Sometimes a stage gimmick is actually born out of necessity. The frontman for Godswounds, the new Australian electro band currently touring Taiwan, reaches over from his keyboard to strum the bass mounted on a stand in center stage as the guitarist (who was just playing the bass) goes back to playing his guitar. They have no choice — they couldn’t find a bassist before going on tour.
“We tried me just playing all the bass lines on the keyboard but it robbed the music of the visceral edge the bass gives it,” said Lachlan Kerr, aka Herbie Greenfish, keyboardist, vocalist and sometime bass player. “Apparently this whole dancing car wreck is really fun to watch, so we’re going to try to maintain it as long as it seems healthy and not forced.”
Kerr’s experience of launching the Third Eye Theater Company in Australia and writing, directing and producing plays there prior to his first live music performance in May this year (at Candy’s Apartment in Sydney) has given him an idea of what works on stage.
He says the dynamics of the three-piece band are “akin to ballet.” They share duties on what they refer to as Ghost Bass after undergoing a series of “false leads, fall-throughs and confronting responses” while looking for a bassist to come on tour in Taiwan.
“I guess the reality was it was a bit of a scary notion going to a foreign country and taking on an audience and a culture you know very little, if anything, about,” said Kerr. “A lot of musicians also don’t seem to have a perception of the middle ground of being in a band. There seems to be a common perception that one day you’re fiddling about with samples in Garage Band and a week later you’re
a millionaire.”
The trio is happy to play the smaller shows that comprise the middle ground, with gigs at pubs and live houses from Taipei to Kaohsiung and most places in between scheduled from now until
mid-December. Their first show was at the Lost Lagoon party in Wulai at the end of last month, and they have gigs scheduled for Bliss, Riverside Cafe, Tone 56 and Underworld in Taipei, Light Lounge and 89K in Taichung, Join Us in Kaohsiung, and at the Red Wolf in Tainan.
The music is quite bizarre, with more than a passing nod to video game culture — more of a total physical response, in fact, with Nintendo-infused sound. Kerr, a huge Kaiju fan, said “there is a whole sub-culture of musicians mining this field at the moment.” Called chip-tune artists, they take Nintendo Game Boys and “use specially made software that allows them to turn the world’s most successful handheld gaming unit into a compositional or performance tool.” In Australia he played an actual Game Boy live, but said that melodically, he “gets a lot more freedom from sampling the instrument and stretching its sounds across an 88-note keyboard.”
Nonetheless, the music is composed quite traditionally, with parts given out to the players to be performed after it is written. As inspiration for the music he cites his obsession with the Large Hadron Collider and quantum physics, and “of course, Shigeru Miyamoto [Japanese video game designer] and 80s-90s video game culture.”
“Songs tend to mutate when you play them for [a] while.” Kerr said. “We do a cover of a song by an Australian band called Fage Panique that seems to get stranger every time we play it.”
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located