Singaporean blues-rock guitarist Rosli Mansor just released his sophomore instrumental guitar album, and his management scanned the review I published in my newspaper day-job and blogged about it, so I thought I’d link to the scan and blog post here. You can buy Rosli’s album from indie online music store CD Baby. We don’t get a commission here at Sonicfreakz if you buy it; just wanted to give the guy some props.

Nine Inch Nails (NIN) frontman Trent Reznor is saying goodbye to more than just the concert stage with the current NIN Wave Goodbye global tour. He’s also saying goodbye to his online persona he’s nurtured on Twitter, after recently quitting the microblogging service.

But even as he took the stage a few hours ago (Monday night) at Singapore’s Fort Canning Park in an effort to let his music, not his tweets, do the talking, there was no escaping that for many fans at the open-air gig, Reznor remains very much an Internet personality and NIN is clearly still an imitably tech-savvy band.

iPhone-toting concert goers chatted with each using the band’s NIN: Access mobile app, and NIN photographer/designer Rob Sheridan photo-blogged to the NIN website from his new iPhone 3GS right from his sweet spot at the foot of the stage. As you can see from his photo on the left, it’s pretty good, and a far cry from the noisy shot below on the right that I snapped on the exact same hardware.

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The Singapore Arts Festival might have wrapped up but just because the two major local festivals are over, it doesn’t mean there isn’t anything else to look forward to in this year’s festival calendar.

This coming week, we’ve got Milestones at the Timbre bar at the Arts House, as well as this year’s Singapore International Piano Festival. Later in the year, the Sun Festival will return although it will be interesting to see how the programmes been affected by the fiasco at IMG Artists, with chairman Barrett Wissman (the man behind the Sun Festival) pleading guilty to securities fraud.

It’s a shame that local rock festival SingFest won’t be returning for a third year despite the ambitious plans originally set out by founder Michael Hosking of Midas Productions but it’s far from the end of the world because Nine Inch Nails is coming on August 10, then Lady Gaga on August 12, followed by Keane right after that on August 13, all three courtesy of LAMC Productions. And Green Horn Productions is bringing Aimee Mann in on August 29. Following the recent trend of every other gig being a Singapore debut, NIN, Keane and Mann will all be performing in this sweltering country for the very first time. While Lady Gaga did a small private concert two weekends ago for the launch of Universal-SingTel’s AMPed music service, her August gig will still technically be her first full-length public concert.

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I must confess that I’ve overdramatized this post’s title but it’s my way of recapping a great week for classical music in Singapore.

On Wednesday, June 10, British pianist Joanna MacGregor played a two-hour set at the Esplanade Concert Hall. And the same venue hosted various combinations of viola virtuoso Yuri Bashmet, his Moscow Soloists string orchestra, and the Moscow State Chamber Choir that very Thursday to Saturday, June  12-14.

I’d like to look at the performing personalities of these musicians – not their artistic or technical calibres but how they behave on stage – and how that affected their relationship with Singaporean audiences, as well as what that could mean for the evolution of audience-artist interaction in general.

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Singapore’s online music market has suffered a major blow just as it was gaining some momentum. As I tweeted yesterday, Motorola is closing down its two online music stores – Soundbuzz and Motomusic – effective July 15. Specifically, it is shuttering its operations for Soundbuzz in Singapore, Indonesia, Australia and India, and winding down Motomusic in Singapore, Vietnam and India. Some customers have already received emails urging them to download their purchases while the sites are still around.

This isn’t exactly a surprise from out of the blue, given Motorola’s dire business woes, but it is a huge disappointment. It’s also a shame since Motorola only bought Soundbuzz last year, which indicated that it intended to make inroads into the online music retail scene.

The irony is that Soundbuzz was the first big online music store to open in Singapore and sell major-label releases. It looks like a first-mover advantage doesn’t count for much when you become a last-mover further on in the game. Motomusic was launched as a parallel store to Soundbuzz, with Motomusic receiving a much stronger marketing push. Both are essentially different facets of the same offering, with only minor variations.

