March 20, 2007

The Observatory To Close NUS Arts Fest Before Playing Bangkok

By PC

Singapore band The Observatory is closing this year's NUS Arts Festival with a concert of its own on Sunday, March 25 at the NUS University Cultural Centre Theatre.

Fresh from opening for Jaga Jazzist on March 13 at the Mosaic Music Festival at the Esplanade, this upcoming concert will be the band's first concert proper in over a year.

Keyboardist Vivian Wang told MTVAsia.com, "This being our first show, we think it's gonna be really special, it's the first time anyone will see Ray's contribution as The Obs' new drummer, though can't say he's much of a spring chicken in the local scene. We'll also be debuting more new songs from our soon-to-be released album. We're targeting March 31 for release, with a launch gig on 14 April."

She added, "The Obs has been rather inactive in terms of public performances for the past year, now that the album is completed, we're really looking forward to gigging it as much as possible. It'll be fun to see if we're gonna be able to sustain an audience with this material. And of course, we're eager to find out how people will respond. But it's been a tough and challenging year for us creatively as a group but we had to take time out and disappear in order to really focus. But now, we're ready to hit the road!"

A Far Cry From Here is the sextet's third album in four years, following on from 2004's Time Of Rebirth (a unique blend of folk-rock, jazz and electronica) and Blank Walls (darker, edgier, more exploratory atmospheres) from 2005. For their latest work, The Observatory furthers the experimentation with sound, arrangement and song-form in Blank Walls, but this time making an ambitious quantum leap through textural re-imagining and metamorphosis.

The album assimilates rich and myriad influences (Soft Machine, This Heat, Tortoise, Talk Talk, Shining, Jaga Jazzist, Supersilent, Brian Wilson, Robert Wyatt, Nick Drake et al) into the band's distinct vision built around vocalist/guitarist Leslie Low's pensive, tender yet elliptical song-craft. A Far Cry From Here is a multifaceted entity where adventurous, far-reaching musical notions exist in tandem with qualities of restraint and intricacy. This sense of paradox further emerges in the album's thematic and lyrical insights where hope, despair and resignation conceive a yearning for free-determination in the midst of personal and contextual limitations.

The band will be heading to Bangkok to perform on March 31 at Evi Place (between Ekamai 19-20) at 6pm. Other bands on the bill include Malaysia's Furniture, Japan's Tatsuya Yoshida, Thailand's Goose, Assajan Jakgawan, Desktop Error and Koichi Shimizu. Tickets at 200 baht available at DJ Siam.

Details
Event: NUS Arts Festival 2007 - The Observatory
Date: March 25, 2007 (Sunday)
Venue: University Cultural Centre Theatre, NUS
Time: 7:30pm
Tickets: $18 available from SISTIC