My 2006 Discography

Originally posted at RamblingLibrarian:

Ivan Chew’s 2006 Discography (links to MP3 files)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

1. White Nights (in collaboration with Vanessa Tan) - [Dec '06; Song Details]
2. Lady Of Shalott (Down to Camelot) - [Nov '06; Song Details]
3. Carry Me Over - [Oct '06; Song Details]
4. Ray of Light - [Oct '06; Song Details]
5. Dreaming of Better Days - [Sept '06; Song Details]
6. August Nights - [Sept '06; Song Details]
7. Moonsong - [Sept '06; Song Details]
8. Take Me Away - [Jul '06; Song Details]
9. March Upon The Black - [Jul '06; Song Details]
10. I Am Singaporean (Soundtrack) - [Jul '06; Song Details]
11. Run (Our Feet Will follow) - [Jul '06; Song Details]
12. Electric Rain Dance - [Jun '06; Song Details]
13. TechnoJungle - [Jun '06; Song Details]
14. So I Am A Werewolf - [Jun '06; Song Details]
15. Saturday In May - [May '06; Song Details]
16. Brand New Day - [Apr '06; Song Details]
17. January Skies (Cosmic Mix) - [Jan '06; Song Details]
18. January Skies - [Jan '06; Song Details]

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Free concert at NUS: 10 Jan 2007 - “A Journey Through Time”

Here’s a plug for a fellow FOYer (Friend of Yesterday.SG), who will be playing the Double Bass at the following free concert at NUS, Singapore:

A Journey Through Time
By NUS Symphony Orchestra
Wed, 10 Jan 2007, 7.30 p.m.
NUS Theatrette, Lecture Theatre 13 (LT13)
Free Admission
For enquiries, please call Tel: 6516 4041.

Mmm… I find traveling to NUS a hassle, but PY has provided maps etc. We’ll see… More details of the concert at PY’s blogpost (there’s a link to a clip of their rehearsal). Happy playing, PY!

Poem: Recall

sometimes i get
spontaneous flashes
of random memories

irreverent snapshots of life’s
moments, processed
in my mind’s darkroom
without my being aware

no details of context
only specific acts of
embarrassment involving
myself, more often than not —

like this recent recall
of a meeting where i
made a bubbly remark in jest
that fizzled flat

or this sudden image
of me taking the lift, and
i’d forgotten to thank
the man who held the door open –

incidental images like that
that weave in and out
from my mind’s eye

One step at a time

I happened to be reading Kenneth’s post while listening to this song by “Stereophonics” at youtube. Kenneth was sharing about this experience in running the 10km Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon. The music; his words. They all seem to fit nicely. Kenneth was describing what he observed and experienced in the marathon. I thought it alluded to many things in life.

They say that we just have to row our boats merrily down the stream. I think it’s more like a marathon. Or a slow walk. Whatever we choose to be.

So long we complete it.

Sketches of my left hand (1990)

Sometimes I get inspired, and I am able to sketch something like this (circa 1990):

Close-up of the sketch that was used for this genre guide:

BioTech illustration

This is an illustration I did for the NLB Science Fiction “Biotechnology” Genre Guide (2006).

The picture shows a human hand juxtaposed with a cybernetic one. There’s a DNA double helix strand on the side of the human-hand, while the series of computer zeros and ones are on the side of the machine-hand.

How it was done
We needed illustrations for the genre guides. No time to commission an illustrator, so I volunteered. My Colleague suggested that the illustration could be based on the following:

“BioTech Science Fiction - cloning, genetic engineering, Aeon-Flux stuff etc…Usu. with enmasse specimen laboratories, or really complex-looking machinery…Or eye candies with some form of marked defect.”

That gave me some rough idea to work with. I remembered I had these pieces done years ago — a sketch of my left hand and a cybernetic hand:

In brief: After cropping the separate images, I adjusted their placement on a new canvas (I used Photoshop Elements). Then added the background colour, played with the eraser tool with different opacity settings to give the background a washed look (there are 2 background layers). Then added the Zeros and Ones, and the DNA strand.

