Luxy's first birthday bash this weekend is a double date, with Citrus putting on a big show tonight called "Full House" and the lads from Fatboy Slim's DJ stable laying down the vinyl
tomorrow.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ARTIST
Alan Hsia of Luxy said the parties would be "thank you" events and with over NT$100,000 of free prizes lined up, no doubt punters will be queuing up to say "xie Hsia."
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
It's been a good year for the city center club with full houses most weekends and most ladies' nights on Wednesday, which is a considerable achievement considering 3,000 plus partygoers regularly go out to Ministry of Sound in Neihu for their music now.
The market for dance music has expanded enormously over the past year and Luxy has established itself as the number one club in town.
A year ago the only places doing good regular business in Taipei were 2nd Floor (Hsia's previous club) and TeXound. They were constantly raided by the police and clubbing was demonized by the city and central governments, with urine tests a central part of the crackdown.
Nowadays, apart from the occasional ID check, clubbing has gone mainstream and become a vital part of the entertainment scene in the city.
On the musical front, Luxy has pulled in some great names (including Derrick Carter, Pete Heller, Tyler Stadius, Ken Ishii, LTJ Bukem, Armin Van Burren), as well as boosting the careers of local DJs like Joe Ho and Victor Cheng, among others.
"Over the past three years we have really established ourselves [with 2nd Floor and Luxy] and are now thinking of more regional expansion," Hsia says. "I'm very pleased with the way Luxy worked. We have created a new crowd that appreciates musicianship and the local crowd has become really sophisticated very quickly."
For tonight's party, promoter Citrus has been working hard and in addition to DJs Fancy, Saucey and SL, there will be a light show from Dr. DMT and a special guest appearance from Johnny Fiasco. This DJ shouldn't need an introduction because he practically started the scene in the 1980s when they were experimenting with acid music in Chicago warehouses. Since then he has become a producer and flies around the world playing records for huge sums of money.
Saucey, the enterprising Canadian who started Citrus with SL two and a half years ago, said the pace of change had been phenomenal and putting on a legendary talent like Fiasco at Luxy was a sign of this.
"When I first came here [2001], it was all hard house and techno at places like Rock Candy, @live and Texhound, so I wanted to recreate the house party feel. So, we teamed up with Shiuan [Liu, aka SL] and Alan at 2nd Floor to do the Citrus nights. The funny thing is, Citrus is quite big now. The house sound kind of snowballed, so we've gone back to Eden with `Deep Inside' and a more intimate type of party feel," Saucey said.
Last weekend felt like the quiet before the storm, so The Vinyl Word went somewhere a little different, namely the salsa night at Barrio, B1, 277 Dunhua S Rd, Sec 2, Taipei (台北市敦化南路2段277號B1).
It proved to be a good choice as the vibe was hot and if the music did skip from Latin American beats to top-20 hip hop, it got better as the night went on and morphed into some great meringue, a kind of reggae for South Americans, with large choppy beats and the chance to slide across the dance floor with your dance partner.
According to PR manager Lucy Wang, 80 percent of the crowd at Barrio is from South or North America. "We have four groups of people. Native Taiwanese (20 percent to 30 percent), American (20 percent to 30 percent), the rest either pure SAC [South American Chinese] or pure South American. Actually we all have a community with a strong bond. Before us there really wasn't much latin music around, so we have provided that now."
Barrio is open every night. Ladies night on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday have free salsa lessons, at around 9pm, for about 40 to 50 minutes.
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist