Panai (巴奈) A Piece of Blue (那片藍)
Crowd Lu (盧廣仲) 100 Ways of Life (100種生活)
88 Balaz (八十八顆芭樂籽) The 44 Stone Lions (肆十肆隻石獅子)
Wu Bai (伍佰) Spacebomb 太空彈
TC Yang (楊祖珺) A Voice
That Could Not Be Silenced: The TC Yang Collection 1977-2003 (關不住的歌聲—楊祖珺錄音選輯1977-2003)
While politicians bicker endlessly and people eye the economy nervously, Taiwan’s music scene seems like the only thing that’s moving along these days. To be sure, the Mando-pop industry keeps churning out new stars and regurgitating the old ones, but the gems lie in a new generation of independent-minded musicians with a polish and sheen of their own.
If you buy only one CD by a Taiwanese artist this year, make it Panai’s (巴奈) A Piece of Blue (那片藍), a dreamy and sublime collection of acoustic songs spiced with jazz, Brazilian folk and reggae rhythms. This long-awaited second album — inspired by a group of artists in Taitung County’s (台東縣) Dulan Village (都蘭) — shows the 37-year-old singer-songwriter at her best. She naturally draws from her Amis and Puyuma roots, but doesn’t let traditional music dominate her original songs, mostly penned in Mandarin. The various island music grooves sprinkled throughout the album bring a lighter shade to Panai’s melancholy-tinged voice, which sounds both detached and intimate. The result is a beautiful balance: soulful, poetic reflection at a drifting, beachside pace.
There’s a near-magical energy to 23-year-old Crowd Lu (盧廣仲), whose guitar-fueled, sunshine pop is winning the hearts of college kids in the Chinese-speaking world. His full-length debut, 100 Ways of Life (100種生活), sounds as inspired as his personal story: he was in a serious car accident, and while recovering in the hospital he resolved to learn to play guitar. The instrument turned out to be a good match for his agile and highly capable voice; his geek-chic charm and earnest songwriting glued the rest together. Lu’s tunes are about exams, making breakfast and toy robots, which haven’t sounded like so much fun in a long time.
Special mention goes to 88 Balaz (八十八顆芭樂籽), whose solid debut album, The 44 Stone Lions (肆十肆隻石獅子), is full of punk verve and rock ’n’ roll heat, but best of all captures the zany spirit of Taiwanese rock. On the other side of the taike (台客) spectrum is the venerable Wu Bai (伍佰), who has gone into outer space with his latest, Spacebomb (太空彈), a sci-fi concept album that stuffs light social satire into a rock party.
In light of this fall’s Wild Strawberry student protests, TC Yang’s (楊祖珺) retrospective album of folk and protest songs is timely. A Voice That Could Not Be Silenced: The TC Yang Collection 1977-2003 (關不住的歌聲—楊祖珺錄音選輯1977-2003) is a collection of the folk singer-turned-college professor’s recorded output, which includes her renowned version of Formosa (美麗島), a tune that rang throughout various protests by the Dangwai (outside the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT) movement of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Another of this year’s best albums was Gaga, the first full-length release by 54-year-old Atayal (泰雅) singer Inka Mbing (雲力思), which includes traditional Aboriginal songs as well as original works. The album has an intensity of deeply felt experience, and can be seen and enjoyed as a musical portrait of a people, one that takes in the children’s playground as much as the vast prospects of the mountains which many Atayal call home.
Sodagreen’s third album, Incomparable Beauty (無與倫比的美麗), continues the band’s transition from indie to the pop mainstream without totally selling out its roots. Lead singer Wu Qing-feng’s (吳青峰) voice continues to define the band’s sound, but the album has tight arrangements and good lyrics as well. Sodagreen likes to show its sentimental side, yet never forgoes charm, and often flirts with cute, but is thoughtful enough to avoid insulting the listener’s intelligence.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
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