The Death of Cinema

Fusing the pretentious woe of trip-hop and post-rock with the spastic elements of IDM, the quartet collectively known as The Death Of Cinema crafts ambient and moody pieces of music they describe as "post-cock". Experimenting with beats and loops, the act provides a whole new aural experience. While a relatively new unit, they have been favourably compared to established acts like Air and DJ Shadow .

Eswandy - keyboards, samples, laptop

Nicholas Chan - guitars, bass

Khairyl Hashim - guitars

Timothy Ngoh - drums

So, cinema is dead; reality TV rules. How sad is that?

Nick : I think reality TV began being shown when the networks were sufficiently convinced that most people knew that if you dismantled a television set you wouldn't find little people spilling out.

Eswandy : Actually, it is good. Reality TV will prepare everyone for worse-hitting documentaries coming our way very soon. It is good cos that will desensitize human beings more than anything. Why, wouldn't that be good for the whole world? but phew, what a distraction it has
been. I'm sure voyeurism appeals to everyone.

The Death Of Cinema is supposed to be a trio. How did Eswandy come into the picture?

Eswandy : I'm supposed to be the Windows Media Player for The Death of Cinema.

Nick : I wouldn't say it was supposed to be anything cause it wasn't even supposed to exist. With this band, it's like that girl you've always had a thing for but knew it could never happen. Then one day, it does and you're not sure it's for real. All four of us go some years back making music together. So, Ess was never really out of the picture to begin with.

Eswandy , what's the current status of bigred.moment at the moment?

Eswandy : Let's just say bigred.moment is trying its best to rediscover the joy of song writing. I'll also say that we're looking forward to introducing new vocabulary into our music after being "out of the scene" and "out of step" for a year.

You guys describe your own music as "post-cock". I sense a healthy disregard for musical genres and disdain for the stereotypes that plague the respective genres. What's your take on that?

Nick : I wouldn't say we disregard genres. Rather, we're very sensitive to the trappings of them, so you're right about the stereotypes. For example, with the whole down-tempo and triphop thing, there's just this very pretentious, pseudo-intellectual and extremely dated edge to it. Just look at the cover of any Winter Chill or Hed Kandi 'chillout' compilation, or the cover of Groove Armada 's Vertigo . Have you seen anything more dated or stuck?

The same thing is happening to post-rock too. Like what's with 5-word smarty pants titles as 'de riguer '? The reason I mention these genres is that we ourselves are into this music and we can't escape the influence anyway, so we learn to take what we can and make fun of it, and hopefully we end up less derivative.

Since its inception around 3 months ago, The Death Of Cinema has already released an EP. Are you guys workaholics or just overtly prolific?

Nick : Actually it's been 2 months only and we haven't released an EP. We just burnt a demo sampler thing and sold it at the RNDM gig. Those songs are still demo versions, albeit good ones. I hope we can be prolific and there's much to look forward to coz most of the band are capable of producing music as individuals alone.

It's highly interesting that Tim drums with headphones on. That's pretty much of a rare sight. For the uninitiated, what exactly is going on?

Nick : A lot of the stuff Ess plays on the sampler, even the delays, is fixed to a certain tempo. So Tim has to lock his beats to that tempo. The headphones are for him to monitor the sampler alone. Check out Keane , Kasabian or the YeahYeahYeahs live and you'll get a better idea. Though the Keane drummer just uses one giant speaker facing him from the side.