musicians, with The Straits Times finding "the East-meets-West soundscape...hypnotic in the way it tightly enveloped the audience" at the "seamless art-rock concert[s]". Continuum was partially funded by the National Arts Council's Arts Creation Fund. The Straits Times found Continuum a "sonically stellar mix" and "tenebrous but at the same time, musically cutting-edge and far-out", giving it four out of five stars. Time Out Singapore ranked Continuum amongst the best albums of 2015, noting that while the album is "not their best release by a long shot... this EP of gamelan music spiked with noise and doom rock deserves mad props for its bravery". Bandwagon ranked it #7 on its list of Top 10 Singapore LPs of 2015. In February 2016, the band performed Continuum at the Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Japan, directed by Aki Onda as part of a programme curated by Tang Fu Kuen. The one-night performance was supported by the National Arts Council. August is the Cruellest Released: 29 February 2016 Music composed, performed and arranged by The Observatory Additional instrumentation on "The Weight of It All" features Natalie Alexandra Tse on guzheng and Andy Chia on dizi Recorded and mixed by Leslie Low Recorded at Solslottet Studios, Bergen, Norway except "August is the Cruellest" and "Brutal Blues", recorded at Black Axis & The Well, Singapore Mastered by James Plotkin Photographs by Bjorn Vaughn Album design by Yuen Chee Wai Recorded in Singapore and Norway during the height of the 2015 Southeast Asian haze crisis, August is the Cruellest, inspired by King Crimson, Soft Machine, Zircon Lounge and others, is described by the band as "a work of political noise, a punishing challenge to look inward and move forward." The title track, inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land", was previously performed live at theatre company Drama Box's Singapore International Festival of Arts 2015 production, The Cemetery. Writer Ng Yi-Sheng described the song as "growling rock, loud as bulldozers", another critic called it "a searing rock track... raw and loud, melancholic and frustrated, and ends with high-pitched feedback", while TODAYs Mayo Martin noted that "the music evokes anger, frustration, despair and destruction — but perhaps also the slightest trace of hope". Reviewing the album on Bandwagon, three critics called this "proper follow-up to Oscilla" "challenging and disconcerting", "sinister, raw and explosive", and praised how the production, especially the drums, "sounds great". "Designed to grip you