopMyCherry! will be playing at the One Dot Zero Party at Red Dot Musuem...alongside UVA! United Visual Artists...the same people doing the visual stuff for Massive Attack 100th Window Tour, Kylie Minogue, Travis and Basement Jaxx!!!!

United Visual Artists Website
http://www.uva.co.uk/index.php

I hope they are nice and friendly and will like the tunes in my bag! :D

Information about this Sat!
http://www.onedotzero.sg/liveaudio_av3.php

I am going to Hong Kong to play at the Four Tet gig this Sat. The flyer irritates me because of misrepresentation of information...such as the Motorola thing and blah female dj... sometimes I get very tired of the hype. I'm just a selector at the end of the day and my mixing is only average. Good to me is when you can pitch bend + find the first beat, push up the channel fader and mix on the fly. But I really shouldn't complain. The gig is limited to 200 pax which means it's a small tight space and I'll be able to do my fun set of downtempo/house/minimal and probably bits of jungle and drum&bass. :)

The love themes which cripple us all - love lost, love unrequited, love damaged, love found and lost again, love revenged, love fumbled, love stumbled upon, love manipulated. All in all, I saw cruelty.

I once heard a story about a couple who ran away together (probably coz their parents didn't love them enough to let them be together - some crap like that) and so they ran and ran up into a bell tower and shut the door behind them, huddling up in a corner in the dark recess, whispering sweet nothings and showering love tokens on each other. Come morning, the priest opened the door to the tower and millions of loving whispers flew out of the room and into the skies. The lovers were dead, suffocated by the words of love which they mumbled to each other through the night. How beautiful. How sad. How silly are we in this game. Love is cruel, without its adverse, we would never see the lightness. And so would it become addiction to the hurt or emptiness in which you keep walking back to the same area abandoned, searching for a little glimpse of heaven.

Heaven isn't heaven when you are there, heaven is only heaven when its far far away and you are looking up at it wondering what it is all about though you can second guess the paradise stuff that goes on there. So we sit and continually throw ourselves into the agony. Some get pushed to the edge and simply choose to go to the real heaven, wave a big goodbye and proceed on to what they guess is a better place. Some try to beat the system and become miniature worlds in the worlds of others. They turn into the stars, the sun, the moon, heaven and hell all rolled into one. Mindgames masters. I wonder if they know how much it hurts. Actually they probably do but because their own worlds were destroyed so they actually think there's no worlds existing anymore and just go about doing what they wish, conveniently ignoring and forgetting that they are the stars, the sun, the moon, the heaven and the hell which can kill others.


twisted
your knife coated
in sugar glitter bliss

buried in my heart
the cold blade

manipulated