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Nokia’s new flagship N97 smartphone’s already been launched in other parts of the world like China, but it was only just officially launched in Singapore and Malaysia at a the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Kuala Lumpur. The N-series has traditionally aspired to excel at all things multimedia, but here at Musicgoondu we’re primarily interested in whether or not it’s a good music player.

Having fiddled with most aspects of the phone short of plugging in my earphones and trying my own music on it, it’s clear that the N97 makes for a very compelling media player, but is far from the holy grail the specifications make it out to be.

What specifications? 32GB of memory, expandable via microSD card to 48GB. That’s a record-breaking amount of memory for a phone, and storage capacity’s a key consideration when it comes to digital music. There’s also a standard 3.5mm earphone jack, which none of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phones have had till the new W995, and which neither of HTC’s Google phones has. Again, that’s di rigeur for music use. Throw in a 3.5-inch touchscreen that’s as big as the iPhone’s, a physical Qwerty keyboard and a navigational buttons, and it reads on paper like an ideal music player.

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Some of the people who heard jazz singer Richard Jackson perform at Singapore’s Esplanade Concert Hall last weekend (May 29-30) with Jeremy Monteiro, the T’ang Quartet, Randy Brecker, Ernie Watts and Christy Smith probably thought he flew in just for the Arts Festival, just like his fellow Americans Brecker and Watts did.

That couldn’t be further off the mark, however, because Jackson has been based in Singapore for over a year at the Boat Quay branch of Harry’s jazz bar, where bass player Smith is a veteran. His relative obscurity shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise though since in Singapore, more than many other places, familiarity breeds contempt.

Too often, the assumption is that you can’t possibly be all that talented if you had to come all the way to a cultural backwater like Singapore to get a gig; you’re only worth seeing if you deign to set foot here for an occasional performance before returning to New York.

However, that kind of cultural near-sightedness means that we Singaporeans too often miss what’s lurking right under our noses because we’re too busy gazing at Europe and the USA.

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It’s my distinct pleasure to introduce our very first Musicgoondu guest contributor: Shueh-li Ong (the lady on the right in the pic), theremin virtuoso and the Singaporean half of electro-pop duo Xenovibes. The guy on the left is Xenovibes’ other half, percussionist John Martinez.

Shueh-li’s going to be blogging about insider perspectives on the music industry, musicological reflections and general buzz from the United States, where she’s based.

Earlier this month, we gave you readers a pre-release review of Xenovibes’ latest album, Xing Paths, and you can hear more of where Shueh-li’s coming from musically on ReverbNation.

After years of rumours and frustrated anticipation, Sennheiser finally unveiled its new flagship headphones, the HD800, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and it’s launching in Singapore next month.

It took 7 years to create. That’s a pretty long product development cycle, so when the resulting headphones cost double Sennheiser’s previous HD650 flagship model, but still utilise conventional dynamic speaker technology, some eyebrows were understandably raised in scepticism.

On the surface, it seems like Sennheiser just went for a big model number leap (bypassing the previously rumoured HD700 name) and pursued a bigger-is-better approach by chucking in the largest transducers ever used in headphones.

But a closer examination and a hands-on test reveals that there’s more to the HD800 than just marketing hype and bragging rights.

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The inaugural Asian edition of Jack Daniel’s Global Tour kicked off in Singapore tonight at the Hard Rock Cafe, but you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it because I hadn’t either, even after I was invited by the PR people to attend it a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was going to be a Jack Daniel’s whisky-tasting event, with some music as ancillary entertainment.

Imagine my surprise then when I walked into the private room at the Hard Cafe tonight and found it packed with journalists from The Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, all eager to find out more about Jack Daniel’s first Global Music Event in Asia.

That’s right, Jack Daniel’s Global Tour is a mini music festival, and the first of its kind to be held outside the USA. That makes two overlapping music festivals in Singapore at the same time. The difference is that while Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Festival was properly marketed and made a distinct effort to include local talent, Jack Daniel’s seems to have pulled in talent from everywhere except Singapore.

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