Think of pineapple on pizza, and before frowning, you’ll know that some things are really not meant to be together. At least, not in their cultures of origin: ask for Hawaiian Pizza in my native Italy, and  you’ll get a compassionate stare, at a minimum — the most conservative will give you a well-deserved slap in the face. But like it or not, what turns the blood of people in the Bel Paese cold has become a rather adored staple dish on pizza menus in most of Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Pizza-o-nomics asides, two very incompatible things like pineapple and pizza may end up working together well when placed into contexts that are different from their origins. I saw it happening in the underground music scene of Penang, where a clever ethno-pop duo added yoga to their already pretty revolutionary type of post-rock.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Formed at the end of 2018, Buddha Beat is what every Malaysian band should be: multi-ethnic — made up of a Chinese, Cole Yew, and an Indian, Krishna Armum — and powerfully localized.

Each member is a multi-instrumentalist who plays the electric guitar, electronic bass, and folk instruments related to their ethnic backgrounds. In other words, Buddha Beat blends the Hindustani tabla and the Chinese Di Zi flute with electro-pop bases and turns their amplifiers’ knobs towards Pink Floydish, 70s-inspired electric twangs.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

“Folk instruments represent our cultures,” says veteran underground maverick Cole Yew, Buddha Beat’s flutist and the manager of Soundmaker Studio, northern Malaysia’s longest-running independent music club, and practice spot.

He’s also a former member of several influential Malaysian bands such as RUSH, Hui Si Di Dai, and White Crow.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

“Being a Malaysian, with its culturally diverse society, our history has taught us to embrace harmonies and appreciate our multi-cultural community,” he said to Eksentrika. “Electronics help create a contemporary sound so that we don’t end up sounding like a traditional religious worshiping band.”

If mixing Malaysian identities, multi-ethnic folk sounds, and rock wasn’t original enough to set Buddha Beat in a musical class of their own, the band went even a step further by implementing a simple but revolutionary idea.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

“I started using Buddha Beat’s music as a background for my yoga training,” said Krishna’s brother, 30-year-old yogi Yuva Armum. “I liked the way the flow of Buddha Beat’s songs paired with my morning asanas, and so I thought: if I enjoy this, why shouldn’t the band try to bring this whole yoga-cum-music concept on stage?”

Truth be told, Yuva’s idea literally sounded like putting that damn pineapple on a pizza: something original and yet simple, but so crazy that nobody had thought about doing it before. Born in India, yoga culture has most often been shunned in Western-centric underground rock-derived subcultures all over the world. In Western societies, yoga is quickly dismissed by rockers as an aberration for pseudo-hippies, Birkenstock-wearing hipsters, and rich kids on politically correct benders.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

If you think of it, “spiritual” rock has never even worked that well in England and the United States, which have held the reins of global underground music production since the 1960s — think of the Krishnacore bands of the 1990s, like Shelter and 108, or the whole Christian metal scene. Beyond using diverse lyrical themes infused with religion, music-wise they did nothing very different from the standard of their genres of reference.

But in Malaysia, where people like their pizza with pineapple, I guess that local rockers can also stomach their rock infused with yoga. “Some make music to sound like what they have heard before, and some make music using their own imagination. I reckon we belong to the latter group: to sound like your influences will end up taking away your identity, and we want to create something that truly belongs to us, our ways, and it’s uniquely ‘us’,” said Cole.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

“Yoga sessions with meditative music” was the tagline that Buddha Beat used to be able to play live shows until the first months of 2021. A limited number of fans would come to participate in a series of yoga workshops, having the added benefit of making the project compliant with local COVID-19 SOPs, considering how it wasn’t a regular “gig”. As Buddha Beat plays, Yuva strikes basic asanas for a small crowd that follows, stretching legs and arms under the stage in synchrony with the band’s ethnic-pop rhythms.

Call it a clever gimmick, but on the contrary of most other Malaysian bands — who had to hibernate after live music venues closed right after the first movement control order kicked off in March 2020 — for a long time, Buddha Beat had a weekly gig to both hang for sanity and please a tight-knit group of aspiring-yogis.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

The rise in coronavirus infections has unfortunately forced Buddha Beat to reschedule the release of their first album “Eclipse”, initially planned for May this year. The title nods at the most intimate moment between the moon and the sun when light is enveloped by darkness. It suggests the financial, psychological, and distancing challenges that Krishna and Cole faced as a band during these trying corona-times. But however long these may be, an eclipse is also always temporary — and the light eventually comes back.

The album opens with 3 tracks featuring a contemporary expression of the famous Vedic chant “Om Vakra Tunda Maha Kaya…“, which offers salutations to the Hindu Lord Ganesh. “Old religions, traditions, and faiths such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others have accumulated more than enough wisdom to point an individual in the right direction to begin or continue one’s own spiritual journey,” said Krishna.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

“The main message/theme for Eclipse is to be creative and adaptable, and find positivity in negativity,” added Yuva. And what better time to develop and practice this innate ability that Buddha Beat believes we all have than right now when an invisible virus kills people and destroys the music and art scenes of the world?

In their own experience of mixing the sacred with the sonic, Buddha Beat has certainly shown how they walk their own line, and how they equally managed to spin the wheel of Malaysian alternative rock in their own very distinctive way. And when confronted with innovation, all that skeptics really have to do is close their eyes and take their first bite. After all, strange tastes — the proverbial pizza with pineapple —  can also grow into becoming very well-appreciated novel standards.

Cover image by Marco Ferrarese. 

Copied and pasted from Eksentrika.

Follow Buddha Beat here. We’re looking for writers to write about the arts & culture in Malaysia and beyond. Read our F.A.Q. here before submitting your story pitch.