Mazzy Star
I first came across Mazzy Star featured in an after hours CD mixed by Faithless and, for a while, that electronic association made sense in my head; as a psychedelic rock group with shoegaze influences, it presents an aesthetic that is dreamy and hypnotic, where the voice is more powerful than the lyric. Their performance on Friday night likewise played across a variety of styles: new song “lay myself down” had a country twang to it, while in tracks like the closing “so tonight that I might see” there was an interplay between the guitar distortions and Hope Sandoval’s spoken-word delivery—a cooing whisper that is as suggestive as it is melancholic, blending in with the unexpectedly cold desert air. I came to hear “Fade into You”. But I left with so much more.

Swedish House Mafia/Alesso/David Guetta
I’ve decided to clump these 3 artists into the same paragraph because, you guessed it, they individually deserve about two lines each. SHM dazzled the main stage; Alesso played Levels because he wanted people to still care about him in 6 months time; Guetta yakked and yakked and brought forth Usher from the darkness (although this time he was mixing a lot more than the last time I saw him, but I think it’s because will.i.am wasn’t around to constantly interrupt his set with his awesomeness). It’s becoming a bit of a festival mainstay for “DJs” like these to bring in the crowd. But, alas, it’s the kind of crowd that isn’t even slightly bothered by the fact that they are watching 3 guys doing what iTunes can probably do in hibernation mode.

M83
While M83 has never captured the indie world’s attention as much as with their current album, it pains me that the days of the band’s wall-of-sound electronic shoegaze are in danger of being forever lost. When they played at Coachella on Friday night, their most recent single was “Reunion,” a song with pop hooks and a “woah-woah-woah” sing-along chorus. Even as Anthony Gonzalez continues to pen songs about childhood and teenage angst, I have come to accept that the M83 I know from my musical upbringing is best appreciated in retrospect. It is perhaps fitting, then, that my biggest gripe with M83’s performance was the disturbingly low volume and the unbalanced sound mixing; they are the symptoms of a band that has grown way too big for the side stage.

Amon Tobin
The best visual equivalent I can give you that represents my 20 minute listening experience at Amon Tobin’s ISAM show is a piece of glass breaking. And then congealing back together before being smashed and pulped again in an endless process. Not that you need visual accompaniment to get your mind blown at an Amon Tobin show. But in case you’re a very resistant sort, Amon Tobin actually provides you with a full audiovisual concept: interlocking splashes of colour on three dimensional blocks of screens that are stacked like children’s playthings on the stage. It has the appropriate level of abstractness for his style: cold and metallic and electronic and alien but, somehow, also organic. Amon Tobin’s an engineer, an architect, and a visual artist, and his ISAM show is a sci-fi journey and an intimate exploration of sound.

Feist
Leslie Feist told us on Saturday night that Feist is a “music performance group.” And she wasn’t kidding. There was a drummer and a bassist, a trio of backsup singers who were dressed like the chorus of a Greek play, a brass section, a string ensemble that included a double bass, a guy wearing a fedora switching between an upright piano and a keyboard, and some guy in the middle who was fiddling knobs. All of whom were supporting the indie pop phenomenon that is Feist. Which is totally cool. Because apart from filling up this review with the band set-up there really isn’t much for me to say about Feist. She plays pleasurable pop that is cute and endearing and makes you wanna hug her. If I were living in a parallel universe where I live in a cottage with a smoking chimney and I do the gardening and I cook with wooden utensils, Feist would constantly be playing in the background.

St. Vincent
There is a certain formula to St. Vincent songs. Militaristic drum work, screeching guitars, and pedal combinations that beg you to listen. These elements are pieced together by the versatility of Annie Clark’s voice, which can sound like a precocious girl pleading or like a Woolfian character speaking in streams… sometimes at the same time. And then you get to see her aggressive side in songs like the new “Krokodil,” an art-punk frenzy where the disparity between Clarke’s petite demeanor and her audacious rock aesthetic is most apparent. No matter what kind of songs St. Vincent plays, Clark never lets the guitars or the drums overwhelm her. This is a singer who clearly knows how her songwriting and her band complement her voice. And this is also a performer who knows how to rock the crowdsurf.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Whatever you have heard about Godspeed’s live performances is true: they really are the archetypal post-rock band that every other post-rock band is compared to. The lead guitarist sits on a chair facing the drummer, and they play long sessions of guitar distortions with no sign of hurriedness, even when that deliberateness is often the source of tension. Their simplistic visuals on the screen are repetitions of the same few motifs: de-saturated images of news articles, shadows of trees rustling in the wind, white and black halves, and possibly the moon. Which are all great objects to look at during a post-rock concert because the music is almost like a blank canvas and your mind never stops moving around and grasping for external stimuli to digest. I think I must have conjured up a whole personal history of loss and childlike contentedness while I was watching Godspeed, but I now can’t quite recall the details.

SBTRKT
It’s still a bit early to tell if the dubstep-pop crossover formula is working. Across the highly fragmented dub landscape, you have female nu-rnb vocalist Katy B, dubstep beat makers Baths/Shlohmo/Starslinger, and the one and only James Blake who, for better or worse, deserves his own paragraph. For the most part, these artists have been successful because their blending of styles syncs traits cohesively. Seeing SBTRKT at the Gobi stage, however, it sounded like I was listening to a combination of musical elements that doesn’t know quite what to do with itself.. Sisay Sampha’s vocals embodied a decidedly RnB/soulful house feel, but it felt like the party only got started when he got off the stage, when tracks like Ready Set Loop and Rundown relied only on the atmosphere of grimy bassline loops to feed their energy. SBTRKT might have broken into indie circles with Sampha, but I can’t help but think that he should really just ditch him in favour of a purer aesthetic. There’s no doubt that SBTRKT has a clear vision of what he wants to do with his music. I just wish he would change his mind.

Radiohead
Everyone has their own personal story about Radiohead. Whether they prefer Kid A or OK Computer. How much they paid for In Rainbows. So when Radiohead graced the main stage on Saturday night, everyone probably had their own unique response to the performance. Opening with the rhythmic pulse of Bloom, they moved on to the quirky 15 Step and Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, which really sounds like a lullaby for neurotics. New song Identikit seems to have originated from the same primordial ancestors as TKOL’s Feral. I managed to get nearer to the stage during Lotus Flower, whose wraithlike sound effect at the start made the gigantic stage feel like the bow of a hollow ghost ship. They then finished with an encore that included Everything in its Right Place, which built up around a pulse that intensified and then slowly petered out as Thom Yorke was left remaining on stage. Part of the reason Yorke and Co. are able to command such a captivating cultish presence, making thousands of people in the desert stand still, is that everyone comes into the show firmly believing in their personal relationship with Radiohead.

Observations by Jared D.

Jared regrets to inform you that because of prior commitments to a bird-watching competition in Arizona, he was unable to stay for the third day of Coachella, and is thus unable to give you any first-hand account of the Tupac hologram – Ed.

The official Coachella 2012 website is here.
You can check out setlists for Coachella here.

My mother, a true devotee of the holy bread, imparted this love of all things crusty in me since I could hold a bread knife. “Pre-sliced grocery bread? I think not!” she would sniff as she sawed away lovingly at some multi-grained monstrosity of a loaf. There was nothing for me to do but the pleasant activity of nibbling on the seeds that had dislodged from the crust.

This is what comfort food means to me: familiarity, homeyness and contentment. And because my idea of familiarity was so tempered by my mother, I wondered if people on the other side of the globe had radically different notions of familiarity and homeyness that were shaped by their various cultures and cuisines.

So I posed a very simple question to friends and friends of friends around the world. Here are a few of the responses:

What surprised me was the uniformity of responses. Essentially, I was hearing this:

My bread-loving mother would approve.

People here like to enjoy themselves, take time and – most of all – eat (and drink!). Although Milan is the busy financial and fashion capital, you can feel the dolce vita here too.

Food is everywhere and each region has about 1000 different recipes depending on the season or holiday. I combined several recipes and came up with this super easy one for amaretti, sweet little almond cookies that Italians eat together with their caffe or with a glass of Asti Spumante.

