Singapore rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s, Heritage and Zircon Lounge, showed tendencies to create music beyond conventional rock idioms. In the late 1980s, Corporate Toil baited audiences with noisy electronic performances influenced by industrial/new wave bands like Suicide or Einstürzende Neubauten. In the 1990s, Kelvin Tan produced literally dozens of albums of avant folk and improvised guitar, as well as assembling the short-lived Stigmata featuring bassist Ian Woo and saxophonist Kelvin Guoh. Zai Kuning, largely known as a visual artist and dancer, lived for a period in Japan and collaborated musically with Tetsu Saitoh, a famed Japanese cellist. Zai also created his own form of Malay folk and gypsy blues music, singing incantations in his deep tenor while playing a loose form of open tuning guitar. By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, a group of experimental laptop artists appeared: George Chua, Yuen Chee Wai, Evan Tan, Ang Song Ming, and Chong Li-Chuan, the last having received the bachelor's and master's degrees in music at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Straddling the world of digital effects and acoustic instruments was the duo aspidistrafly, who eventually gained an enormous following in Japan, producing their own music and running their Kitchen. Label. The Observatory, a supergroup formed from the ashes of Leslie Low's folk rock Humpback Oak trio, have been widely regarded as one of the best bands in Singapore, with Yeow Kai Chai of The Straits Times writing, "No other Singapore band, past or present, has captured the imagination quite like The Observatory." With every album, The Observatory have pushed at the limits of the song form, incorporating prog rock, jazz, avant garde guitar, drones, black metal, and more. Musical outsiders Engineered Beautiful Blood (Shark Fung and Wei Nan) blazed a hot trail of no wave improvised rock, then stopped playing in 2009. However, their members eventually formed a larger improvised rock ensemble, I\D, which itself would splinter off into smaller groups and configurations. Shark Fung himself has been a key figure in the musical margins, with his idiosyncratic solo drums-and-electronics noise outfit Awk Wah, and forming the collective structured improv group BALBALAB with Wu Jun Han, Dennis Tan and Zai Tang in late 2014. Around the middle of the 2000s, another grouping calling themselves Under the Velvet Sky wowed audiences with their performances that evoked prog rock, free jazz, traditional Malay and Chinese music, and more. Again,