Myanmar X Bands

Myanmar X Bands is mostly known as the only website for rock bands from Myanmar (Burma) and also known as mXb. It has been known for promoting new, unsigned bands from Myanmar using website and also holding concerts around the capital, Yangon.
Early Years (Dec 2003 - Apr 2004)
mXb was started by as a school project for diploma course in University of Culture in Yangon by Yair Pike who was by then a student. It was their final assignment project and well known among the students for it's popular design and tipped to get the first prize. But it never got any prize due to the words used as the website's slogan that include the word "Underground", which is banned by the military government ruling. The actual slogan was "Underground music world of Myanmar".
By December of 2003 Yair believed that the site could find success by promoting the underground bands in Myanmar formed by his university friends. As he was also a fan of punk and metal music, he has so many friends in the industry. With the help of friends and his parents' initial money, mXb was born. Initially, there were only around 4-5 bands including Offkeys, Sar Chauk Yoke, Antibiotic, Neo-deadz and Wanted, which all were his friends.
Success With Nine Planets (Apr 2004 - Nov 2004)
In April 2004, Yair had a chance to team up with his high school buddy Pyee Phyo Htet, who has formed a group called Nine Planets with his friends from his university. Initially the plan of Nine Planets was just to build a place to play Burmese traditional Water Festival. But as they foresaw the project as a failure, they decided to build a floor which is 19 feet high for bands to perform live. As Pyee had already known about mXb, he contacted Yair to team up with him. Since then mXb and Nine Planets decided to work closely for 8 months and had contact for the next 2 years until Yair left Yangon in November 2007 to Singapore.
Since Yair was a friend of all the bands, he started persuading bands to perform at Nine Planets stage. The bands performed that summer were Antibiotics, Offkeys, Tah Than Lhynn Chate, Sar Chauk Yoke, Name, Reviver, and 9mm. 9mm was the only hip hop band to work with mXb. But later it was revealed that mXb never wanted to work with bands that play other genres except rock and mXb was pressured by Nine Planets to work with 9mm who were also friends with people from Nine Planets.
The mXb and Nine Planets projects which was foreseen as failure turned out to be totally opposite. Because of the architecturally goth-like stage made by Nine Planets and the metal bands from mXb, it turned out to be a success. They made the ticket sales around 9 million kyats (local currency) which is equal to US$ 9000.
But 4 days after the water festival, three members of Nine Planets, Pyee Phyo Htet, Thet Phone Naing and Aung Zaw Hein, and Yair were arrested for 8 hours by Military Intelligence (MI). During the water festival, they have paid around 2 million kyats to the nearby police forces because the bands performing were publicly using drugs and also using lyrics like "bitch", "whore", "fuck", etc. The Police Commissioner warned the organizer (Nine Planets and mXb) to stop using those words but the bands and organizers believed this is just a common thing for nu-metal genre and kept on using them despite the warning.
They were freed around 4.30 am after questioned for 8 hours because it was a big misunderstanding. The MIs thought when the bands were using words like "whore" and bitch", they thought the organizers of that free concert were targeting to the daughters of the ruling junta's military leader General Than Shwe. After this bad publicity, Nine Planets and mXb became more popular among rock and metal fans and at the same time hated by the mainstream music industry.
Their very first concert was held on May 29 2005 at Strand Hotel with all the same bands that they have worked during water festival but also include already successful punk bands like Big Bag, The Ants and Okra. A day before the concert The Ants was pulled out due to the death of their founding member L Phyu. Still the concert was a very big achievement for both Nine Planets and mXb. All the videos were uploaded on to mXb website and hits were also started to rise. That concert also gave fair amount of publicity to the bands as well.
Break up between NP and mXb (Dec 2004)
There wasn't much of updates to mXb during June 2004 - Nov 2004 since Nine Planets started their new project to make a record store called Sound Planet. In October 2004, Nine Planets and mXb started discussing about expanding the metal genre in Myanmar by releasing a compilation of all the metal bands that were a bit popular in underground music scene. And the problem started when Thet from Nine Planets wanted to put mainstream modern rock bands on the album and wanted to take out some of the nu-metal bands to make the album commercially successful which Yair from mXb wanted.
It also stirred up some problems in Nine Planets since some of the members also wanted to put nu-metal bands on the album since the album would be the first of its genre in the history of metal scene in Myanmar. Since then Nine Planets has started to fall apart and Yair was also doing his solo work for mXb all over again.
Thamine Thit Album (July 2005 - present)
On July 2005, Moe Sweet, lead singer of Offkeys and Yair had an idea of creating a new demo album called "Thamine Thit" which means The New History. By then metal scene in Yangon was also becoming a bit bigger with lots of kids started form metal bands. Yair did a cover of the album and sponsored by mXb, Thamine Thit finally released on August of 2005. It became a big hit in underground metal scene and that's when Nine Planets wanted to remake the album with the same name.
Since mXb has been a non-commercial website to promote metal music in Myanmar and only run by Yair alone, he decided to give up the name "Thamine Thit" to Nine Planets. Lots of new bands sign up to be on mXb and mXb became the only place for true metal fans in Myanmar.
mXb has been banned from local ISP called BaganNET from time to time due to usage of anti-government slogans and words. mXb always has server problems due to lack of work force, Yair started to look for partnership. Surprisingly, Victor San Kho Lin, founder of Kholix™ Multimedia International, a fellow metal fans and Burmese working in Singapore offered a free server space deal just to promote metal music in Myanmar. So on May of 2007, Yair from Hyper Time Studio which designed and maintaining the site and Victor from Kholix™ Multimedia International agreed to work together to build Myanmar X Bands website.
Designs of mXb
mXb first ever design was the same as the school project back in 2003. It's second design was actually based and influenced by Industrial Metal genre. It used lots of images and graphics like machinery, cctv cameras, motors and GPS satellite images.
The second design was inspired by American rock band called Aiden. The design used lots of images of bullets, blood and blade. Third design was based on Military Logos and commando themes which wasn't up for too long and replaced by the fourth and current designed based on City of Bagan, the ancient city from Myanmar.
mXb has also made tool bar that works on both IE and FireFox and can download at www.Myanmar-xbands.com

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