Tomorrow sees melodic death metal group The Haunted from Sweden playing with local act Infernal Chaos in a metal extravaganza that should leave partygoers with stiff necks and throbbing eardrums.
The music continues with a second show, billed as an “afterparty,” that begins at 10:30pm, with industrial music by Roughhausen, heavy metal/grunge rockers Doublewide, and Into the Void, a Black Sabbath tribute band.
The Haunted started off in 1996, and the release of the group’s first album in 1998 garnered Terrorizer magazine’s Album of the Year award. Peter Dolving’s lead vocals are scathing, introspective and full of angst. The song D.O.A. from The Haunted’s 2004 album One Kill Wonder was made available for download in March this year for a video game called Rock Band on Xbox and PlayStation.
Taipei’s Infernal Chaos was formed by guitarist Jesse Liu (小黑) of Chthonic (閃靈) and plays a driving, engaging style of thrash metal.
The afterparty features Taiwan resident singer, songwriter, producer, keyboardist and guitarist Jeff Stoddard’s industrial band Roughhausen.
Although Roughhausen tours Europe, the US and Southeast Asia regularly, it has only recently started doing shows here.
While Stoddard calls Germany “the center of the universe for this kind of music,” he adds that has been “getting a lot of love and warmth [recently] from the local death metal crowd.”
“As an artist, I keep the integrity to myself,” he says. “As a performer I have to keep the audience, so I focus more on the industrial hardcore: guitars, verse/chorus structure. It’s sharp [and] blindly angry but it’s something familiar.”
Stoddard, who hails from Canada but hasn’t been back since he left six years ago, grew up in hippie communes in the US and found himself attracted to Vancouver’s industrial scene, where he spent more than two years in Skinny Puppy’s studio beginning in 1996.
“I was 20 years old serving at the table of the masters,” he says.
The use of samples from cult leaders such as Charles Manson, David Koresh and Jim Jones in Stoddard’s music reflects his fascination with “the raw power of these personalities to convince people of things they know logically and rationally to be untrue.”
Doublewide, featuring vocalist Macgregor Wooley, also New Hong Kong Hair City’s saxophone player, ends the night’s proceedings. The group is “a hodgepodge of heavy sounds,” Wooley says.
At the Lost Lagoon party on Oct. 12, Doublewide, with Wooley painted half black and half white and making crazy eyes at the crowd, stole the show.
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
“China wants to unify with Taiwan at the lowest possible cost, and it currently believes that unification will become easier and less costly as time passes,” wrote Amanda Hsiao (蕭嫣然) and Bonnie Glaser in Foreign Affairs (“Why China Waits”) this month, describing how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is playing the long game in its quest to seize Taiwan. This has been a favorite claim of many writers over the years, easy to argue because it is so trite. Very obviously, if the PRC isn’t attacking Taiwan, it is waiting. But for what? Hsiao and Glaser’s main point is trivial,
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Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
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