For about 40 amaretti

200g sugar
200g almond flour (or powder)
3 egg whites
1 tsp almond extract
Zest of 1 organic lemon
Powder sugar to dust

Pre-heat the oven to 150C (300F). Combine all the ingredients for about 2 minutes in the food processor until smooth. Using a teaspoon, place well-rounded spoonfuls of dough onto prepared baking sheets (cookies should be about 5cm apart). Bake in pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes until cookies are golden. Allow to cool completely on the paper before removing. Sprinkle with powder sugar and store in a dry place.

Check out simple & chic for other recipes and fashion-, food- and travel-related posts.

Thanks

Can anyone recommend a (comparatively) cheap hostel/hotel downtown to stay in summer? I’m looking for something that is not over populated with typical tourists like party kids or Hawaiian shirt wearers…

Many thanks in advance!

Christin

FRIDAY

Martin Solveig
Martin Solveig’s ubiquitous presence at dance music festivals in the past year owes much to his pop cross-over single “Hello.” Never mind that he used to play a semi-interesting genre of house that bordered on soul and funk; Solveig is only concerned now about playing (and not so much mixing) tracks that the Spring Break crowd laps up. Some choice cuts: an unnecessary dose of Daft Punk, a rework of Smells like Teen Spirit, and the original mix of Wonderwall in one of his breakdowns. It was the only time that weekend when I was annoyed that the line at the beer stand was so long.

New Order
The crowd at New Order’s sunset show was probably the only one over the three days where the median age was past 25. Which makes me wonder whether these people in the audience came to Ultra just to see New Order, who has threatened to disband multiple times in recent years following the departure of Peter Hook and the formation of new sub-band Bad Lieutenant. The sound balance of their set had a somewhat muffled quality, due in part to Bernard Summer’s voice being overwhelmed by the synthesizers and the acoustics of the live stage. But since New Order also sounds like that on record, it might as well have been intentional. Like any band with a 20+ year history and a 40 minute slot, they mainly played signature tracks: Bizarre Love Triangle and True Faith back to back gave me massive goosebumps. I think I would have paid $300 just to see New Order.

Loco Dice
Loco Dice throws it down at the Carl Cox-curated stage, which is probably the only place in Miami you will not hear Levels. As an avid listener of techno, I wanted to stay at this stage the whole day, what with Dubfire playing earlier in the afternoon and Hawtin following Loco Dice. At an American music festival dominated by billboard- and beatport-charting artists, techno occupies an ambiguous, secondary place: not as popular as Dutch house but better known than Drum n Bass, worshipped by genre nerds the same way tranceheads flock the ASOT stage, and functioning via a we-play-what-we-want mentality. Too bad I had four other stages to explore.

Kraftwerk
Whoever did the booking for Ultra really needs a pat on the back for bringing in Kraftwerk. The electronic pioneers are billed as co-headliners, next to Tiesto’s name on the lineup poster. But really, is there any comparison? As per usual, the set-up had the 4 members spaced evenly from one another, each with custom-made synthesizer stands and robotic skin suits. 3 of those are either bald or close to bald; the last, 32 year old Stefan Pfaffe, joined Kraftwerk following the departure of founding member Floridan Schneider in 2008. Playing each track separately and utilizing stunning visuals (black and white photos of cyclists for Tour de France, yellow and red radioactive icons for Radioactivity) Kraftwerk reworks their album cuts in modern takes. While nothing beats listening to Trans Europe Express on record for the first time, all of these tracks, especially Computer Love and Music Non Stop, sound massive and fired up live.

Groove Armada
The last time I saw Groove Armada at a festival was Electric Daisy Carnival in 2010. Back then, they played a DJ set mainly comprised of hits off their recent Black Light album. Even if said album was fundamentally 80’s-inspired electro-pop, their style at EDC can be described as a mixture of tribal and minimal. Their formula hasn’t changed for their set at Ultra. Except for a vocal hint of “I see you baby,” their mixing style is a constant dark, minimal-infused house. Oh, and apparently these guys like to play in complete darkness.

