From Slovenia with love

caught the stroj at the boon lay open field. industrial drumming act: think stomp, but from slovenia, more angst-filled, and without dancing. plus they have this one super, super buff girl na talagang nakakatibo.

now, where was i, before i was so rudely interrupted by my iffy wifi connection?

ah yes. yung babaeng nakakatibo.

grabe. pounding industrial steel seems to be quite the workout. nakakainggit.

i was so enraptured by this girl's back that marlon and i hung around after the show trying to take a picture of it. in the process, i overheard this funny exchange between an old chinese man (ocm) and one of the slovenian roadies/managers (srm).

ocm: where you from?
srm: we're from slovenia.
ocm smiles and nods vaguely.
srm (trying to be friendly): do you know where slovenia is?
ocm frowns and shakes his head.
srm: we were part of the former yugoslavia.
ocm (brightening): ah! czech?
srm: no, yugoslavia.
ocm: czech. czechoslovakia.
srm: yugoslavia.
ocm: czech.

they continue in this maddening roundabout fashion for a couple of minutes. srm begins to get red in the face, but exerts superhuman effort to stay calm and cheery. he decides to give up on the idea of the former yugoslavia.

srm: we're beside germany and austria.
ocm: ah!
srm (smiling): yes! You know austria?
ocm (nodding happily): czechoslovakia.

i could so relate to this poor roadie. i came from a never-heard tiny high school and have endured years and years of similar exchanges and vague nods when asked where i went to high school. i felt like taking the poor roadie aside, patting him on the arm and telling him i knew where his country was. i could have also said that i know what his currency is called (tolar), what the slovenian word for sale is (ugodno) and how to pronounce the name of his capital, ljubljana (use a 'y' sound for the 'j's). maybe that would have made him feel better.

why do i know these little factoids, you may wonder? slovenia holds a special place in my memory as being the location of my very first international choral competition (which we swept, nya ha ha) on my very first european trip with the glee club. a beautiful place with lots of fun recollections –

buses on the street slowing down to gawk at us black-haired, brown-skinned people; partying in a centuries-old wine cellar; appearing on slovenian national tv; getting twenty dollars of my pocket money changed into tolar and feeling like a bazillionaire; crossing the drava river to go shopping in downtown maribor and happily realizing that a shop with "super ugodno” plastered all over it was definitely somewhere i wanted to be.

sorry. attack of nostalgia there. back to the show.

marlon and i only got to catch up with the second half of the stroj's performance, because it took us so goddamn long to get to the open field beside the boon lay mrt station. (long by singapore standards anyway; by metro manila standards, getting across the city in one hour by bus is a miracle.) as far as singapore is concerned, boon lay is at the end of freaking nowhere.

which meant that, with the exception of a few rocker teens and art-starved stragglers like me and the boyf, the stroj's audience was mostly the indian laborers, old people, children and families living in the surrounding hdbs (government flats). who for the most part sat primly in their neat rows of white monobloc seats while the stroj was bashing their hearts out into their self-soldered industrial behemoth of a setup.

which was a shame, because the performance was pretty awesome. they deserved a better audience for their talent, passion and grit. there is something tribal in their live music that hits a nerve in you – whatever nerve is responsible for those times in your life when you fling yourself out into a crowd and dance with wild abandon. i really wished they had played in manila. all the jologs would have been trashing the monobloc chairs, or all the hot tattooed girls in dangerously low-cut jeans dancing on top of those chairs, by the middle of their second number. in boon lay, there was nary a foot-tapper in sight.

there were some very pinoy moments though. one of the stroj's numbers had a firebreather (yes, you read right) belching flames rhythmically, in concert with the rest of the instruments. each fiery spurt was met by a round of applause and a chorus of “woh lah!”s. I'm guessing in filipino, “woh lah!” would translate to something like “walastik! bumubuga siya ng apoy!” it was all very tanghalan ng kampeon or other such noontime singing contest, where the singer shifts to a higher key, veins popping, and the audience bursts into dutiful applause.

and naturally, the audience rose out of its catatonia when the stroj ended its show with fireworks. i personally didn't think they needed to end with a bang (literally), but maybe it was a local audience thing that their local handlers decided to do. we used to do those kinds of endings in high school variety shows.

what the stroj does seems like a lot of fun, although after reading through their website, i realize that it's all much harder than it looks. one of their numbers ends with two guys using steel drums (as in dram na lalagyan ng tubig) as instruments, bashing at them rhythmically with sledgehammers. it looked like tons of fun, like something everyone should get to do on a really bad day. which made me wonder: do they bash their instruments better on a bad day? do they invoke the day's resentments during that portion of the show?

BAMMMM!!! this is for the dead singaporean audience!!
BAMMM!!!! this is for that pig's brain soup we had for lunch!!!!
BAMMMMM!!! this is for sticking us out here in the boonies!!!
BAMMMM!!!! why are we playing for geriatrics?!?!?!
BAMMM!!! where are the hot half-naked tattooed babes??!?!?
BAMMM!!!! why the f#%$&! aren't we playing in manila?!?!??!
BAMMMM!!! hey waitaminit, that's my favorite drum you're bashing!!!!
BAMMM!!!! why is the only girl in this group buffer than i am??!?!?!

i guess only the stroj will ever know for sure.

--

to make our lengthly sojourn worthwhile, marlon and i stuck around after the show and discovered something extremely interesting: a dry goods market at the boon lay mrt station/bus interchange. major diligence is required to sift through the assortment of cheap goods. good thing i'm a diligent shopper.

our cheap booty: for marlon, copies of empire of the sun and batman (guess what recent release we're totally hung up on). plus the world's largest, greasiest chicken wing for a dollar. for me, an embroidered 100% cotton kurtah from nepal. i was so taken with a whole rack of the shirts that i spent twenty minutes hemming and hawing over what color to get.

screen test: you can probably figure out by the background which version i decided to take.

we hung around and browsed for a long while, long enough to necessitate a mad dash for the last train back to civilization. from slovenia to nepal all in one evening -- downtown singapore suddenly seemed so dull after the adventure.