About

A TAV Curator's Pick.

“Culture is not a museum. It is ever changing.

The Observatory’s music is texturally complex and viscerally emotional, crossing wasted borders and musical extremities that parallel polarities within human existence, provoking and inspiring in a deeply enigmatic way. The group draws inspiration from their Southeast Asian roots and heroes of new music and art.”  - The Observatory Official Website

The Observatory is an art rock, experimental and electronica band based in Singapore, consisting largely of alumni from significant 1990s Singaporean bands.

The band formed in 2001 and performed for the first time at the Baybeats music festival in December 2002. They have released eight albums: Time of Rebirth (2004), Blank Walls (2004), A Far Cry From Here (2007), Dark Folke (2009), Catacombs (2012), Oscilla (2014), Continuum (2015) and August is the Cruellest (2016). The band has performed in Norway, Italy, Japan, France, Germany and Singapore, and headlined regional music events in Malaysia and Thailand, such as MTV's Pattaya Music Festival, Heineken Fat Festival Bangkok, St Jerome's Laneway Festival and the Seoul Fringe Festival.

Four years in the making, The Observatory's seventh album, Continuum, is their take on Indonesia's gamelan music tradition. Partially written and recorded in Lodtunduh, Bali, Continuum found The Observatory devising their own six-note scale of E, F, F#, A#, C and D#. Inspired in part by Talk Talk and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Continuum had the noise musician Lasse Marhaug contributing a remix, "Part 6", to its release. Released on double vinyl, CD and digitally, Continuum was launched at The Substation on 23 July 2015 at a launch concert with an ensemble of 10 musicians, with The Straits Times finding "the East-meets-West soundscape...hypnotic in the way it tightly enveloped the audience" at the "seamless art-rock concert[s]".

The Straits Times found Continuum a "sonically stellar mix" and "tenebrous but at the same time, musically cutting-edge and far-out", giving it four out of five stars.  – Wiki

Check out Bandwagon’s track by track guide to the album here.

Features:

• Double LP
• Includes CD and Digital Download
• Standard weight black vinyl x 2
• Deluxe paper jacket
• Black polylined inners
• Full size insert with album liner notes
• Illustrations by Massimiliano Amati
• First press limited to 250

Item description: