I FINALLY played my first international show since January 2020 after which the pandemic cancelled all my plans.

Actually, it was really a “regional” show: I wrapped up my Kapuk Tour September 2022 edition with two shows in Singapore last weekend.

I hit the road down south with fellow troubadour Sounds of Kites, the stage name of singer-songwriter Wan Umar Shahid, who is fresh off his heels of the promotion of his sophomore album “Faceless Nameless”, which was released earlier this year featuring one of my favourite singles of the year “Ipoh/Infinity”.

A couple of months ago, a friend asked me how one chooses a touring mate – an important question since the answer depends wholly on the artist’s modus operandi, specifically in the  independent or underground subcultural realm.

Personally, I would ask someone who has recorded and released an album or single and has some merchandise for some earnings on the road.

My tours aren’t going to make you rich nor will it enable you to quit your day job, but they offer you an alternative existence outside of the confines of your breadwinning activity (including playing music for a living, ironically).

Back to the tour. It was was initially planned as a “reunion” of sorts of a loose and growing collective of solo singer-songwriters whose work exists outside of the popular imagination because of their individual and auteurist style of songwriting.

We named this loose and small collective the “Selat Folkers” because we are all tied to the regional bloodline of the Selat Melaka, or Straits of Malacca, and we play different permutations of the broad generic category of “folk”.

This name emerged when we decided to tour Indonesia – East Java, the Special Region of Jogjakarta, and Central Java – back in mid-2019 to be amongst the first foreign acts to join in the grassroots nation-wide music festival in Indonesia called the Festival Musik Rumah.

The four of us – Sounds of Kites, Bayangan, the stage name of Malaysian singer-songwriter Fikri Fadzil, and Singaporean doom folk artist Hell Low, the stage name of singer-songwriter Jeremy Lee, – shared a common sensibility in our songs and worldview that overruled over more obvious musical or generic convention which most usual more mainstream or pop music industry considerations would pore over more.

Most importantly, we are friends. While Sounds of Kites is the youngest of the group, I’ve known Bayangan way before he became Bayangan and Hell Low for a decade now.

From our group, I’d like to use this as an example of what differentiates music “industry” considerations versus those from the “independent” or “underground” circuit: friendship trumps business any day.

If you’ve been in the scene, you’re probably familiar with words like “cronies” or “favouritism” and here’s a fact that’s true but hard to swallow – friendships go a long way and if one has the autonomy to choose their journey mates, friends will of course override any other options.

Alliances are born out of not just empathy but also a sense of kinship and I’ll be honest, the kinship amongst artists is different from regular folk. It just is.

I don’t mean to exclude the rest of you, dear readers, but heck, we read so much about the kinship between CEOs and the fantastical lives they lead, I think it’s time for me to set the record straight that not all of us will ever experience the varied nuances of human activity.

Sorry I digress. Back to the tour. This Singapore leg of the tour was very meaningful to me because I got to reconnect with my friends – both musicians and audiences – after the lockdowns of the past two and half years.

When I met each of them, I told them “We are survivors” and that made the moments more poignant than the best live set I’ve ever played.

And that, to me, is at the core of music-making and touring. It’s not the façade of glamour you see projected to us in popular media.

Unfortunately, only a few of us have access to this kingdom. That’s why each gig counts. – September 30, 2022.