No Eye Candy’s 1st Female Guest Drummer (July 4)

Ever since our 2nd drummer has decided to spend more time with his new baby – which our band No Eye Candy fully understand and support – for the last two months, we scrambled to look for guest drummers to jam with us, to explore the possibility.  Guitarist Jason called in his friend for help and so did Bassist Cynthia.  Last evening, Cynthia’s friend Wieke who was born in the same country as her (i.e. Indonesia) joined us.  Time to pay our favorite studio Stone Jamz a visit.

It is hard to look for new members.  We don’t do cover songs or religious music (that is popular amongst the local community) and we work on the songs that I write.  Somehow there is a mutual respect and admiration on our domain specialty formed between the three of us – Cynthia, Jason, and I – since November 2004.  And we do have a certain practice tempo we commit, however infrequent it may be.

Before I go on, below are the captions for the pictures on the left.  Photos taken by Jason’s wife Selrol.  A big thanks to her as these pictures captured the essence of our session well (next time I must take some pictures of her).  Too bad, the battery of the camera went flat fast.  Lesson learnt: always buy original battery!

[1] Our cool bassist, Cynthia.  [2] Our 1st female guest drummer, Wieke, and she referred to her iPod during our break to look for some inspirations I guess.  [3] Our guitar god, Jason.  [4] That’s me.  Nice shirt eh?  My new shopping loot.  [5] OK.  Jason almost remembered the chords of our entire 5-song set.  Almost.  [6] We certainly are still amazed that such a petite lady can create such a deafening drumming sound!  Wieke is creatively amazing.  She has transformed some of our songs beyond our band’s recognition!  [7] Notice a huge white ring that Cynthia wore?  Well, while the boys were at Sim Lim side shopping for amplifiers and cables, she went shopping for accessories.  [8] I did look intense.  How did Selrol manage to capture this?!  I look scary.  I am a beast.

At times I would imagine how a new or guest member sees our band.  A band that is still finding its way, still full of rough edges?  A package of songs that are dark, at times gloomy but nevertheless radiates a sense of genuine emotion from the soul?  Songs and music arrangement with no defined structure and the same song never sounds the same every time we play it?  Perhaps all of the above and more.

I am personally unsure if someone will commit to our band in the near future (though I would certainly welcome that idea with open arms).  But in this transient beauty of being able to collaborate with different artists, different talents and be taken to a different height, it is one helluva journey that I’d love to take, any time.