Tiesto
I still consider it a personal tragedy that I only managed to see Tiesto when he had already stopped playing trance. Tiesto has taken his brand further this year with his college tour series and his Club Life concept. But unlike other crowdpleasers like Avicii and Guetta, Tiesto hasn’t been producing much since 2009’s Kaleidoscope (apart from his Allure side project, which has nothing to do with the Tiesto brand). So between his headlining set at Ultra last year and this year, one can’t expect anything other than Tiesto to play other producers’ Dutch house. For better or worse, no one in the crowd really cares what Tiesto plays anymore. And neither should I.

SATURDAY

Laidback Luke, Duck Sauce
Full disclosure: I wasn’t actually there for either of these late afternoon sets. I was still in my hotel room relaxing after a morning at South Beach. However said hotel, the Intercontinental, is right next to Bayfront Park, so I did get to hear their sets through glass. Advice for future Ultra attendees: book your hotel early. Or else you’ll be looking at either far-flung hotels, or decent hotels at annoying prices. And if you stay at South Beach without a car, have fun getting back to your hotel after Ultra ends. But I digress. Yes, Duck Sauce. I wasn’t sure if I heard Barbra Streisand. But if I did I would probably be glad I’m not listening to it at 100 decibels.

Fatboy Slim
I suppose if I had paid a little bit of attention, I could have told you exactly what Cook was doing with his mixer. Or what kind of sound effects he was playing with. Or which of his leftovers hits from the 90’s he played. But I was too distracted by the throng of half-naked Australian men shuffling at the back of the main stage. They were far more interesting.

Andy C
I was dumb/smart enough to catch only one set at the Drum n Bass/Dubstep Ibiza Stage, and that was Andy C. He laid down some frenetic DnB as well as some dubstep crossovers. All in all an evenly-paced mixture of the faster side of the bass music spectrum and a nice alternative to the 4/4 that dominates the rest of the festival. (And no, I’m not considering Skrillex an option). Somehow though, it felt like Andy’s style caters more to a dubstep fan with DnB tendencies rather than a DnB fan who listens to dubstep on the side. My favourite thing about Andy’s set? The crowd. I love DnB crowds.

DJ Shadow
Okay I lied. The best drum n bass set I heard this weekend was at the live stage, with DJ Shadow. Maybe it’s because I’m unfamiliar with his productions post Entroducing….., but I certainly wasn’t expecting the kind of samples and sounds he integrated into his live show, which was perfect for the amphitheater stage. Some pianos here, a vocal sample there, and an interesting range of wonky basslines to top it off. It’s the kind of performance in which I couldn’t decide if I wanted to sit down and listen to what Davis is doing, or to get up and dance. “Organ Donor” as closing track? Hell yes.

Justice
The nice thing about Justice’s performance on Saturday night is that their live show doesn’t depend the strength of their 2007 debut +. Tracks like Civilization and Audio Video Disco work as well as reliable favourites D.A.N.C.E and their remix of We Are Your Friends. And even if they still are the poster children of the now 5/6-year old electro/electroclash movement, there is a sense of restraint and control over their live act. Electro for the discerning listener. Good job Justice. You’re still relevant.

Avicii
Here are a few reasons why I like Avicii: he’s only 22 years old, so he gets points for achieving headliner status so early in his career. He plays a melodic variation of Dutch house and has not been tempted to produce music with ELECTRO synths or farting noises (yes SHM that’s you). The guy seems really interested in getting the crowd going. And even if he did get introduced by Madonna for Saturday’s closing set at the main stage, it didn’t feel overly gestural or insincere. After ending his set with a 10-minute long version of Levels, complete with fireworks over downtown Miami, I didn’t care that I was listening to a playlist. As a festival DJ, Avicii is perfect

The official Ultra site is here.
Check out the setlists here.

By Jared D.

Ed note: Jared doesn’t go for the last day of music festivals. It’s a thing.

It’s a world of hidden doorways, palpable intrigue, artisanal libations and their enthused imbibers. It’s a world, you think as you enter the establishment, of coolness. The regular drinks even taste better; there’s nothing quite as sweet as the thrill of a secret on your tongue.

Then it’s time to stumble back out into the Real World. Your friend exhorts you to “keep it quiet” so that “not too many people will know about it”. You readily agree, but already your inebriated mind is going through your list of friends, figuring out whose response of disbelief would be the most satisfying. Take, for example, the New York bar PDT, which stands for Please Don’t Tell. The name itself already entices you to Please Do Tell.

