Around the beginning of the year I re-posted this quote by Joss Whedon from screen_craft's instagram about making stuff.
When I posted it I wrote about how my mantra for the new year was to MAKE STUFF. Any Stuff. Just Stuff. Anything. As long as it's Stuff. And this would extend to making public previous Stuff that I've made so get ready for an influx of old shit made available and public once again from my back catalogue of movie making Stuff.
But movies aren't all I do. For quite a while my most public creative output was music. And if you've been following me on the social medias you'd notice more and more posts of past musical Stuffs being put up. This isn't just a hark back to self-perceived glory days (because they really weren't that glorious) but more of a mapping of the chronological timeline.
A lot of this music was made back when the main way to pimp out your music on the interwebs was mp3.com (where I discovered Teh Tarik Crew's first demos) and later myspace, and the way one would get your music out there would be CD's and tapes at gigs. That musical landscape on the net has changed quite a bit, and I wanted to put a bunch of this stuff out there that had never been put up, warts and all.
Oh, there's many warts.
The two types of music that I've been posting are my electronica alter-ego 'A Girl Named Jane' and the band that's named after my online presence, 'Khaimano'. Most of the 'A Girl Named Jane' stuff had really only been heard on filmmaking stuff I'd done as I'd use a lot of the tracks or compose them for the videos.
'Khaimano', however, is where I'll be mostly concentrating my musical Stuff making efforts.
As stated in a previous post, the band started as a bedroom recording project, heavily influenced by Sublime, back in 2001. From there it turned into a raw three piece ska-punk band that played around the underground circuit till about 2003, where I then concentrated my musical efforts to Y2k and Rollin' Sixers.
For a while, though, throughout my time in these two bands, I'd been recording songs by myself as well, not really knowing what genre or moniker to place them under. And later after that (about two years ago) I started Khaimano back again and gig-ed for a while before work started taking over way too viciously.
And nowadays it's really hit me how much the music was a vital part of my creative process.
The thing about making and performing music, to me at least, is the sheer, basic joy of it. Of making and writing and recording and performing. I never liked the business side of it or the promotional side of it, the marketing and what nots, because it always tainted the crux of why making music is important to me. And as the profile of some of the bands I was in rose and they became more succesful I really got to see and differentiate what really matters to me when it came to making music.
I remember finally playing 'Rock the World' at Stadium Merdeka, a dream many local musicians have, and realizing how much more fun I'd have in a small underground venue where the audience wasn't separated from you by a ten foot gap and barriers. When I played a huge music festival in Thailand I felt that even more - how I'd rather play to a crowd of fifty in a cramp room than thousands in an event arena. I remember finally recording in a fancy music studio with a reknown engineer and as great as it was, I know I had much more fun recording in a house with the barest minimum of equipment, trying to figure out how to mic the drums without pissing off the neighbours.
I'm not saying I'm not grateful for the opportunities I had. I truly am. But it helped me realize what mattered most to me when it came to making music.
In all honesty, I've actually been a bit afraid of putting up all this old stuff online, and even more afraid of putting up the new. The independent musical landscape now is so much more different than before. I remember when the height of harsh criticism was a troll or two on the Jamtank forum messageboards. Now it's YouTube and Facebook comments. It's scary. Especially since I'm not exactly a good singer to begin with.
But I don't want that to hold me back from making Stuff. The point is the doing. The making. And the fun.
The next batch of stuff I'm uploading are some of the songs I recorded during the 2007 till now period, all acoustic guitar based. I figured it'd be a nice stepping stone from the previous raw Khaimano three piece stuff leading on to the stuff that I've been recording recently as it's no longer sticking to a single genre or two but taking in pretty much every influence I have.
Originally I thought maybe I should put all this under yet another moniker and keep Khaimano as a three piece ska-punk influenced band. I would've used my own name but apparently there's a kid on Youtube with the same name as mine making music and I didn't want things to get confusing.
