My name is John Resborn, I´m a 31 yrs old photographer from Sweden. Together with my sister Lena, a journalist, we´ve been working for 4 years on a photographic documentary book on 208 pages about the people in the metal, hardcore and punk underground music scenes in Southeast Asia. The title is Labour of Love & Hate – an underground musical journey through Southeast Asia. We just self-published the book.
The book features unique portraits of different driving spirits in the scenes in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and gives an un-censored insight in todays society in this region through the eyes of the young generation in the subcultures of underground metal music. They tell you what it´s like to be a fan of this music, what they do with it and what it means to them. The book features more than 140 photographs – both portraits and snapshots from their everyday lives, concerts, parties, homes etc as well as live action photography from gigs.
During the past 30 years the Southeast Asian metal, hardcore and punk bands have gone from just playing covers by their Western idols, to producing and distributing their own music. Today it´s an organised, strong and thriving music scene but due to both political and religious oppression, conservative constitutions and prejudices – it´s pushed away from the establishment.
In the Western world today, extreme metal and punk music is no longer frowned upon; it´s everywhere- on the CD-shelfs in the gas station by the main road and prime time on TV-shows. But the luxury of being a metalhead or punk rocker is not a given, nothing taken for granted, in Southeast Asia. The gap between the ruling and the youngsters that grew up with MTV and the Internet is just huge and music like metal, hardcore and punk is considered as a ” demoralising of the youth”. But it´s through genres like these that the kids can make their voices heard. The music becomes their revolt and weapon – this underground movement has just begun to spread across the new Asia.
The reader will for example meet headhunter descendants of headhunters on Borneo that play extra aggressive metal to honour their ancestors, islamists in Jakarta spreading Jihad through political grindcore, female goth metal vocalists performing live in their veil and fighting for feminism in a male-dominated scene, bands trying to preserve and re-awaken local old traditions and religions by implementing it with their own modern metal and a re-incarnated indian viking who´s life is in debt to Scandinavian metal bands etc etc.