Let’s take a step back for a brief history on the speakeasy. In 1920, the United States government enforced what was known as the Volstead Act, a ban on the sale, distribution and manufacture (though, oddly, not the consumption) of alcohol. The ban lasted for 13 years. During this period, the number of illegal bars mushroomed almost overnight. In New York alone, there was an estimated 80,000 bars that sold alcohol illegally.

In order to prevent the law enforcement officials from clamping down on their establishments, the owners would tell their clientele to “speak easy” when they got too rowdy. They also devised ingenious ways to hide the location of their bars. Book cases that swung open, stairways in the back of closets and kitchens… these modes of entry became an enduring image of what the original speakeasies were like.

These creative portals might be the only things that survived the years to be implemented in modern speakeasies. Like the Harry-Potter-esque entrance to PDT. You enter a hot dog shop, go into the phone booth on the left and announce your arrival into the receiver. And then, space or reservations pending, the back of the phone booth opens and you are ushered into the muffled confines of the bar.

A utilities closet-like door in a Japanese restaurant opens to Angel’s Share. Photos by Ian Seah.

Far from the vile homebrews, watered-down liquors and bootlegged alcohol one found in traditional speakeasies, these modern takes on them invariably offer a more bespoke cocktail experience. A vast selection of tipple – including unpronounceable, exotic liquors – and utterly fresh or homecrafted ingredients seem to be the norm. Some places even eschew a menu altogether; in New York’s Milk and Honey, you are expected to trust the mixologist to craft a cocktail for you based on your choice of alcohol and flavour profile.

Mixologist. As I type “mixologist”, Microsoft Word puts the angry red line of illegitimacy below it. What ever happened to the honest-to-goodness bartender who would, you know, tend the bar? The one who was just happy to serve his beleaguered working-class patrons a simple drink? He has been replaced by a sharply-dressed specialist who will even chip a block of ice down to just the right size to fit your glass.

The modern speakeasy is only that in name. It’s fully licensed and, if the prices are anything to go by, definitely not for the lower-middle class. Its clandestine nature is nothing more than a marketing strategy and a very effective gimmick of authenticity.

As they sit there, ensconced in a haze of alcohol, mellow leather tones and quirky house rules, patrons feel like they are in the know. That they have figured out the inner workings of the city. A far cry from the overpopulation of loud, brash, crass, overly-packed bars and nightlife venues, here is a place that finally feels real.

The modern speakeasy relies on people’s need to feel exclusive and unique. The hoops one has to jump through to secure a reservation (check out PDT’s singularly unhelpful website), or even find the place, rather than frustrating, more often than not adds to the experience. There is a fine line they walk on how much publicity is welcome. Please Do Tell, they seem to be saying, but whisper, don’t shout.

Down the steps into this unassuming hotdog joint is an ancient phonebooth that opens into PDT. Photos by Ian Seah.

When a tourist goes into a speakeasy, he automatically feels like he’s in the know. This is the underbelly of the city, he thinks, patronised only by people with enough social traction to suss out the hidden and obscure. Going to speakeasies is the shortcut to feeling like a local. Like a Catholic confessional, partake of whatever ridiculous activities you want, then attend the speakeasy – contrite and remorseful – and be forgiven your touristy sins.

The truth is, when you sneer at those loud, brash, crass, overly-packed bars and nightlife venues, all you are doing is denying yourself a greater experience of what is “real”. The club with the cluster of people at the front dressed up to get down, the dive bar with the TV turned to some music channel with patrons looking for nothing but an after-work beer. These are the nighttime locales of the everyman.

Perhaps what stops the tourist from taking these as authentic experiences is the fear that it’s too much like home. That guy slumped over his beer bottle could have been someone you know in any bar in your own city. Why travel across the globe to find out that they are not quite so different than us after all?

But isn’t that the goal of being a true globalised local? Celebrating the diversity of the world’s cultures while embracing the commonality of the human experience? While abroad, we need to anchor all our interactions with the underlying acknowledgment of the other’s humanity, regardless of how alien.

