The wheels will get in motion this weekend for the annual Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival's indie band competition with the first of three elimination round battles of the bands set to be held over the coming three weekends. Tomorrow's competition between 11 bands will start at 11am at Tainan's Shanhua Wine Factory.
Of the 33 bands that were selected for the first-round competition, between 10 and 12 will be chosen by a committee of music critics and music professionals to take part in the final competition at the Ho-Hai-Yan festival between July 16 and July 18 on the beach at Fulong, in Taipei County. The winners of the competition are handed a check for NT$200,000.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TCM
The finalists will get to share the stage this year with festival headliners the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, as well as some of Taiwan's better-known acts like Chang Chen-yue (張震嶽) and Sandee Chen (陳珊妮), who have also been confirmed to play the event.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TCM
The festival is in its fifth year and has gone from a tiny gathering of local indie bands organized by the music label Taiwan Colors Music to a full-blown three-day festival with international bands paid for by a budget from the Taipei County Government and major corporate sponsors. The big budgets of the past couple years allowed the festival to invite international acts last year like the Perishers from Sweden came and attract up to 20,000 over the weekend, making it the biggest rock festival in Taiwan.
Booking Jon Spencer, who's almost a legend in American indie rock and famous for his collaborations with blues great R.L. Burnside, also confirms the organizers' ambitions to make the Ho-Hai-Yan festival a major regional music event.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TCM
This year's competing bands, according to organizers, run the gamut from hip hop to rock to electronica, and in a break from the norm, bands fronted by girls make up almost half of the competing groups.
Next Saturday's round of competition will take place in Taichung in front of the Mitsukoshi Department Store and on Sunday, June 27 at Taipei's Red Playhouse (紅樓劇場). Tainan's Shanhua Wine Factory is located at 2 Chengkung Rd, Shanhua Township, Tainan (台南善化鎮成功路2號). Entrance is free to all shows, and incidentally, it's also free for the festival between July 16 and July 18.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby