The Observatory are not your ordinary band. Going beyond making music alone, the local Singaporean band has been closely involved in art beyond entertainment for two decades, always ready to speak truth to power and constantly using their sound to amplify their thoughts and feelings about social issues, even expanding into the realm of visual art in 2022’s REFUSE at the Singapore Art Museum which explored music, mushrooms and decomposition.

Now, for the 2024 Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), the team, comprising Dharma, Yuen Chee Wai and Cheryl Ong, are here to present something altogether different, with REFUGE, a performance project that descends into the world of caves. Descending into the subterranean, the work sees the band examining the relationship between self and the natural environment, the interconnectedness of the human body and geological formations of the land in the face of profound constant change.

Crafted after spending time exploring the caves of Ipoh in Malaysia, REFUGE seeks to unearth the stories of the underland, and find solace in both collective and personal memory, with themes of decay, rebirth and seeking comfort far from the madding crowd. We spoke to The Observatory, and found out more about what it means to embrace the darkness, their position as a ‘band’, and what it means to create art today. Read the interview in full below:

Bakchormeeboy: In 2022, with REFUSE at SAM, your work seemed to expand beyond music alone to encompass art of all forms, from installation to film work, all to tell the story of the band through the lens of mycology and mushrooms. Considering how the band loves taking a ‘stylistic sledgehammer’ to your releases and ‘eras’, could you tell us more about the transition from REFUSE to REFUGE, in terms of the origin, changes experienced, and creative journey the band took that led to the inspiration behind REFUGE? 

Dharma: We started collaborating with other art disciplines in 2009, mainly with film and theatre. Providing the live film score for “Earth” and “A Page of Madness” are some examples. Also, members of the band have been involved through the years in their own capacity working on audio tours, soundtrack for film and theatre, basically beyond solely music. 

Cheryl Ong: After REFUSE, we were in the process of thinking about the next work when we had to go on a research trip to Taiping and the Kinta Valley for a collaborative project headed by Lucy Davis. The first stop was Gua Tempurung and we were struck by the experience – the lack of light, how sound works in the cavern, flora and fauna etc., we took that as a starting point and I guess it stuck. 

Yuen Chee Wai: In the research trip that we did in Gua Tempurung, I was busy looking for fungi in the cave, and I did find some. It was incredible reflecting on the resilience that they could persist and grow in such harshest of environments, and it led to me thinking about the similarities between mycelium and the complex subterranean cave systems. So in some sense, REFUGE draws on some sensibilities that we were exploring in REFUSE, but of another scale.

Bakchormeeboy: Why did you decide on the form of multidisciplinary performance for REFUGE, and could you share more about your collaborators? Did you always know that film would play a big part in REFUGE, and could you share more about the filming process and experience?  

Cheryl: We’ve always wanted to delve into some form of performance including other disciplines, but also do it in our way, giving room for experimentation and working with the various forms as we go along. We don’t often think about it, but performance and also film / moving image is so reliant on sound, but in process, it’s always image making that comes before sound and personally I’m curious to see if process-wise that could be flipped, if the sound / music could take the lead.  The moving image that you will see in this work has been amassed from the various research trips that we have made with our collaborators. 

Dharma: Our collaborators:

Justin Shoulder is a movement artist from Australia. They are also known as Phasmahammer and for REFUGE will embody a creature through had crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by the own gestural language. 

Rully Shabara is one half of Indonesian duo Senyawa, lead singer of Zoo and a solo performer in his own right too. Besides singing he also experiments with an AI bot called Xhabarabot which will be featured in REFUGE too. 

Duck Unit are a visual design team. They work frequently with Thai filmmaker/ installation artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. We first worked with them in late 2023 when they did visuals for us at DIAGE festival in Bangkok, it was a great experience.   

Chee Wai: We shot a lot of footage in our research trips to numerous caves in Borneo and Kinta Valley. We initially approached it with a documentary lens and had Isaiah Cheng and Arabelle Zhuang document that process. In the later trips, we started to also film the process ourselves, and in the last trip, we personally filmed Justin in the caves. We also had Duck Unit film Justin in the studio in Bangkok. The moving image of the work is a tapestry of various lenses, seen and presented through the final stitching together by Duck Unit.

Bakchormeeboy: What are some experiences or issues that push you into seeking refuge? Is seeking refuge a form of escape, or is it a chance to recover before returning to continue living better?  

