“Deejaying will never die, there will always be the need for a live DJ ... until Japan invents deejaying robots,” says Dominick Fresina, aka DJ Fratzuki in the house scene, and now just plain Dom in the Taiwanese hip-hop scene.
Originally from Houston, Texas, the DJ, promoter and ex-restaurateur has lived in Taipei for four and a half years and now aims to become the only famous white rapper residing in Taiwan and rhyming in Mandarin.
“Being a DJ allows one person to be musically involved,” said Dom, 29, “so that for me was a way to do something. Some of the best parties I played were Re:Action in Taichung at Wen In Hall with Tim Healy, Halloween at Luxy, and Love Fest back in Texas, a beach festival with over 10,000 people and lots of stages of random music all up and down the beach.”
So why switch tack?
“The house music scene in Taipei is dying off,” said Dom. “People are not coming out to support the events regularly so there is a lack of the feeling of a good scene. Some of the promoters from a year ago are gone and events since then have kind of died off. A lot of the people that you could count on watching the sunrise with have moved, and the new people to Taiwan aren’t coming out in the masses.”
With an ambition for success, this perceived decline may have encouraged Dom towards his latest goal of becoming “the greatest thing to hit Asia since chopsticks.”
When Dom’s restaurant Ocean Blue went out of business in 2007, he found out one of his partners was a record executive at Machi Entertainment, a hip-hop label cofounded by Jeff Huang (黃立成) of Machi (麻吉) fame.
“I had always liked rap music and am pretty good at freestyling and MCing,” said Dom. “I told my partner since we were going out of business I needed to find a way to make some dollar and he needed to give me a record deal. He said he would be open to my idea after I explained it, and so he gave me the confidence that it could be done.”
Dom’s latest tracks are certainly brimming with ideas.
“Most rappers try to be the hardest, and most gangster,” said Dom. “My songs are about ridiculous topics like aliens and betel nuts. For me, it’s a whole entertainment package as the music is a foundation around which I can express the full idea of videos, photos and one-of-a-kind shows to really make something special.”
Having studied Chinese since he arrived here, he writes all his own songs and then works “with Taiwanese people on translation and making the wording a bit better,” said Dom. “Pretty soon, at the end of the month, we are going to put out a three-song demo CD with my songs and an hour-long mixtape with my songs mixed in with other local Taiwanese rappers’ music.” Ten thousand will be pressed and handed out for free.
Beginning next month, Dom will be hosting a regular mixtape on the Web, “freestyling in English and Chinese, and having guest MCs come in and freestyle in both languages,” he said. “Every month will highlight a new local DJ and new MCs to keep it fresh. I don’t care about people getting the music free as I want as many people out there to hear what we’re doing, so they love it and come out and support the live shows.”
The aspiring rapper is set to shoot a music video, his first, for the track Something New, a song about aliens that come to Earth and kidnap him in order to learn how to be cool.
Something New’s production is pretty slick, the flow is pretty sweet and in the video Dom is sure to be ... pretty.
“The video will be out in August,” said Dom, adding a hugely audacious claim that you can’t help but respect. “This is going to be the most bad-ass video you have ever seen, guaranteed!” Ever? Awesome!
Check out Dom at www.wretch.cc/album/ILOVEDOM for future dates, and catch him deejaying at Deep Passion on May 23.
If you agree with Dom that the house scene needs more support then get yourself down to China White tomorrow to see a couple of legends throwing down electro, house and breaks as Paul Energy and vDub will be on the ones and twos. NT$300 gets you access to their years of collective house knowledge and a drink.
Tasty Beats is tomorrow from 10pm to 4am at China White, 2F, 97-101, Dunhua S Rd Sec 2, Taipei City, (台北市敦化南路二段97-101號2樓).
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