I know this is probably rather late, but I have been having so many projects in the last few months, so I never really have time to review what sort of music I have been listening to in the past year.

2011 was a rather strange year for me. My return to Indonesia put me back to listen to Indonesian indie bands again, which was really, really nice, but in the other hand the indie music seemed not as exciting as two or three years ago.

I was also happy that two of my most favourite bands, Pet Shop Boys and erasure, released their albums in 2011. However, I was not very excited about them. Well, Pet Shop Boys’ album was not really a studio album.. it was a musical for a ballet performance. The music was really nice of course, but it was nice if you listened to the album from the beginning to end, not to shuffle it in your media player. And it seemed that I expected too much from erasure. I thought their latest album would be more like “Nightbird”, especially after knowing that they held several concerts in forests, which really sounded like a great concept.

Anyway, since I finally joined last.fm (yes, I’m terribly late, I know) I finally have the statistics of albums and tracks I listened to throughout the year 2011. It’s easy and quantifiable. But the drawback was that not all tracks I listened the most were the ones I like the most. Some because I wanted to go to their concert, some because I wanted to make a mixtape, etc.

So first, I will just put my top 11 albums and tracks of 2011 based on my likings (not the total number of the tracks/albums being played)

top 11 albums of 2011

1. Mirrors – Lights and Offerings


2. Darren Hayes – Secret Codes and Battleships


3. Acid House Kings – Music Sounds Better With You


4. Pet Shop Boys – The Most Incredible Thing


5. Moby – Destroyed


6. Erasure – Tomorrow’s World


7. Elbow – Build A Rocket Boys!


8. Jens Lekman – An Argument with Myself
[this is an EP btw, but i think it's eligible for the list..]


9. Luky Annash – 180 Degrees


10. Beach Fossils – What a Pleasure


11. Future Islands – On The Water




top 11 tracks of 2011
1. Mirrors – Searching the Wilderness
2. Acid House Kings – Are We Lovers or Are We Friends?
3. Darren Hayes – Perfect
4. Moby- Sevastopol
5. VCMG – Spock
6. Tahiti 80 – Easy
7. Pet Shop Boys – The Grind
8. Elbow – With Love
9. Erasure – Just When I Thought It Was Ending
10. The Mummers – Call Me A Rainbow
11. Beach Fossils – Fall Right In

last.fm
Now to the last.fm. I must say I listened to a lot of old songs too, so only a few tracks and albums from my chart were those released in 2011.

Here’s the album chart first:

1. Fran Healy – Wreckorder [64]
2. Erasure – Erasure [59]
3. Billy Joel – The Hits [55]
4. New Order – The Best of New Order [54]
5. Darren Hayes – Secret Codes & Battleships Disc 1 [53]
6. Tom Jones – Greatest Hits Rediscovered [50]
7. Darren Hayes – Secret Codes & Battleships Disc 2 [46]
8. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – The OMD Singles [43]
9. The Bluetones – A New Athens [43]
10. Candle Thieves – Sunshine And Other Misfortunes [42]
11. Acid House Kings – Music Sounds Better With You [42]

As you can see, only two albums were released in 2011

It’s the same thing with the top 11 tracks:
(ps there are 9 tracks being played 10 times from #10-19, so I will write my most favourite ones)

1. Au Revoir Simone – Another Likely Story [15]
2. Belle and Sebastian – I Want the World to Stop [13]
3. Darren Hayes – Perfect [13]
4. Math and Physics Club – Baby I’m Yours [12]
5. Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring [11]
6. Spring – Baby Blue [11]
7. The Bluetones – Culling Song [11]
8. KT Tunstall – Fade Like A Shadow [11]
9. Mirrors – Ways To An End [11]
10. erasure – Sono Luminus [10]
11. Tom Jones – It’s Not Unusual [10]

I also had a look of my top 11 artists in the last 12 months from last.fm, and the number one was, still..
pet shop boys

1. Pet Shop Boys [207]
2. Erasure [176]
3. Saint Etienne [144]
4. Darren Hayes [133]
5. Travis [125]
6. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark [122]
7. Bee Gees [112]
8. Au Revoir Simone [106]
9. Sheryl Crow [83]
10. Aztec Camera [80]
11Math and Physics Club [78]

16.12.2011

It was quite a nice surprise when Float –a “sweet” folk band whose songs “Pulang” in 2004 melted the hearts of those both in the indie scene and general audience– gave an intimate, acoustic performance at Antara gallery that cloudy Friday night.

Personally I hadn’t heard about them for a while, and in fact I had never seen them live before, so I was more than happy when I heard they would be playing downstairs.

The performance started rather late unfortunately, at 9 in the evening, but the gallery’s cafe was still jam-packed with people. Mostly they were the band’s friends or their loyal fans, so no wonder everybody sang along to their songs.

Also, at the start of their performance, one of their friends gave away a green book filled with their lyrics. So people could sing along just as if they were in a church. This green booklet was much nicer of course, since church booklets are often not really well designed, usually made using ms word with either times new roman or comic sans fonts.

Float performed in two formations that evening; Meng with the original members Bontel dan Remon and with the new folks who looked so pro they seemed to have been graduated from music schools.

*just checked their website, the new members are from the band Ecoutez! (Leo Christian on bass and Iyas Pras on keyboards) and Chlorophyl (Timur Segara on drums and David Q Lintang on guitar)*

  

The songlist included “Sementara”, “Surrender”, “Stupido Ritmo” “3 Hari Untuk Selamanya”, and of course people all got gooey and giggly (oh dear I’ve been watching and reading too much of Blackadder) as they played their hit “Pulang”.

