Deathrockstar.info

It all started in early July 2007, when we were just hanging out at their HQ, the God.Incoporated complex, when Otong, the band’s notorious sinister mastermind, suddenly said something that he knew we would gladly agreed to; “By the way, we have finished the recording for our new record, we’re gonna let you upload and distribute it. For free.”

Here at DRS, we’ve been campaigning and calling out local bands within out reach to distribute their songs for free, and with or without certain subjectivities, Koil had always been one of our favorite local band, and we see eye to eye, for like, eons.

At the time I didn’t take his words too seriously, because personally I’ve given up all hope on their next album coming out anytime soon. It’s been too long. And god knows how much longer it would take. Their latest single at the time, “Breathe With Me”, doesn’t sound like anything they would’ve prepared for a full-length album, basically an EDM track, containing mixes of some recording scrapes that they’ve piled up for some time. And rumor has it; they scrape most of the recording sessions they took since 2004. “I always wanted to fool everybody to think that we weren’t ready yet while we actually have, you know, catch them off guard,” he said in a hair-treatment session we took together a couple of months ago.

“We’re gonna shake this nation’s music industry upside down. Just wait and watch.” He then showed the cover artwork, picturing a man’s torso (Bobby, the band’s guitarist) holding a Flying-V guitar, with a slight view of the boxer underneath his pants labeled God.Incorporated. I was laughing my ass off at the utmost un-subtle advertising. “We’re still looking out for the female counterpart, do you have someone up for it?”

At the time I was going through an drug-like-induced-idea-high, since I was rooting for NIN’s Year Zero stunt on the online ARG (Alternate Reality Game) marketing, they went as far as “leaking” hi-quality songs on their new album. Together, we then kept on bouncing ideas on each other for some time; some of it came to fruition and have been proven very exciting, while some are still on top-secret confidentiality. DRS had always been kept in the inner circle. I was proud for what we’ve done, it was a history in the making, locally at least, and we even did it before Radiohead’s In Rainbows. “You know, I actually had been planning on this since a couple of years ago, before all the NIN stuff, but the technology and the people here weren’t ready yet.”

He sent me the files a couple of days later. “Please don’t write any review on your part, and don’t tell anyone that you had all the songs until the appropriate time.” I didn’t quite fully understand what he meant at the time, but turns out to save us a great amount of energy not to be chased around by the people around us asking for the copy. Some weren’t quite as lucky, while they didn’t actually had the songs, people think they did and kept on bugging them like a bunch of paparazzo’s.

The first song, Kenyataan Dalam Dunia Fantasi (Reality in the Fantasy World), posted on 18th July 2007 and six months later it has been downloaded for over than 5000 times, just from our site alone. The initial agreement was for only for 3 songs out of 6 they’ve prepared, then it grew and became all of it, and then three more after they’ve expanded the planned maxi-single (initially titled, “Hanya Tinggal Kita Berdua” (Only the Two of Us Left)) into the 9-song Blacklight Shines On full album.

I’d been invited to hear the final mix of the additional songs in early August 2007, and was totally ecstatic upon hearing it. They had totally given their trust to us for distributing their full album online. “We knew that you guys had the resources and had no catch or whatever doing so.” We have been bragging about our enormously silly volume for storage and bandwidth at him for a while back then. “I had actually approached others, so people could have some fun at hunting the songs from several different websites, but some actually wanted US to PAY to put our songs on THEIR site for FREE.”

* Koil will perform their first Jakarta gig after the Blacklight album, this Wednesday, 14th of May at Hard Rock Café, alongside Zeke and the Popo and Ronaldisko