Taiwan's biggest-ever international music festival opens today at noon in Taipei, kicking off three days of rock, rock and more rock. Modeled after Japan's Fuji Rock and other mega-shows from the US and Europe, the Formoz Festival's lineup calls for big name US bands, including Megadeth, Yo La Tengo and Biohazard, red hot and multimillion-selling Japanese thrash and punk groups, rap metal from Hong Kong and Singapore and a slew of local bands.
Most of Taiwan's 39 representatives at the concert will play today, serving as a warm-up for bigger things to come tomorrow and Sunday. Both days of the weekend will start off fast, featuring major draws early. Opposition Party (
"We met with the organizers of Fuji Rock several times, and they told us that the first band of the day is very important. Strong bands get people in and build the mood early," said Freddy (
Headliners tomorrow include the heavy girlcore of Japan's Yellow Machine Gun, the full body tattoos, rap and speed metal of Brooklyn's Biohazard and the slightly mellower Yo La Tengo. Sunday winds up with the rank Cantonese hip hop and thrash of Hong Kong rockers LMF, Freddy's own black metal ensemble, Chthonic (
As Taiwan's first-ever festival featuring a number of famous foreign rock bands, Formoz has also brought new organizational problems that few, if any, other concert in Taiwan have ever seen.
"Megadeth needs bodyguards," said Freddy. "I forget exactly how many, but a lot. And they might be bringing some of their own too. Then, the lead singer of Biohazard, Billy, he has his birthday on Saturday. So we have to throw a party. He says he wants it kind of crazy."
According to Freddy, the festival's metal bent stems partially from his own tastes, but mostly from chance. "Originally, we didn't think it would be so much," he said. "We approached around 30 foreign bands to see which gave the best response, and went from there. For a while, we were trying really hard to get Stereolab, but they didn't work out."
Later he added, "if we do it again next year, it will be different."
For this year, however, he's throwing a very heavy rock fest in an eminently suitable location, the Whashang Arts District (
Three-day festival passes cost NT$3,500 and allow camping. Tickets for today's show cost NT$500 and cost NT$1,999 tomorrow and Sunday. Attendance will be limited to 8,000 people. Concert-goers are permitted to bring in their own food and drinks. For those who forget to bring their own, beer, water, T-shirts and other rock concert paraphernalia will be on sale at the site.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
Before the last section of the round-the-island railway was electrified, one old blue train still chugged back and forth between Pingtung County’s Fangliao (枋寮) and Taitung (台東) stations once a day. It was so slow, was so hot (it had no air conditioning) and covered such a short distance, that the low fare still failed to attract many riders. This relic of the past was finally retired when the South Link Line was fully electrified on Dec. 23, 2020. A wave of nostalgia surrounded the termination of the Ordinary Train service, as these train carriages had been in use for decades
Lori Sepich smoked for years and sometimes skipped taking her blood pressure medicine. But she never thought she’d have a heart attack. The possibility “just wasn’t registering with me,” said the 64-year-old from Memphis, Tennessee, who suffered two of them 13 years apart. She’s far from alone. More than 60 million women in the US live with cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease as well as stroke, heart failure and atrial fibrillation. And despite the myth that heart attacks mostly strike men, women are vulnerable too. Overall in the US, 1 in 5 women dies of cardiovascular disease each year, 37,000 of them
RSS