Singapore Writers Festival Book launch:

 INDONESIA AND NOT: POEMS AND OTHERWISE: Anecdotes Scattered

Author: Max Lane

This is a collection of poetry, prose pieces and short stories inspired by the experiences of Max Lane, translator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet and collaborator with other Indonesian and Southeast Asian intellectuals and actors in Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines.

The book launch will comprise:

An IN CONVERSATION session with author Max Lane. Lane will talk about his 45 years of experience with Indonesia and Southeast Asian and its relationship to this collection as well as his work on a major creative non-fiction book on the origins and meaning for Indonesia of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind Buru Quartet novels.

But there is also a second Max Lane, a Singaporean, a musician. He has written music to some of the poetry. There will be some playing of these musicalized poems. (see below for more info).

 Bunyian Sajak (Sounds of Poetry) with Safuan Johari (Max Lane, musician).

 Bunyian Sajak (Sounds of Poetry) is a body of work where the world of prose and poetry, written and read by one Max Lane, meets the musical realm composed and produced by another Max Lane. Coming from different locations and generations, the two collaborators share a common muse, the Malay Archipelago. This on-going project welds their individual and personal impression of the region in a collection of aural vignettes selected from the texts found in INDONESIA AND NOT: POEMS AND OTHERWISE.

For this session, Safuan will share the musicalisation process on how he creates the auditory impressions based on Lane’s texts.

 About Safuan Johari

 After years of meddling in electronic music and without any formal education in the practice, Safuan Johari has went on to establish himself as a sound-designer, music producer and performer. Better known as Max Lane, a pseudonym he christened himself with for his production in the electronic realm. The moniker pays homage to Australian writer and academic who translated the masterpiece The Buru Quartet by Javanese literary great, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. In 2009, after a three-year hiatus from music, Safuan felt inspiration strike and produced ‘Purnama’ – a haunting track that combined elements of traditional Malay music with electronic elements. ‘Purnama’ reached producer Jace Clayton, who played it live on a New York/New Jersey-based radio station WFMU just a few days later. His works as Max Lane have been released on music labels from the United States and Belgium.

As a sound-designer, Safuan has worked on various visual multimedia art installations, from projection mapping pieces to designing the sonic surroundings of virtual reality environments. This includes a range of commissioned projects for the People Association, Hewlett-Packard, Beijing Fashion Week, National Museum of Singapore and many more. The performer in Safuan has graced the stages in United Kingdom, United States, France, China, Indonesia & Malaysia. Safuan is also the founding member of audio-visual collective, Syndicate, and is the label manager who oversees the digital releases and distribution for the collective’s music catalogue.