When Yeh Wan-ching (
Ignoring the grumbling from her family, she chose the former.
PHOTO: MAX WOODWORTH, TAIPEI TIMES
It's an unconventional path to take for a politics major, but not half as unlikely as the modest success her label White Wabbit Records (
By that point, school had already ranked low on her list of priorities for several years, and starting a label also conveniently ensured that her band would be able to release an album commercially, which the other labels in town were not liable to help with.
Founding a record label and record store isn't quite revolutionary, but cornering a niche market for quirky, relatively unheard-of indie bands required a measure of risk that, until White Wabbit was founded, others had only taken half-heartedly.
"There's no reliable local business model in indie-music. So, just because we went through with it, we're perceived as pioneers and get a lot of attention for it," said KK, whose label and store have been featured in everything from popular women's magazines to a DPP presidential campaign ad.
The store, located inside the music venue/shopping complex The Wall, is tiny -- no more than five pings -- but it's a significant improvement from its former address inside a converted men's restroom at the now-defunct live music house Zeitgeist. The new space allows for a proper counter, a sofa and floor-to-ceiling shelves to fit a couple thousand CDs from bands known by only a handful of truly dedicated music listeners.
Keeping the titles as obscure as possible helps the store maintain an unchallenged status locally as the city's nexus for people with their ears to the rails for upcoming bands. There's also little likelihood for would-be consumers to find the music sold at the shop on popular MP3 file-sharing systems, like Kuro.com, that major labels and record stores complain have cut into their profits.
"It's a convenient convergence of personal interests and market conditions. I like this kind of music, and it so happens that we operate in part of the music market that MP3 file-sharing doesn't affect," KK said.
Learning the ropes in the rock-music industry, where young women label-heads are noticeable in Taiwan, as elsewhere, for their absence, was a trial-and-error process, but not, KK says, an especially arduous one.
"Because the music market is so fresh, starting this kind of venture might actually be the easy part. Keeping it alive is the hard part," she said.
To do so, KK made the label and store operate symbiotically, as the label's local releases -- six in total so far by Nipples, Bad Daughter (
A significant portion of the business comes over the Internet. Through the label's Web site (www.wwr.idv.tw), newletter and community forum site, KK has built a small client base from southern Taiwan and even as far away as Hong Kong and China.
KK also designed the label's logo -- a one-eyed cartoon rabbit that looks as though it were first doodled on a napkin.
But despite her undeniable marketing acumen, KK hesitates to describe herself as a businesswoman.
"I'm more of a musician than anything else. In the beginning, keeping the accounting books straight at the store was a huge drag. I can barely count," she said.
Her laid-back attitude has given White Wabbit something of a cachet as head of Taiwan's indie-rock slacker community and masks the actual round-the-clock work that goes into keeping the label and store afloat.
And she's not so unambitious as to not forget to forge medium-term plans for the label and store.
"I hope in five years to open up a branch in Tokyo. People buy anything in Japan," she said.
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
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
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would