Fauxe Turned Eight Months in Kuala Lumpur Into Singapore's Most Inventive Fusion Record
Singaporean producer Fauxe spent eight months in Kuala Lumpur building Ikhlas, a sample-built record stitched from old Malay film songs, Tamil pop and Hokkien radio clips. It deserved more attention than it got.
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The Singaporean producer Fauxe spent eight months living in Kuala Lumpur, trawling Hokkien songs, Tamil music and film dialogue on YouTube for material. He came home with Ikhlas, sixteen tracks that twist from hip-hop into electronic bounce and the occasional touch of disco. He put it out on Chinabot. It remains one of the more inventive records to come out of Southeast Asia's underground that decade.
Ikhlas is Malay for sincerity, and the record earns the word the hard way. Fauxe didn't write melodies so much as go looking for them. Every sample came from YouTube. It's the same corner of the internet a bored teenager goes digging through for old karaoke videos.
A Breakup Between Two Countries
The record carries a heavier subtext than its loose, funk-indebted breakbeats let on. Singapore split from Malaysia in 1965, and Ikhlas plays like an attempt to patch that back together one sample at a time, tracing a rural-to-urban migration story that treats old, unfashionable music as something worth taking seriously rather than mining for a punchline. Fauxe put it more plainly than most press releases bother to: "Right now it feels like we have always been one. I hope the music brings about a certain understanding." He didn't make the record alone, either. Malaysian rappers Airliftz, MC Syze and Reddi Rocket also worked on the record, alongside samples from Malaysian Tamil and Hawaiian Malay music.
Fauxe took the album on the road that summer, playing Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Jakarta within about ten days of each other.
From Sampling to a Community Band
Fauxe didn't repeat himself. By the end of 2019 he'd released Altruism: The Beginning, a sprawling 21-track turn toward live instrumentation that traded the sample-based approach of Ikhlas for an actual band: a rotating cast of collaborators including Afiq, Dani, Harv, Leon, Zasha and a dozen others, credited less like session players and more like family. "This is the beginning," he wrote on Bandcamp. He meant it literally. Fauxe calls ALTRUISM a three-part series in his own words.
That Fono session is worth hunting down on its own. What it captures has a looseness that Ikhlas, for all its warmth, never allowed itself.
Catch Up With the Catalog
Fauxe's catalog includes a 2020 appearance for Sing Lit Sounds. It was billed as a Singaporean literature-themed online disco. Whatever he does next, the catalog already sitting on Bandcamp is worth the detour: Ikhlas for anyone who wants to hear a national divorce turned into something generous, Altruism for anyone curious what a Singaporean beatmaker sounds like once he puts the laptop down and lets a room full of friends finish the sentence. Both are still up, pay-what-you-want.
For more on the scene Fauxe came out of, see Loopliner's guide to Singapore's electronic music underground.