So the next time you find yourself in a “hidden” bar, remember to take it for what it is: well-crafted drinks in an environment that hints at a bygone era, where reality fades into a sepia of wistful memory and iconography. And nothing more.

Yuck
Distinctively 90s vibe, beautiful guitar tone and riffage.
Dare I say that Yuck’s performance would be the next closest thing to seeing Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth play again in Singapore (like that would happen but hey never say never).

Chairlift
Caroline Polachek’s Laneway outfit was to die for. A breezy nude coloured floor length top with a slit up front revealing a tiny pair of shorts. Wowsa.

Austra
The girls from Austra are insane. They had these crazy “Mother Earth”-type hand movements and the most “out there” outfits channeling some sort of mad Gaia vibe.

Girls
The band’s frontman Christopher Owens opened the set with a solo tribute to Whitney Houston. He belted out “I Will Always Love You” in his signature croaky, deeply affected style. Rumour has it that he was spotted backstage shedding a tear or two as he mourned the loss of Whitney Houston. Apart from that, the stage set-up included bunches of fresh daisies and sunflowers which the band threw to the audience at the end of the set.

The Drums
Lead singer Jonathan Pierce dances like an eerily happy Ian Curtis. Nuff said. Seemed all the Butter Factory children were lapping up their performance enthusiastically. Not surprising seeing that this is their 2nd visit to our shores.

Anna Calvi
This woman is mad. Either that or she is incredibly angry. Or she feels strongly about too many things. She had some major distortion going on and was channelling some sort of Spanish matador-esque vibe. Brian Eno touted her as “the next best thing since Patti Smith”. Though she’s great, I don’t think she lives up to that statement. Patti Smith is a poet. Anna Calvi is an extremely talented musician who has a very raw, unique sound and happens to look like Kylie Minogue from some angles. She’s no Patti.

Twin Shadow
George Lewis Jr seems to have a fetish for headgear. I’ve seen him in some weird furry thing before…at Laneway he spotted an almost Amish looking hat. Other than that, he was fucking brilliant. Oh and I think mid-way through the set, he took one of his spare guitars and gifted it to the audience. It was a shitty old Squier Stratocaster (in Tobacco Sunburst) anyways but still, pretty cool move.

Laura Marling
Could tell that her setup was really intensive. A double bass, a whole selection of banjos etc.
I went out to the loo so erm can’t say much cept she’s folksy.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
By this time, the sound issues at the left stage had escalated to the point that The Pains of Being Pure At Heart had to stop midway through their first song to twiddle round with the mixers and soundboard. Lotsa feedback and running around ensued before they could get back up and running.

Toro Y Moi
What’s up with ending every song so abruptly? Guess that’s his style. Refreshing set channeling soul and funk undertones after all that alternative indie rock guitar roaring.

Feist
Interesting band of backup singers. She said to the audience, “Singapore, you may be wondering why we haven’t made it here in 6 years” and proceeded to launch into “How Come You Never Go There”…

The Horrors
Lead singer Faris Badwan is a dead ringer for The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft. Other than that, some commented that their set was a tad too self-indulgent but who cares, they are not called “The Horrors” for nothing. One of the darker sets of the night for sure. They played songs from both “Primary Colours” and “Skying”.

M83
Epic sound that’s unique to M83 since back in the day. I think I most definitely prefer M83 live. Anthony Gonzalez was extremely grateful to the crowd, thanking everyone profusely and constantly throughout his set and you could tell he was feeding off everyone’s energy. The keyboardist is an insane woman, hitting the synths, cymbals, jumping up and down and adding great vocal harmony to the performance.

The official Laneway site is here.
Check out the setlists here.
Observations by Eunice Tan

“More than the price of your grandmother,” I muttered. His laughter followed us down the alleyway.

Ah… Morocco. Singer Loreena Mckennitt once compared it to “a clouded dream on an earthly night” that “hangs upon the crescent moon”. Mention Morocco and people start thinking of mysterious desert nights in sand dunes and getting lost in busy markets bursting with everything from vividly patterned textiles to pungent spices.

The word “exotic” gets thrown around a lot when it comes to describing Morocco. Like a lightly woven shawl draped over the entire country, it rarefies even the simplest things with enormous foreign significance.

