Yo La Tengo has finally made it to Taiwan. The owners of the Roxy bars tried to bring them two years ago to complete a series of concerts including Superchunk and June of 44. And even then, rumors of Yo La Tengo coming were still the main buzz for many in Taipei's rock 'n' roll pubs. Tomorrow night at 9pm, the rock trio will end the anticipation when they take the stage at the Formoz Festival.
In an interview earlier this week with the Taipei Times, Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo's guitarist, vocalist and major creative force said that he and his band mates, Georgia Hubley (Kaplan's wife) and James McNew, have little idea what to expect of the upcoming show. At the time of the interview, he said the group had only basic knowledge of Taiwan and was unfamiliar with most of the bands at this weekend's festival. Still, they were excited about coming.
Recently returned from London, Kaplan said he's picked up a guidebook he'll probably read on the plane, and is also reading a novel, Iron & Silk, in preparation for Taiwan.
For better or for worse, however, Yo La Tengo may be in for some surprises when they get here. Though the band has been playing internationally since 1987, they've only been to Asia three times, each time to Japan. Also, Iron & Silk may not be the best prerequisite reading material. It's more or less a memoir of an American English teacher in post-Cultural Revolution China of 1982.
Fortunately, a music festival is a music festival, and should offer the band less of the unexpected. Kaplan foresees that the only major constraints on the group's stage performance will be the Formoz schedule, which limits their performance to about one hour, about half the time they normally play.
"Some of our songs are long, you know, and we always try to play a variety. So the show unfolds slowly. A short set feels a little artificial at times," he said.
Once, in London, when the group was only given around 30 minutes to open up for what Kaplan called "two more popular bands," he said they filled the entire set with a single jam. "It was kind of all or nothing ? the only other thing we thought of was playing eight of our tightest, most recognizable songs, but we decided against it," he said.
For equipment, he's bringing guitars, an organ and a couple of amps. Sensing Formoz's hard rock focus, Kaplan explained the need to bring the amplifiers, saying, "All they have at the concert is Marshalls, [the preferred amp of metal merchants like Iron Maiden, Yngwie Malmsteen and Def Leopard] which is kind of the antithesis of what we're about."
The group arrived in Taiwan on Wednesday with a planned stay of at least four days, though Kaplan mentioned the possibility that he and Hubley may stay longer.
As for the group's activities after Taiwan, he said "we're not sure," commenting that they're "kind of" in a song-writing phase right now.
"What passes for songwriting with us is jamming," he explained, describing a process in which they come up with something like a 20-minute jam, then prune it and pare it until a song comes out of it.
"We're in a habit of working slowly when we write songs. A lot of times, we just wait for a song to appear."
In the end, the process generates the highly-tuned and finely-controlled compositions that appear on Yo La Tengo's albums, songs that are almost always products of some studio (most recently Nashville) even though they seldom have what would be called a standard studio feel. That's probably because, for Kaplan, the songs are never static nor fixed. He understands, on one hand, that careful control and selection are necessary to create an album. And as a sort of corollary, he realizes that live performances present something different altogether.
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