No matter how “smart” we become as a nation, we haven’t smartened up to one fact about the tapestry of Made in Singapore music: that there are talents operating within it that are worthy of all the roses we so readily heap on the Sheerans and Swifts, to say nothing of our complicity in the teeming K-wave. And to these talents hiding in plain sight — like Sameh Wahba, aka Houg.
If I am permitted to insert myself into this telling of the Houg story, I’ll admit to one thing: my great and sincere appreciation for his music has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that, in interacting with it, we have become close personal friends. His music is so easy to like — for all its alleged out-there-ness — that my social proximity to him is irrelevant.
Yet, as a maker of distinctly, excellently, and masterfully rendered idiosyncratic art that dresses itself in the shades of fringe genres such as chillwave and lo-fi but walks with the unmistakable (to those who know it) strut of pop, he suffers the sadly familiar plight of a lack of due recognition and celebration on these shores. Singapore has a longstanding issue with recognising and valorising its own who colour outside the lines beautifully. The fact that this isn’t anything new shouldn’t numb us to its troubling (and annoying) existence. Okay, time to eject.
In this climate and standing atop, as he does, a fantastic catalog that includes the superlatively great 2022 album The Biting Tempo, one has to assume that Houg has the temperament of a Stoic philosopher who knows his way around a winkingly left-field pop hook. And that assumption, dear reader, is one of the right ones.
“I am the sum of the decisions I’ve made”, is the lens with which he takes in and navigates his reality. Musically and experientially, it unspools across the canvas of time: “Every song I make delves into what time has done to me”. His subtlety encompasses literal multitudes, for his music is an elevation of nostalgia to a sacrosanct height in human consciousness, an ascent marked by a dreamy, heady marriage of pop, rock, jazz, and rock styles into a sumptuous cohesion.
There’s another recurring trope in this tale: Houg’s great art has been earned after the continual daily battles with the logic of perseverance against an immovable historical framework, battles that have been fought outside Singapore, too. Not too long ago, Houg went to Melbourne with the larger aim of giving his music legs. In between gigging and building his network with various local scenes, he worked in a Malaysian restaurant there, enduring the 5°C temperature and waking up at 4am in order to make his shift.
The line, “It’s just a wild case / Of wanting something else”, in the single “Metro (4:35)” is a literal and existential time stamp. A marker of where and when, but also of the inner fire that propels the drive of the creative soul, no matter how ingrained the odds are.