We arrived from Spain – 24 hours of train ride, ferry crossing and swollen feet – and checked in to a hostel with enough sanitary problems to induce infection on sight. But the broken windows, stained bed sheets and latrines that inspired days of “dry showers” (powders, wet wipes and deodorant)… all these things seemed to make the experience more real. More exotic.

Get lost in the the medina‘s maze of 9000 streets and a classic scene unfurls: a handful of green-horned tourists, one local guide in cahoots with certain establishments who like selling things the coercive way.

A mob of alarmingly enthusiastic merchants dresses you up in costumes and rolls out carpet after carpet. Your group is herded through a labyrinth of trade like bewildered sheep. (Much) later, when you make your escape, you might fondly recall the merchant snarling when you eventually reject their goods, in turn souring the disposition of your beloved and enterprising guide for the rest of the day. But you take it all in as part of the whole authentic experience.

At some point in time though, the intricate stone trinkets will beckon to you. The bundles of patterned scarves will whisper your name. And the leather goods cured in their very own tanneries (the smell will linger in your nasal lining for years) will convince you that your mother desperately requires a cowhide accessory from a mysterious foreign land.

“Konnichiwa, an nyoung ha seh yo, ni hao!” If you are young, Asian and female, get used to hearing that. If you’re not Japanese, Korean or Chinese, you’ll give up after trying to explain your nationality for the sixth time to an uncomprehending local.

In the sanitation grade F hostel where we lodged, fellow backpackers would ask us where we were from, surprised that we could speak English so well since we were, you know, Asian and not from a Western country.

“That’s so exotic,” they would exclaim when we told them we were from Singapore, promising that South East Asia was “next up” on their lists of places to slum it. I could see visions of the Far East swim into their minds, replete with anachronistic oriental pagodas packed with soft-spoken females wearing traditional garb and shy smiles while waving silk handkerchiefs.

After the third time that happened, the word “exotic” lost its meaning for me; describing something as exotic doesn’t add any intrinsic value to that thing – it just means that you are not local to that thing’s place of origin, and, the farther-flung, the more “exotic” that something is. The cowhide trinket for your mother is only special because you got it from a “mysterious foreign land”, its craftsmanship utterly mediocre unless well-stained by the notion of being from some other place.

We responded to the drunken men who grabbed us for a photo op in a dusty street with tolerant smiles. We were strangers in their country, it was strangely exciting, and we didn’t know what they were saying. Back home, we would probably have said something insulting about their upbringing before leaving them pole-axed in our wake. In an implicit role reversal, we were the exotic ones to these inebriated locals.

How could “exotic” mean anything when what they deemed exotic was completely different from what we thought was exotic?

And when we visited an opulent riad – a traditional Moroccan house – complete with marble balustrades and a view that took our breath away, the same breath was slammed into our chest when we stepped out and saw children begging in the corridor. The sight of poor pressed so tightly against rich was eerily familiar. And yet it was foreign and unrelatable enough that it didn’t remind me of home, but served more like an abstract metaphor for problems back home.

Far from the sweet date the hijab-clad lady handed to me on the train with a smile in her eyes, the almost-sale of my friend for a few non-existent camels, or the exotic cowhide piece of nonsense I got my mother, what I took away most from Morocco was something intangible:

What is the point of backpacking across countries if things are held at arms-length? Far from breeding contempt, familiarity breeds understanding. I finally understood that the same situations I see in cities far removed from my own, the same communal interactions… these things happen all over the world in different iterations, with different bit players, different costumes and different languages.

But these localised stages of players – so exotic and different at the onset – can all be pared down to the very same intrinsic needs, wants and desires of our humanness: to love; to accumulate wealth; to seek happiness and shortcuts; and to desire categorisation of all things in an effort to make sense of the world.

And when seen in this light, these places suddenly lose their sense of foreignness and exoticness.

But instead of becoming duller for it, they draw closer to me, and transform into things that are — dare I say something so kitsch? — hyperlocal; more than just surrounding me with the strangely familiar, they are things and situations that I already know, oddly perpendicular and yet parallel to the everyday life of home.

It erased the word exotic from my mind.