Print

Mail

wiki links

Smell a rat?

Ron Brownlow
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Apr 04, 2008, Page 13

Faith Yang, left, and Deserts Chang, right, are two of the headliners at this year’s Spring Scream music festival. PHOTO: COURTESY OF SPRING SCREAM

Spring Scream starts today in an annual rite of passage for Taiwan's independent music scene that brings thousands of artists and revelers to Kenting (墾丁) for a weekend-long series of outdoor concerts.

The festival started as a small party on the beach organized by foreign residents Jimi Moe and Wade Davis 14 years ago and has evolved into Taiwan's premier showcase for independent music. Last year's event drew daily crowds numbering between 7,000 and 10,000 people, Moe said.

Officially titled Double Rat 2008 Spring Scream (2008正宗春天吶喊音樂藝術祭), this year's fest is being held on nine stages at Oluanbi Lighthouse National Park (鵝鑾鼻燈塔公園), which lies on the southern tip of Taiwan. Roughly 250 bands are scheduled to perform over the three-day event.

Headliners include singer Faith Yang (楊乃文), versatile alt-rock band Back Quarter (四分衛), Brit-rockers 1976 and veteran punk/post-rock five-piece The Chairman (董事長). Among the less well-known local artists worth checking out: acoustic act Passiwali (巴西瓦里), Tainan punks Divebomb, Hakka hip-hop crew Kou Chou Ching (拷秋勤) and Taitung reggae group Red I and the Riddim Outlawz.

Above: Pier 13 performs at the festival in 2006. PHOTO: KUO FANG-CHI, TAIPEI TIMES

The overall quality of the international bands booked for this year's festival does not match the standard established in previous years. But the foreign lineup does include several promising acts, including New York's Dynamite Club, Japanese bands Aonami and Abnormal Voltage, French act Vialka, and Born to Hula and Soler from Hong Kong.

Faith Yang, left, and Deserts Chang, right, are two of the headliners at this year’s Spring Scream music festival. PHOTO: COURTESY OF SPRING SCREAM

"The stages look amazing, and it's gonna be a fun year," Moe said. "There's good music all day long - that's one key difference compared to last year. It's not like before where the great bands tended to be at night."

As usual, a clutch of raves, dance parties and concerts are being held simultaneous to Spring Scream in the Kenting area. (See Page 14 and Page 15 for more details.) In total, the festivities are expected to draw 150,000 revelers to the Kenting area this weekend, according to Pingtung County's Cultural Affairs Bureau.

Kenting residents, visitors and the national media refer to all of the above events collectively as Spring Scream, or Chun Tian Na Han (春天吶喊), but in recent years Davis and Moe have been issuing statements and holding press conferences to emphasize the differences between their festival and the other events.

Spring Scream organizers are keen to disassociate their festival from the raves that attract media coverage of hedonistic behavior and police drug busts. Last year, some 120 people were arrested in the Kenting area during the festival weekend on drug-related charges, according to the Pingtung Police Department.

"Spring Scream has never had a drug problem," a spokeswoman for Spring Scream said on Tuesday in an e-mailed statement. Elaborating in a phone interview, Moe said: "We want people to be able to separate Spring Scream from everything else. This would allow people with families and kids to know that they're safe or protected if they go to the official Spring Scream."

Double Rat 2008 Spring Scream has experienced a couple of teething problems unique to this year. In February, the Pingtung County government announced that several "Spring Scream" concerts would be held at the Hengchun Airport, leading to erroneous media reports that Spring Scream had changed its name. (See this week's Vinyl Word for more information on the gigs at Hengchun Airport.)

Then, earlier this week, roughly one-third of the Taiwan-based expat bands selected to play the real Spring Scream learned that their applications for performance visas had been rejected by the government.

To obtain a temporary performance visa from the Taiwanese government, musicians must submit a promotional kit, music samples and other details in a process similar to applications to international festivals like South by Southwest in the US or Japan's Fuji Rock. The restrictions were designed to protect Taiwanese artists from competitors such as the Filipino cover bands that were once much more prevalent in the country.

Moe said this was the first time Spring Scream required local expat bands to apply for performance visas and that the vacancies in the schedule would be filled. "Everything we are being asked to do [by the government] we are doing," he said.

Such measures help Spring Scream maintain good relations with local authorities. Unlike the Ho-Hai-Yan rock festival (海洋音樂祭), which the Taipei County government appropriated from its founders two years ago and handed to a television station to organize, Davis and Moe have never lost control of Spring Scream.

But the extra precautions will not preempt the kind of sensational coverage of music festivals by the national media that has by now become a kind of Kabuki theater.

Moe said he has already seen a television report on new hidden cameras undercover police will be using this year to film suspected drug users.

"They showed the DJs [from the raves], they showed everything else, but they didn't show any of our stages," he said. "That was two minutes of prime time news with our [the Spring Scream] name on it."
This story has been viewed 1387 times.