AS a musician, performing live can be rather repetitive on the outset.

You go through the motions: load up your equipment in your vehicle, travel, arrive at a venue, meet the soundman, set up your equipment, play with the same musicians, go through soundcheck, sit and around waiting for showtime, sing the same songs, respond appreciatively with the same salutations to the crowd, meet some of them after the show (maybe some selfies with fans), check your merchandise sales, pack up your equipment, maybe a drink or two to wind down, get your pay, load up your equipment back in your vehicle, travel back (or to the next town and venue if you’re on tour), and repeat.

A live musician’s life is always in transit, even if you’re just playing around your own city.

It is a transient lifestyle that if not given some scrutiny may lead them to a rootless life – although sometimes this is exactly the appeal of being a full-time musician to some.

There’s a fair degree of romanticism attached to this kind of life that can be a spiritual one if the musician chooses but also one in which the lifestyle can also catch up with you, since there are many occupational hazards in this vocation.

Historically, there has been countless tragedies of bands that meet their demise on tour via accidents during the mad dash of travelling to the airport or the next city because, most of the time to keep costs lean, bands or musicians would usually travel right after the show, usually in the dead of night, to the next venue on tour.

While to the casual observer – whose only exposure to the touring life is rock stars – they love watching YouTube, documentaries or television, where plush tour buses, debauchery, and the company of entourages are the order of the day.

However, the reality is a lot more stark but no less interesting.

Most bands start out roughing it out usually in cramped and downtrodden vehicles with the equipment crammed into the car boot.

Most live the rest of their lives this way and never look back.

The cliché of superstardom and whatnot often misses the point of why bands or musicians do what they do and there’s no one answer which fits all.

For me, I love this roughing it out and I’ve come to the realisation early on that my genre and choice of original material will keep me on this straight and narrow path into my golden years if I continue trucking on.

As a solo singer-songwriter, I enjoy the solitude of traveling alone, accompanied by thoughts, taking in the sight, smell and sounds of a new town, venue or even country at my own pace.

However, I also play in bands, or sometimes with a group of fellow solo troubadours, and I must say I enjoy that too because of a shared sense (sometimes foolish but gung-ho) camaraderie unlike other vocations except maybe team sports.

These things keep it from being repetitive but only in fair doses.

As much as being in close quarters day in day out even with your best friends can make you into worse enemies, the same thing goes for singing the same old songs again and again, night after night, town after town, venue after venue.

After a while, musicians do feel like a monkey doing tricks at the beck and call of an audience, adoring or cold it doesn’t matter.

Just like our routine lives, we need a change sometimes and for me I’ve found the antidote in improvised and experimental music.

Most Malaysians don’t know that we have a small but close-knit experimental music community and even a festival that has been going strong for more than a decade in the shape of the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Music Festival or better known as KLEX.

I was part of the initial experimental collective known as the Experimental Musicians & Artists Co-operative Malaysia (EMACM), which formed around 2003 by like-minded individuals who held the desire to try different stuff and experiment.

Two members from this collective are the force behind KLEX – free-jazz saxophonist Yong Yandsen (who once headed metal-inspired rock band Moxuan and was also an important musician in the seminal Chinese underground music scene in the late 1990s) and vocalist Kok Siew Wai (who also dabbled in filmmaking earlier).

Experimental music may have a bad rap in popular imagination. Phrases like noisy, weird and no structure, to I don’t understand, where’s the song and why are they playing like that, are often hurled this way.

However, just like research and development are an integral part of any industry, experimentation and improvisation too are important to any artform.

The only “problem” is that this form doesn’t make a musician rich, nor do corporations (at least in Malaysia) clamour to ride its coattails (unlike classical music).

Nevertheless, I find it important to reinvigorate my creative juices and bring back the notion of “play” to music which is often forgotten: music often accompanies fun times or merriment but musicians too need their own fun and merriment to break the repetition of routine, which audiences may or may not understand.

So I’ll be heading over to join their Serious Play Improv Lab Series (I love the name) this Saturday at Percussion Store in the heart of old Kuala Lumpur to rekindle myself with playing with other musicians outside of the usual format of live music.

Aside from staying alive, we must also find time to play and be playful without spending a dime – find your own experimentation in your lives and hopefully you will rekindle some joy in our repetitive lives. – November 26, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.