Amid the airy chords of Girl + the Machine’s closing song at last month’s Mines Advisory Group (MAG) benefit in Hanoi, tears welled in lead vocalist Jackie Liew’s eyes.
The fusion of the song’s content about the hardships of war with the concert’s aim to fundraise for the largest non-military landmine clearing organization in Vietnam created a moment during which a complicated social issue struck home and became a visceral experience for Liew.
Creating such moments is as natural as picking up a guitar for Girl + the Machine. Since forming in 2004, the electro-rock band has been looking for ways to turn their beliefs into art and make social consciousness sing.
At the April 25 MAG International Music Festival, put on by Hanoi’s Minsk Club and the Club for Arts and Music Appreciation (CAMA), the band opened with an ambient piece to kick off their set of pop rock punctuated by a few signature spacey numbers.
That eclectic mix of sounds, Liew said, makes it difficult to categorize Girl + the Machine and has more regularly earned the band spots at artistic and experimental festivals, rather than at standard rock shows.
“Some critics call us ‘pedal gazers,’” Liew said. “We use a lot of electricity and effects, so our eyes are always on our guitar pedals.”
The Malaysian-born Canadian turned her solo project into a full-fledged band when she answered an ad placed by three musicians and sold them on her Girl + the Machine concept.
“I’m constantly on my laptop,” she said. “I just noticed that for everything - my music, my line drawings, my photography - I have to go through a machine to create.”
Liew (the girl) and her backup musicians (the machine) have developed a performance style she calls a “psychotropic audio-visual circus.” A typical show might incorporate light and video projections to enhance the sound, as well as band members’ photos of Asia to educate audiences.
“People are enjoying our music, but also unconsciously seeing conditions in places they haven’t been,” Liew said. Through indirect melding of music and message, Girl + the Machine hopes to reach people, she added, without sounding “too preachy.”
The song “Buddha Sleeping,” for example, explores the way daily routines can mask the “true self within us all,” but does so through its title, tonality and feel more than through lyrics, she said.
The band’s commitment to discovering and supporting responsible causes has taken them to a number of other benefit shows, including York University's Osgoode HIV/AIDS benefit, a 2005 Southeast Asian tsunami relief concert, a Kenyan Nyumbani Orphanage fundraiser and York University's Faculty of Environmental Studies Planning Department research fundraiser.
Liew said her own multicultural background spurred her interest in playing with cultural expectations through music, as well as in making her work accessible to a wide international audience. To that end, she sings in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and English and performs wearing modern adaptations of traditional costumes from throughout Asia.
Her move to Hanoi in September last year has helped her expand her cultural repertoire and explore the local music scene, she said. Her full band couldn’t fly out from Toronto for the MAG festival, so she went on stage with Hot Sky, a Hanoi act with whom she has become friendly.
Living in Vietnam allows her to challenge a new audience’s ideas about culture, Liew said. “When in the East, I can be West, and in the West, I can be East,” she said. “In both places I give people a new perspective.”
Liew said she appreciates her new city because it helped reacquaint her with the Asia she left at 11 years of age. She is learning through the local people, with whom “you can just sit down and start a conversation, and you’ll know the whole story of the street in an hour,” and through expats like Laura Fontan and Diego Cortizas, owners of the fashion design company chula, where Liew gets all of her performance outfits.
The band is planning a joint concert with flutist Ron Korb at the InterContinental Westlake as its next Hanoi event. They’re also looking forward to playing in Ho Chi Minh City and other Asian cities in the lead up to the fall release of their debut album from Toronto-based indie label Aporia Records.
Describing her music as “soundtrack-like,” Liew said she hoped to market pieces for use in television shows, films and commercials.
In the meantime, Liew and the rest of the band continue to promote their beliefs via a number of meaningful side projects. Liew turned the regular cooking lessons she was giving at an art gallery in Toronto into “Girl + the Kitchen,” a vegetarian cookbook featuring fusion recipes often displayed on heart-shaped beds of bean sprouts. Her bassist works for a homeless project in Canada and “gives to everyone on the street without question,” she said.
All of that is part of trying to quietly lead by example, she added. “We don’t want to go up on stage and rock and then just say, ‘bye,’” said Liew. “We want to leave something behind.”
Check out Girl + the Machine online at www.girlandthemachine.com or stream the band's music at www.myspace.com/girlandthemachinemusic.
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