‘Kurangkan Maju’ is a standalone short film-music video directed by A-Jun. A 15-minute meditative piece on places, time, and modernity, it features A-Jun’s hometown of Klang in the West Malaysian state of Selangor. The song title literally translates to ‘Reduce Moving Forward’ which is a play on the traffic road sign phrase ‘Kurangkan Laju’ (‘Reduce Speed’). The song is an improvised solo guitar piece that I recorded on my smartphone using the audio recorder app – I love the seemingly organic raw quality of the sound because it reminds me of my DIY (do-it-yourself) cassette recording roots. I wanted the video to give audiences a chance to reflect on their surroundings and how nature itself often too resists human development in its own quiet way, in plain sight. I feel our sense of time has been corrupted by modernity and this has some serious implications in our lives. We need to slow down. I love the fact that the stillness in A-Jun’s rustic cinematography gives the video a pictorial quality and catches one unaware. It challenges the audience to take some time off and be patient. Launched on New Year’s Eve in 2018, ironically, the pandemic forced us all to slow down just over a year after this video and song was released.

Azmyl Yunor is a ‘fiercely independent’ bi-lingual indie/underground artist and multi-instrumentalist whose work and lyrical vision (and outspokenness) has cut across cultural, social, & political boundaries, beyond race and religion. He prefers to navigate along the outer margins of the music scene and hone his craft on his own terms with a very distinctive singular vision and wit based on principles he believes in. Starting out as busker while studying journalism and filmmaking in Australia in the late 1990s, he has been producing and releasing his own albums for the past 20 years and regularly tours the region to build solidarity and kinship with like-minded artists like himself. A founding member of several seminal underground bands since the late 1990s, he adheres to the ‘three chords & the truth’ school of songwriting. He is also a writer and has published research on the social history of the Malaysian underground music circuit under the name ‘Azmyl Yusof’.