Indie rock fans in Kaohsiung are being offered variety tonight, with live music from one band that wields pop rock noise on electric guitars and another that pumps out beats on laptop computers.
Both aim to have the audience dancing. Touming Magazine (透明雜誌) and Unfamiliar Friends Party (不熟的朋友派對), both based in Taipei, are performing at the Pier 2 Art District (高雄駁二藝術特區) to promote newly released CDs.
Touming Magazine’s guitar-heavy sound and tightly arranged songs clearly nod to their musical heroes, mostly American alternative rock bands from the late 1980s and early 1990s like the Pixies, Weezer and Superchunk.
Photo Courtesy of Unfamiliar Friends Party and Touming Magazine
Twenty-eight-year-old Hung Shen-hao (洪申豪), who is the frontman of the four-piece group and mostly sings in Mandarin, says he feels “young people” don’t share the same musical tastes as the band, but that doesn’t bother him. “We just play the music we like,” he told the Taipei Times.
Touming Magazine recently released a full-length debut album titled Soul Music (我們的靈魂樂), and its pep and solid repertoire ought to have concertgoers moving to the music.
The evening starts with a set of electronica rock from Unfamiliar Friends Party. Tonight’s show is being billed as the band’s official release party in Kaohsiung for its new six-song EP titled Headstrong (頭好壯壯).
Photo Courtesy of Unfamiliar Friends Party and Touming Magazine
Unfamiliar Friends, a four-piece group (currently a trio with one member studying abroad), performs all of its music on Macbooks, MIDI controllers and electronic keyboards.
The group’s beats favor new wave rock grooves, and the music is full of spacey atmosphere with melodies built on video game-like sounds.
“All the people that hear our music say it’s joyful,” band member Lily Chen (陳郁欣) said.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
In our discussions of tourism in Taiwan we often criticize the government’s addiction to promoting food and shopping, while ignoring Taiwan’s underdeveloped trekking and adventure travel opportunities. This discussion, however, is decidedly land-focused. When was the last time a port entered into it? Last week I encountered journalist and travel writer Cameron Dueck, who had sailed to Taiwan in 2023-24, and was full of tales. Like everyone who visits, he and his partner Fiona Ching loved our island nation and had nothing but wonderful experiences on land. But he had little positive to say about the way Taiwan has organized its
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
RSS