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The Changcuters ready to rock the land of the rising sun
Kapanlagi
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Kapanlagi.com
It is not often that an Indonesian band receives an invitation to perform live at an international music festival with world-class artists.
Therefore, when Bandung-based rock and roll band The Changcuters received an invitation back in April to perform at the annual Summer Sonic Festival in Japan on Aug. 15, the band members did not need long to make up their minds and decided to take up the opportunity.
The Changcuters vocalist Tria said that he ' along with his band mates Qibil and Alda (guitar), Dipa (bass) and Erick (drums) ' initially had no plans to perform at a music festival this year as they were busy working on their new album.
However, when a Japanese man offered them a chance to send an application for selection to perform in the festival, Tria said that the band decided to give it a go just for fun.
'This Japanese guy, we did not know him too well, came to one of our performances earlier this year and he told us he liked what he saw and suggested we apply for the Summer Sonic festival by giving him our portfolio and profile,' Tria said.
'So yeah, we thought that we had nothing to lose anyway and thus we applied for the festival through him [...] It seemed that this Japanese guy knew some people who ran the festival and as it turned out, we received the email saying that we had been selected and invited to perform.'
The festival will be held in Osaka and Chiba. Since its inception in 2000, the festival has featured some of the world's best performers, such as Coldplay, Guns N Roses, Green Day and Blink 182. The line-up also features Japanese musicians and international acts from both major record companies and independent labels.
For this year's festival, The Changcuters will have the honor of sharing the same stage as British electronic dance music duo The Chemical Brothers, and the Manic Street Preachers, a legendary alternative rock band from Wales.
The Changcuters will become only the second Indonesian band to perform at Summer Sonic Festival after Pee Wee Gaskins in 2012.
Tria said the band had no particular goal and had made no special preparations for their debut performance at Summer Sonic. From around 70,000 visitors, The Changcuters aim to garner only
1 percent of them to come and watch their performance.
Despite the low target, Tria said they would do what they do best and that was to have a lot of fun on stage.
'We realize we are relatively unknown to the Japanese music fans who will attend the festival. Therefore, our goal during our performance is to simply introduce who The Changcuters are and the music,' Tria said.
'Even if only a few people watch us, if we give them our best, they might learn that Indonesia has a potential rock culture and they might even share or review our performance on social media. This could create a viral effect to boost us in the future.'
The Changcuters have been considered one of the Indonesian bands offering a unique sound, which captures the attention of music lovers with their funky rock-and-roll tones.
The band defines its style in more complex terms, as a mixture of new rock, funk, punk revival, indie pop, jazz and blues. This unique mix of sounds is complemented by humorous lyrics that appeal to both the old and the young.
The Changcuters actually performed in Japan at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo back in 2011. They were invited by the Indonesian Embassy to perform for Indonesian expatriates living in Japan.
In the band's previous performance in Japan, the audience members were mostly Indonesians who could understand their lyrics but this time, the situation will be totally different. Despite this, Tria said the band's members had decided to maintain their lyrics in Indonesian.
'The usage of Indonesian will definitely make our performance stand out. The Japanese fans might find it unique even if they do not understand a single word. We are going to entertain them with our music and on-stage performance and if they find it interesting, who knows, they might even decide to learn Indonesian,' Tria said.
'Man, I will even greet them in Sundanese during our opening,' he added, referring to the local language commonly spoken in Bandung, West Java.
Tria also said the band would only prepare between six and eight songs for the set. 'We will only have 30 minutes to perform. We have chosen all the hit songs from our previous albums. The performance, after all, will be an introduction so it will be fitting for us to bring the best of our work to introduce ourselves,' Tria said.
In terms of appearance, Qibil said the band members would maintain their usual comical gimmick by wearing neat long-sleeved shirts or suits teamed with stretch pants to turn heads along with their old-school hairdos during their performance at the festival.
'We might not wear suits with colors that absorb heat because it is summer in Japan but conceptually, we will bring our usual gimmicks to introduce ourselves to the audience there,' Qibil said.
The band members also plan that once they finish their performance at the Summer Sonic Festival, they will not hesitate to have fun as music fans as well.
'We want to watch all of the other artists who perform there,' Tria said. 'One of our main goals is also to wander around backstage and we might take a lot of selfies with those world class artists.'
