Street Roar Festival
to add a comment e-mail:  lemang@tm.net.my

I went to the Street Roar Festival at KL PAC, and it was AWESOME particularly since there was this mix of intellectual and visceral alternative undergound sounds from a whole bunch of East Asia countries.  And the sound was amazingly good, courtesy of one Eric Wong (don't forget that name if you want to put on a festival, guys).  The stand-out acts were Nao from Malaysia, LadyBug from Taiwan, Observatory from Singapore and the super-band of the night, Subs from - yes - Beijing, with a girl singer - a veritable tigress who could outclaw and out-roar all the guys.   Congrats to Mark from Soundscape records who was the main guy behind the festival...Wow!

But where were the effing PEOPLE?  It was free - I mean FREE for ****'s sake.  How is it that the Chinese don't support real fringe music in this country.  I mean you import a couple of tired Canto-pop acts from Hong Kong and the STADIUM IS FULL of PAYING PUNTERS!   Then there's Rock the World 6 which attracted more than 10,000 fellas and girls nearly all Malay AND they were paying RM25 per ticket AND all the acts were local.  And then there's PETER PAN who are ok but nothing special or distinctive (well, that's just my opinion) and they get 30,000 into the Stadium Negara.  Yet here was a festival where there were International bands who introduced their songs in Chinese, and yet only gleaned a miserable 1K audience (in which there were a large number of other races).   And it wasn't even Black Metal.   it's so depressing...

More to the point - can someone explain why this is - there must be some sophisticated sociological explanation.

Well don't give up guys, keep it up.  There's so many fine bands out there which we don't know about that we'd love to hear