The title says it all. “The Art of Listening” will demand a certain configuration in your faculty to grasp the sheer unnervingly ecletic array of genre shapeshifting and associated madness. You hear but do you listen? I cannot vividly recall another band that sounds like this, at least not anywhere in Singapore. Mr Adam Md Yusop, the mastermind behind this intricate and convoluted musical shapeshifter is certainly one guy I would hope to meet, despite the fact that we had some form of email communications online few years back when I was doing a metal website. He come across as an intelligent free spirit who would not only think out of the box, but would hurl the box into the dump the minute he chance upon one. I know there was something special about Global Chaos when I first heard their debut demo “And It's All Our Fault”, which seamlessly meld the brutal sounds of death metal, hardcore, grindcore with experimental elements. The demo won positive acclaims from many of the underground presses from the early '90s, and it won me over even though I would consider myself as a rather close-minded metal freak back then.

Now, I cannot help but feel that this debut album from Global Chaos will bewilder your average orthodox metal fan. This CD had leapt a light year even further from their demo days. Adam's palate for Global Chaos here is a strange, insane landscape of the human psyche. “The Art of Listening” began with a mystifying Arabic intro that opened a deceptive gateway into a throbbing industrial hell of “And the Angels Danced” complete with a zone out moog somewhere in the middle that takes you further into electroclash/hardtech tripping. This track was featured elsewhere on a tribute compilation to Malaysia death metal gods Brain Dead. Do not be fooled into thinking that you can keep track on its progressives; you'd be thrown off tangent from the hardcore moshpits into surreal jazz arpagios like on “3 Dimensional Anger” (featured earlier on Menagerie Compilation put out by Mouse Records).

Just as you try to wince away from more metallic abuse, “Baraka” a guitar instrumental piece led your hands mischievously into the rainforests and suddenly your heart will beat with environmental consciousness, before emerging on the other side with “A Piece of a Puzzle”, a live version of the emotive rock song with pop sensibility and heartfelt lyrics, first made famous on the Made In Singapore (MIS) compilation from Mouse Records. “Flames of Srebenica” is a jazz infused progressive death metal instrumental, a full steam ahead loco train into the depths of unpredictability with unusual time changes and twists. “Cyber Neanderthal Man/In Twilight with Myself” is what I would consider as the crazy crazy highlight on the CD. This is witty, perverse, brilliant and fun concoction of reggae, circus music, hardcore, jazz, blues and death metal in one blue pill and it still works under the magic of Global Chaos! Two tracks from the legendary cult demo “And It's All Our Fault” are featured here as bonus tracks, namely “Imagine If U Will” (blues meet death metal and grindcore) and “Dying Inside” (hardcore meets rock, death metal and avantgarde).

This CD is a great vehicle for exercising the human ID via its convoluted musical auto-suggestion. All of this thematic theorizing is of course a bunch of subjective horse feces. The music is just incredible and very recommended for the adventurous music lovers with an expansive open-mindedness and enough intelligence quotient to get hooked. The last weird piece in the Global Chaos puzzle: this CD is for some interesting reason only issued on Malaysia's Pony Canyon/Small Budjet Production (Fadzil's pre Musikbox label from Johore Bahru) despite the very fact that this is a Singapore band, and that most local music collectors will have some trouble finding this item, given its limited quantity and puzzling elusiveness.