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to just call it all Khaimano - the solo stuff, the band stuff, all of it. When I put all the tracks I've done in differing genres on one playlist and listen to it back to back even though the genres are changing it's still the same voice and the same style of writing.
So my plan is release this acoustic EP, followed by a full album that's mainly just me where I produce the tracks as crazily as I want, regardless of if it can be performed live or not. Odds are those tracks may still be performed live, just with different arrangements. Then, after that album, a stripped down three piece album recorded live with the bandmembers and perhaps some guests here or there.
The plan is also to make this music as free as possible online to stream or download, and if people feel so inclined they can pay whatever they want but there's no obligation. I'm way past being a rock star and I don't want to spend the time and effort it takes to sell an album as opposed to just giving it away. I may make some kind of physical album if the need arises, but it would have to be something that's worth paying for it and differentiates it from the free downloads. But then again, that's only if there was an actual demand for it.
I just want to make music again. Tell some stories in that medium. Have some fun doing it. And maybe some other people will enjoy it too.
Before there was a band called Khaimano there was a demo tape.
Like, literally. A cassette tape with the words ‘Khaimano’ scribbled on it. I didn’t even have a CD burner on my laptop in 2001. That shit was a luxury back then.
I started recording the songs that would end up being the 411C sessions (named after the room of my student housing flat in London) between Spring and Summer, finishing up the bulk of it after my finals. Sublime was the primary influence, together with everything else I was listening to up to that point and it shows.
The reasons for recording it? No idea. I had some songs I wanted to get out of my head and I had a way to record it like never before - on a computer.
I started recording my own compositions when I was about 15, using a second-hand Tascam 144 four-track cassette recorder, which apparently was the same type of machine Bruce Springsteen recorded the entire album ‘Nebraska’ on. I loved having a machine I could multi-track record on in the comfort of my own room, and at the time it seemed like it was really compact for such a powerful machine.
Jordan laying down a guitar track on the ‘compact’ Tascam 144.
We’d occasionally use a program called ModPlugTracker to compose drum machine beats but the instruments it came with sounded insanely midi, so often times I’d bring the four track to the music room and record some live drums there. The computer didn’t seem powerful enough to record everything on, but this was 1995 - computer home recording wasn’t as common as it is now, and nowhere near as advanced.
However, by mid 2000 I had learned how to use ModPlugTracker a lot more and figured out how I could possibly record guitar based music on it, sampling the guitar and bass riffs and looping them.There was no way I could use the Tascam anymore anyway. I had sold it off two years earlier for... social activities.
Since I had no pre-amps or a mixer, I used my Marshall drive master pedal as a vocal pre-amp and lined the guitar and bass directly, leaving me with only the option of clean instruments. Then I’d chop the riffs up, arrange them, program some drum beats and track the vocals using N-track, a free digital four track app which would record out of sync after twenty seconds so all vocals had to be recorded part by part.
My digital audio workstation, circa 2001.
I wrote songs about Stuff. And Things. I wrote about girls and erectile dysfunction, skateboarding and leaving London for Malaysia. I wrote about being an undergraduate. I couldn’t sing very well back then, but I knew how to write a tune and I liked telling stories.
Things have come full circle and I’m currently recording new material on a computer by myself, just like I did back then - figuring out the arrangements, the riffs, the instrumentation - and even re-recording some of the tracks from this demo. The equipment has come a long way since 2001, but some things still haven’t changed.
I still can’t sing very well. And I also still like to tell stories.
Someone who can’t sing very well getting ready to tell a story, circa 1999.
Better late than never - my band 'Khaimano's performance of 'So Hipster' at The Venue, Pavilion, for Open Mic #8.
For those that remember 'Khaimano' back in the day, the song is basically 'This Is Black Metal' with new lyrics, since the old ones are pretty dated now.
Ten years from now, these lyrics will be pretty dated too.
