Word: banding
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...hard to overstate the importance of Beyond to Hong Kong music fans under 40. In a scene long dominated by insubstantial teen idols, Beyond have been the Beatles, the Clash and Oasis rolled into one. To this day they remain the only Hong Kong band to have made the transition from underground obscurity to mainstream stardom. From their first single?1987's Songs of Yesterday?they've achieved this by espousing an openhearted, socially aware brand of rock that compensates for its occasional ham-fistedness with endearing sincerity. Through 27 albums, their songs of protest and peace have touched...
...sitting in their landmark Kowloon studio?where the walls are covered with two decades of messages from fans?the boys from Beyond are in an affable and unapologetic mood. "It's a technique to be able to strike a balance between rock and commercial music," says Paul Wong, the band's 39-year-old guitarist. "Once you decide to produce albums, undergrounders call you rock traitors, but the public doesn't even know who you are yet. Every day you're struggling between commercialization and your dream, which we had to remember very clearly. [That dream] was to change...
...practice studio. They are passing around a bottle of Singa Jengke, or "crouching lion," a barely refined vodka produced in the industrial heartland of Tangerang. The music booming in the shop is heavy, probably Nordic, and a bootlegged DVD is showing the latest video from the German band Lucyfire. "We're thinking of going for the cowboy look like these guys, at our next show," jokes Otong, Koil's lead singer. "Our fans would probably freak...
...they're sticking to the image and the hard-driving rock that have turned Koil into one of Indonesia's biggest underground bands. Partial to black latex, rubber vests and platform shoes, the look is industrial Goth and the music an amalgam of slow, chunky guitar over samples of synthesized voices and haunting noises punctuated by the growls of Otong. The 30-year-old, with dreads down to his waist, personifies the band's DIY ethos, a trait that has earned it a fanatical cult following and critical acclaim. After two albums and a demo in 10 years, the band...
...gamelan and other ethnomusicological favorites. But Indonesians have been die-hard rock 'n' roll fans since the 1970s, when Procol Harum and Deep Purple made Jakarta a regular tour stop. The baby-boomer crowd still waxes nostalgic for classic rock licks and to this day continues to invite hair-band has-beens such as White Lion and Megadeth to embark on resurrection gigs. Subsequent generations, however, have forsworn feathered hair and eye shadow; the kiblat now is MTV. Seringai front man Arian, for example, is a senior editor of MTV Trax magazine and well aware of the potential...