Celestial shoegazing with Singapore's Stellarium

Depending on which band member you talk to, the name “Stellarium” that belongs to this Singapore shoegaze outfit was either delivered by some celestial being right out of the cosmos or birthed from the deepest nooks of the human heart.

“We gaze at the night sky, stars, like fishes in the giant celestial aquarium,” says Mohammed Bachtiar aka Bach, the band’s 30-year-old drummer. “Forming black air castles, floating and disappearing like cigarette smoke. Restless nights tinged with white noise.”

Riiiiight. Contrast that with the decidedly more earthy version courtesy of 30-year-old frontman and guitarist Muhammad Azman (Az) and his girlfriend, bassist Marina Abu Hassan (Mar): “I had awesome times spent with Az watching the stars, and those moments were something I wanted to remember,” says Mar. Adds Az, “Yes, I particularly enjoyed Orion’s belt during those times. It remains as [the single] most significant point of my life, romantically and musically.”

Ahhh, of course. Whether you’re the gawky romantic or the art house elitist that swears by Franz Kafka and Jean-Luc Godard, Stellarium (completed by guitarist Firdaus) have a goal of grabbing your eardrums, doing some hefty reshaping and couriering them back to you in 467 pieces, properly busted. The four-piece act are built out of members hailing from four separate Singaporean bands that play a variety of genres, and in the last one year since they settled on their current lineup, they have raised their country’s shoegaze scene to a level where…well, to a level where there actually is a scene. 

There is a definite reason behind Stellarium’s rollicking rhyme, and it’s a somewhat noble one. “We formed the band as a result of the urge to educate people about good music and to not accept what's been stuffed up their hungry faces by MTV, the radio and especially the trends,” says Mar. It’s a bold ambition accentuated by bolder strokes of self-belief, but Stellarium’s ability to froth and feedback with the best of ‘em has set some firm foundations in place for future generations of noiseniks. 

“I was personally quite sick of the rubbish all around,” says Az, who also dabbles in solo work as Disco Ditto. “[So] we decided to gang up for a single purpose: to bust your eardrums.”

That, they’re certainly armed for. With Az handling the initial songwriting and the band lending their arrangement ideas, the resulting Stellarium tunes are well-described by Bach as “a single melody with individual inputs, like mother earth and its funny creatures”. Those “funny creatures” come dolled up in psychedelic guitar churns, best recognised by their scientific name Jesus and Maryius Chainus with a little My Bloodyius Valentineus crossbred for melodic effect. Yet Az prefers to look even further back in the evolution of music. “We’re more accurately attuned to the 60s sounds of The Ronettes and the wall of sound concept of Phil Spector, to name a few,” he insists.

Whatever the era, Stellarium’s sound is all too appropriate for this current one, where global gloom and economic doom seem to be the dominant vibes of today. With Az’s dense vocal drones running point, the band translates a disdain for silence, and utter love for blowing amps, into a swirling mash of musical mush. It’s not your standard three-minute radio fare–‘Vertigo’ and its quivering delays might give all those Top 40 DJs the weepies–but that’s just the way the band likes it. “Hell, it’s just rock ‘n’ roll,” says Az. “Nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing new to this formula, conceptually. Everything has been done before, whether you like it or not. Being 100% avant-garde and ‘original’ is cliché and farfetched.”

Already, the band has played at venues like The Esplanade and Substation. Beyond gigging, they have also worked hard to promote their genre of choice. Last December, Az co-organised an all-shoegaze festival in Indonesia called Supersonic Sound Fest, which saw Stellarium travel with four other Indonesian acts through six cities, where they hooked up with several other local bands for entire evenings lovingly dedicated to shoegaze. “It started off as a DIY tour that has the three bands, but grew to include more bands and spanned more cities,” says Az, who hopes to make it an annual and regional event eventually. “Soon enough, shoegaze music from Asian countries will unite and [we will] build ourselves a scene that will be celebrated and hold its own, regardless of Western music movements.”

Truly, in the midst of all the impending success lies a sense that Stellarium are bound by an unofficial duty to spread the gospel of good music to their fellow islanders. “I feel that many listeners are not able to discover on their own the kinds of stuff they would appreciate,” says Mar. “Most are spoon-fed and stuffed with the commercial sh*tloads by other people and mediums. Reaching new frontiers is both for us and for the listeners. It's for us to spread what we love and for them to appreciate it.”

The band’s debut is set to be released later this year in the United States under indie shoegaze label Custom Made Music/Unexplainable Recordings (which also distributes acts like Skywave, Ceremony and Black Nite Crash). A full-scale Indonesian tour is also in the works, with dreams of an American trip next year not too far behind. “[But] no SXSW for us, thank you,” says Az about the famed weeklong American music event South By Southwest, perhaps alluding to other Singaporean acts whom in recent years have had to raise huge sums of money for a brief appearance in some cruddy Texan clubs alongside thousands of other indie hopefuls. Rather, the band are hoping to make it cross-Pacific on their own terms. “Three weeks of the East Coast. No joke,” outlines Az. “We plan to hold a Tupperware party to raise funds for our tour. BYOTupperware, okay?”

Sure thing. That, and maybe some earplugs.

WORDS CHRIS PHOTOS RUEVEN
www.myspace.com/stellariumsg