Dharma: Health problems are an example. The limitation that it brings about requires one to come to terms and the process of which requires one to seek refuge, in some cases. To me seeking refuge is not just a form of escape but also recovery, introspection, and solace. We hope to return to not only live better but also be a better person, though it’s not always the case as life can be very challenging at times. 

Cheryl: Making work in Singapore is a double-edge sword, on one hand, there is financial support and funding, but on the other, there is a lot having to deal with bureaucracy – bureaucratic processes that takes time to understand and work with, that is a lot of time that could be put to creative work and allowing the work space to breath and evolve rather than being pedantic. There is also hardly enough space and time to just sit, so the cave allowed us to sit and just be. There is that hope of recovery and coming back better but maybe it’s more of a metaphorical sense of hopefulness, I don’t think we have found the solution just yet. 

Chee Wai: I was extremely inspired by the research that went into making the work. To excavate the stories of prehistory in this region, seeing, touching and learning about things that predate organised religion, listening to the sounds of fauna and flora deep in the caves, understanding the migratory paths of early humans, attempting to understand evolution and how to make sense of our own era of existence, added a lot more meaning to the mundane every day. That is just a small sample of the intensity of research that went into the process. I think these new perspectives and introspections have taken refuge in me. We are but a microscopic fibre of a speck of dust in the entire spectrum of deep time.

Bakchormeeboy: REFUGE deals in part with interconnectedness, not just with each other but with the natural environment as well. In Singapore at least, do you feel there are enough opportunities to connect with nature? Or is there so much urbanity that any connection is only fleeting, and never enough to provide the refuge we seek?

Dharma: There’s not enough nature in Singapore and as I type this its further depleting, so are the opportunities to connect with it. The deeper ends of nature here are also shut off for army live firing. So yes, there is too much urbanity here (and its ever increasing) to seek refuge with nature though at the moment it’s still possible, one just has to work harder to reach out to it.     

Chee Wai: Sadly, what we see in Singapore is not nature. The nature that we do have in the central catchment area is out of bounds to us, and reserved only for the military. Massacring secondary forests to build an eco-tourism destination is not nature. Manicuring trees and plants, and the constant cutting down of trees is not nature. Culling animals is not nature. Building a train station to ‘bring nature closer to you’ is not nature. Why can’t we bring ourselves nearer to nature? The idea of the garden city, or city in the garden concept, is just greenwashing. Is a garden really natural if it is not allowed to grow freely? Is this fixation to control nature a symbolic act of something larger than life? We are just constantly saturated with greenwashing rhetoric, corporate and otherwise.

Bakchormeeboy: On your website, you state that The Observatory makes ‘Music for those who still care. Music for a new world.’, which speaks of how the band often speaks truth to power in both music and lyrics. How do the current members of The Observatory view the world? How different is this world from before?

Dharma: The world seems bleak, bleaker than before. Corporations and their business interests seem to be paramount in most cases, all this under the veil of a better quality of life, but life doesn’t seem to be getting any better with the increasing cost of living. It’s not something that’s unexpected either. It became obvious to me in the late 90s and I’m sure many would have realised this even before that, that the world will be getting bleaker. And I haven’t even started on addressing the injustice in Palestine / Gaza yet.   

Bakchormeeboy: What do you hope REFUGE says about where The Observatory is as a band, and what you want to say to the world and everyone watching it? Is The Observatory still a band, or do you feel that term is too restrictive as a categorisation? 

Dharma: As The Observatory, we still primarily make music but not limited to just that. It’s always great to expand the experience of music, seeking new grounds and kicks!  

Chee Wai: It’s part of evolving and challenging ourselves with new ideas and modes of transmission.

Bakchormeeboy: In line with SIFA’s theme of ‘They Declare’, who do you feel, more than ever, needs their voices amplified and heard? 

Dharma: The people of Palestine and West Papua, they have been suffering for more than 50 years from the impositions of the Western Allies. 

Cheryl: The people of Palestine, Free Free Palestine!

Chee Wai: Keep on resisting, keep on boycotting, until Palestine is free! Respect all living things big and small, and the spaces we inhabit. 

REFUGE plays from 31st May to 1st June 2024 at the SOTA Studio Theatre, as part of Singapore International Festival of Arts 2024. Tickets available here

SIFA 2024: They Declare runs from 17th May to 2nd June 2024 across various venues. Tickets and full programme available here