Telephony Delivery: The Final Frontier

But it’s not that the band is universally hung up over numbers, of course. With a healthy track of gigs in the last year (thanks to the release of their EP Living In Vivified Enclosures that’s been out since 2007), the band–also consisting of Azhar Razwan (keyboard), Adib Azfar (drums), Azzali Ahmad (bass) and Ungku Shaheeran (samples)–certainly view playing live as crucial to their development. A quick scan of their MySpace page reveals a picture with the slogan “Delivering with Diligence” emblazoned on it. It’s a code Telephony Delivery evidently live by.

In many ways, the band’s demeanor and music are the complete antithesis of one another. While their music often paints a cathartic and apocalyptic soundscape with tripped out programming, driving synths and general post-rock implosions (“We collectively agree it’s ‘progressive music’ but specifically what genre, we don't know. People keep asking and we keep saying 'post-rock' just to stop them from asking.”), the band themselves hardly take things as intense. Well, any band that professes to have lifted their band name off Malaysian comedian/actor Afdlin Shauki’s blog cannot seriously profess to being too serious. “Our former bassist Azmir thought we needed a fresh start from a previous musical wagon we were on, and thought a name change should kick-start things,” Farhan reveals. “Then one day he went blog-hopping, stopped at Afdlin Shauki's blog and found the phrase ‘Telephony Delivery System’ quite inspiring. It was the distribution method Afdlin Shauki used for one of his albums. We were game for anything then, so the name just stuck on.”

With post-rock in its classic form heaving its final breath, the mantle of progressive instrumental music is surely starting to shift from basic four-chord, soft-loud post-rock bands to something more, which bodes well with Telephony Delivery, whose sound is certainly a few notches above the evolutionary chain in post-rock music. But the band still feels that ultimately, the Malaysian scene still has a long way to go. “The future is very uncertain,” ends Farhan. “As much as we have our own thing going on here, we're pretty much dependent on what's happening internationally. Our music here is much like the consumer trend. We consume and then we recycle, unless something truly great happens.”

Words The Geek Photo Telephony Delivery
www.myspace.com/telephonydelivery