During that evening the gallery also displayed album covers with stunning artworks from the world’s greatest bands. These albums are a part of Bang Oscar’s extensive LP collection.

link to the band’s website: http://floatproject.com/
link to youtube documentation

in the mean time, here are some of my favourites:

ai weiwei

musuh dalam cermin

in between the two, we had a quick stop at menteng huis to get something to eat. oh and as we walked to menteng huis, titing bought a chocolate donut from the tan ek tjoan.

09.12.2011-23.12.2011

I heard about this exhibition from a friend, who took part in the workshop of making photo books. I stupidly, missed the info about this photo book workshop. It was a complete miss for me, as I had been wanting to take part in this sort of workshop for ages.

titing

But anyway, I went to the exhibition that Thursday afternoon with Titing and we both felt like two children being lost in a public school library. OMG those photobooks were gorgeous! Well of course they were, as the books displayed at the exhibition were the winners of “Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2011” (German Photobook Prize). But there was one book that completely distracted me from the others. And it was, none other, the book about the works of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. *going hysterical*

kunst des lichts, laszlo moholy-nagy

The book, Kunst des Lichts, was a catalog of the exhibition with the same name. I was bloody lucky to be in The Netherlands when the exhibition was in Den Haag. I even went there twice, mostly to be immersed in the photograms. (I miss going to Gemeentemuseum again.. *sigh*)

The other books at the exhibition was very nicely varied. All sorts of genres and techniques were there, it truly was highly inspiring. There was also a book by Peter Bialobrzeski, the German guy who won a World Press Photo award in 2010 with photos shot in..
Jakarta.

Yes, I don’t think an Indonesian photographer have ever won a WPP award with a photo of Jakarta. Unless if the city is drowned in bloody civil wars or hit by an 8.5 earthquake. Which I prefer not.

I also like some more ‘personal’ photo books. There was a photo book with a cover like a children book’s cover, and I think it was really cute. Photo books on big structures and architecture were also fascinating. And stage photography of course.

 the adorable fran healy of travis

I took my Supper Snapshots book (it was a personal photo book, not published btw) to show it to Titing and how I wish one day that book could be among the other books in the exhibition. I even already had a slight idea of leaving it there, so people would think it was a part of the exhibition

titing with supper snapshots book

opening the supper snapshots

I should’ve written this review half a year ago (the gig was on july 15), but i guess I was utterly disappointed with the whole event I lost the mood to do anything related to the gig.I have even just finished selecting and editing the photos few days ago.

That particular evening was supposed to be a special, memorable night for both Mocca and their fans. It could be their last, last performance for Heaven knows how long, so everyone sort of expected that it would be so awesomely grand they could go home with a big smile on their faces and butterflies in their tummies.

But they didn’t. Or at least I and some people I knew didn’t.

They felt annoyingly gutted for being ripped off by the organiser. Yes, it was all ruined by the organiser. Mocca played brilliantly as always, but the rest was a total rubbish.

I will just list them here for easy reading:

1. The venue was moved from the posh Balai Kartini to Hall Basket Senayan, just so the organiser could get more money from ticket sales.
   Despite the venue being downgraded to a acoustically terrible sports hall, the tickets were still sold for 200k IDR (around 17euro). We paid almost the same amount of money when Club 8 and Sondre Lerche played at the super-posh Hotel Nikko few years ago.
   The Senayan’s Basket hall is more famous as a venue for hardcore/punk concerts, where bulky men hustle and bang their heads in moshpits, not for a nice, swing-indiepop band like Mocca.
2. During the concert, the rain poured down the tin roof and it gave such an awful noise you barely could hear the music.
   Some friends who didn’t believe such thing could happen at a Mocca concert, thought the noise was a part of the performance.
   I confirmed that it was actually raining outside as I could smell the wet grass.Basically, the sound system was really bad.
3. The cabarette was amateurish.
   The concert’s theme was “Annabelle and the Music Box”, and so there was a sort of cabarette – with high school students performing a fairy tale-ish play, with plots etc. And their performance quality was way below Mocca’s musicality. The costumes were also rather *uhm, sorry* ugly.

tos dulu mbaksis!

The main character, Annabelle, dressed in an Alice costume. The bad guy dressed as if he was a pirate, and the whole plot was oh-so cliche.

Moreover, the spotlight was often directed to the amateur actors instead of the band, as if the band was merely complementary.

Anyway I heard that after this performance Mocca had a truly final, absolutely the last, performance in Bandung before Arina went to the States to marry her boyfriend. Lucky them.

OK, so everything was completely rubbish but the band themselves. Their performance was astonishing. Everybody was so mesmerised that I thought that those who have great memories with their ex girlfriend or boyfriend could really have their heart torn in pieces again. Those who are still with their girlfriend or boyfriend however, probably had one of the loveliest nights ever.

They played all their classic hits, including “Secret Admirer”, “I Think I’m in Love”, and “I Remember”. They also collaborated with three Jakartan bands; first with the husband-and-wife folk duo Endah n Rhesa, playing “Me and My Boyfriend”, then with Mondo and Ade Paloh of Sore playing “This Conversation”, and last but absolutely not the least, White Shoes and the Couples Company. I think Mocca and WSATCC have quite a lot of similarities, and it made their duet a special one, where they played “I Would Never” (originally with Karolina Komstedt of Club 8). It was also nice to see Mocca sang WSATCC’s “Senandung Maaf” and WSATCC played “What If”.

And so I guess if everything (the venue, the organisers, the cabarette etc) was as special as the band, then everybody would have gone home like in fairy tales: happily ever after.