Photoshop Layers
Layer #1 — a series of Zeros and Ones. It’s done as a text (’System’ font, size 22). Got the idea partly from “The Matrix” where the zeros and ones pixelised to become images.

Layer #2 — the sketched hand, cropped from the “1990 Sketch - Hand and Figures” (see this post). Used the lasso tool to crop over the image and then used Eraser tool (with different brush & Opacity settings) to wash out the unwanted spaces. Colour/ Lighting adjustment was done to give the pencil lines a more rusty look, like something out of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings — to show something really old, as opposed to the futuristic cyberhand.

Layer #3 — a cropped image of a DNA strand (from 3DScience.com). It’s a composite of two copies of the same image and merged-down (bec. one single image wasn’t long enough, or got distorted when stretched). Colour adjustments done to give it a bluer tone. Layer was set at 50% Opacity to blend into the background.

Layer #4 — cropped image from the “1990 (Sept) Cybernetic Hand“.

Layer #5 — a layer to paint the cybernetic hand. Highlights and shadows are painted onto the same layer.

Layer #6 — background layer for that chalky/ washed look for the side of the hand. It was one of the first layer I started off as a doodle. I liked how it blended nicely with the look of the sketched hand, I left it there.

Layer #7 — added as a background layer to paint the shadows and give more depth to the cybernetic hand and the zeros and ones.

Layer #8 — Plain white background. Kept it so that I can duplicate blank white-filled backgrounds as required.

Creating a “paper-garden”

This was made for the NLB library outreach event at the 2006 Singapore Garden Festival (background to why this was done, at this post and this one).

How it was done
1) Started off with blank sheets of paper (square sized). I decided to fold the sheets in half and combine two folded sheets to make a long banner of sorts:

2) Next I penciled a very faint outline of the flower petals. Then I used black Electrician’s tape (yes, you read me right — Electrician’s tape! I had to use whatever was available) to create the top and bottom border, kinda like a panoramic look to it. Step 2 took the longest as I had to grapple with the wrapped paper (it was pasted hastily on an uneven table, with no time to dry the glue properly):

3) The rest of the steps were relatively easy. I traced out the petal shapes with a black marker, like so:

4) Then I added more petal shapes, drawn free-hand style:

5) The completed product looked like this:

At first I wasn’t too pleased with it, but my colleague was kind enough to assure me that it looked OK. I have to admit that it sort of grew on me, and looked better with some paper mosaic pieces pasted. Let’s see if the kids visiting the booth like this. Would be interesting to see how it turns out after the kids are done with it.

The optimum length for being disappointed

I love this quip:

“… being disappointed is okay, but don’t be disappointed for too long. Two or three seconds is the optimum length.”

From a comment left by Sami, who wrote it in response to one post where the author expressed disappointment (the author chose to keep the blog private, hence no link to the blog post).

New Year Postcard (2007 series B)

This post provides the background as to why I created this postcard:

The design was sketched in free-hand, using ink on watercolour paper. Had a rough idea to use circles and intersected obliqued lines, and simply applied ink to paper and let the design flow. For the colours, I tried to limit to Cool colours (blues/ greens) though in the end I had to sneak in some hot pink to spice things up.

Sequence of inking/ colouring:

New Year Postcard (2007 series A)

My brother had a set of markers left over from his art-school days. I had a stack of watercolour-paper postcards which I bought more than a year ago (they were marked like a postcard on one side, and blank on the other for you to paint on). Last Sunday I decided to try my brother’s markers on the watercolour-paper postcards to create — what else — postcards for 2007.

This is how the finished side looks like (the reverse is where you write and fix the stamp):

First, I outlined the “2007″ at the center with a pencil. Then I moved to ink and directly sketched the other lines. There was no prior design; I simply applied the pen to paper with a hazy idea that the design would look like something from a Chinese Vase. Other than that, I drew whatever came to mind as the sketch developed.

For the colouring, I tried to keep to similar tones and was conscious not mix Warm colours with Cool ones. But there were only limited colours so in the end, I used almost all the available colours in the box.

Sequence of inking and colouring: