Thought you’d already put 2008 to bed? Wait a minute. Here’s a list of top tunes from last year selected by some of the country’s top vinyl junkies.
KINK FEATURING RACHEL ROW — WET
“This track is a definite floor-stomper. Bulgaria’s tech house hero brings his signature acid/bouncy sound as a backdrop to Row’s sexy and seductive vocals. The stutters midway make for an excellent buildup to an all-out acid bonanza. This tune destroyed the dance-floor many times while I was on tour this fall.” (Sona)
THE SUNBURST BAND — JOURNEY TO THE SUN
“It’s a 2008 release though it sounds like it came from some disco lab orbiting Earth since the early 1970s. Imagine a millennium party on the Starship Enterprise, all hands on deck and in the air, and you begin to get a feel for this timeless tune. To me, it’s not only the perfect musical embodiment of the Citrus party vibe, but reaffirms that house music can be great live music as well.” (SL)
PHOTONZ — SHABOO (ANDY’S EDIT)
“In the era of MP3 downloads, there is still room for underground music: Dissident Distribution release single-sided vinyl, each limited to 500 copies, and each of their 12 inches is just the bomb. This track sounds like a lost gem from [the] 1988-Chicago House era. Aciiiiid!!” (BB)
SIGUR ROS — MEO SUO I EYRUM VIO SPILUM ENDALAUST (ALBUM)
“I’ve been hunkered in the studio listening only to my own stuff for a long time. However, I cannot recommend discovering Sigur Ros highly enough. Their summer album was a perfect follow-up to the delicious Takk a few years back.” (Viba)
MIA — PAPER PLANES
“A Clash sample, finger snaps, four gunshots and a cash register ka-ching gets song-of-the-year honors. MIA’s brilliant Paper Planes pokes fun at immigrant life and confirms that Diplo is the sound of the 21st century. The song had legs all year because of the notable remixes (DFA) and TI’s hood anthem Swagger Like Us sampled MIA on the chorus. (Marcus Aurelius)
AUDIO SLINGERS FEAT. LESLEY WILLIAM — RADIO NOISE (KELEVRA REMIX)
This is a big-bass electro track with a female vocal. I find that you can get away with playing some really dirty sounding bass-driven tracks that have a sexy female vocal. It seems to even each other out and you end up with a phat-sounding track. (Matty D)
LIL WAYNE — A MILLI
“It’s like the minimalism of hip-hop. A Milli is a timeless track that’s not only made The Carter III a platinum album, it also shows the world what an outstanding rapper Lil Wayne really is. There’s nothing but dense rhymes plus hypnotic repetitive chanting of “A Milli” throughout this song. The more you listen to it, the more you will get hooked on it.” (Bigg’z)
JUNKIE TOWN — EL RITMO
“If you like your dance music with a lot of grooves, you’ll definitely get a kick out of this unconventional electro-tinged house release from Argentina. It’s got Latin-style trumpet riffs over snappy beats so smooth and funky that they set the floor burning nice and slow.” (Queen Bee)—QUEEN BEE
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
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
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