CHECK OUT: A book about a European traveller’s experiences in SE Asia’s metal scene

This came in the mail this morning and I am SOOOOO excited to grab a copy of the book when it comes out!

Read the full press release below:

On November 28th 2015, Kuala Lumpur publisher SIRD (@GerakBudaya) will launch ‘Banana Punk Rawk Trails‘, a Southeast Asian metal punk memoir by Marco Ferrarese (former guitarist of Italy’s destructo-punk band The Nerds Rock Inferno).

Banana Punk Rawk Trails is the first-person account of how it was to be a white European inbred metal punk fool in a globalised world of transnational extreme music chop suey.

Between 2010 and 2015, Marco Ferrarese was the only “white elephant in the room” of the Malaysian metal punk scene. In this book, he tells you how it was to play guitar in Penang’s thrashcore band WEOT SKAM, negotiating flimsy stage set-ups and shady promoters in order to gel into a developing world’s music scene.

He also packed bags and travelled the whole length of Malaysian Borneo scouring for sonic extremities, chasing down longhaired metal punk descendants of Iban headhunting tribes, scrawny Bidayuh Anarcho-punk rockers, Kadazan-Dusun artist activists, and Muslim death metallers. Still drenched in tropical mosh pit sweat, next he hops on a plane to tell all about WEOT SKAM’s first Indonesian tour.

This books contains about 200 black and white pictures, and a 74-minute Free CD compilation with 22 of the greatest punk, metal and in-between pan-Malaysia bands.

You can read more, sign-up for the mailing list and enter a contest to win a free book at

www.bananapunkrawktrails.com

Straight from the website:

“Banana Punk Rawk Trails is the first trade book in the English language on the metal punk scene of Malaysia and Indonesia. Moreover, it’s the first book written by a former European hardcore punk impresario who mingled and played with the cream of the crop of its bands.

Such a fresh, quirky story will appeal equally to fans of metal and punk, travellers and adventurous backpackers worldwide, and to the growing segment of laypeople and academics interested in Southeast Asian and East Asian popular culture and cultural studies.”