Party organizer Hexed Generation may need a little black magic to squeeze the ambitious lineup for its second live music event, Voodoo, into Revolver’s limited space tomorrow night.
Starting at 8pm, six acts are scheduled to perform on the Taipei venue’s second floor from 9pm to 3:30am.
Hexed Generation’s debut event in December, dubbed Saturnalia, marked the beginning of what the duo behind the outfit hope will become quarterly rock and electro-based festivals.
Photo: Steven Vigar
“I think there tends to be a feeling in Taipei that live music doesn’t bring in the crowds and the revenue that dance music does, which is why the clubs in Taipei rarely show live music,” said Toby Garrod, who cofounded Hexed Generation with Greg Russell. “We wanted to see if that was true, and I think Saturnalia, with a crowd of over 300, proved that it isn’t.”
The lineup for tomorrow starts with post-punk from Macbeth (a favorite of Joy Division/dark 1980s fans), synth/pop indie rock from the Looking Glass, and Ween tribute band Skycruiser (which Garrod sings lead vocals for), all by midnight.
After the witching hour, Black Sabbath tribute band Into the Void will be followed at 1am by KbN (凱比鳥), which in 2008 became the first Taiwanese band to play the legendary rock festival South by Southwest. GMB, otherwise known as Genetically Modified Beats, will play live electro from 2am to 3:30am.
GMB, made up of Eben Pretorius and Matt Chisholm, has just released its first international EP, a remix of John Caza’s Cartagena, through Progrezo Records. The track is “very summery,” said Pretorius, who “used the samples from the track and samples of live instruments in a very looped, electronic fashion, then gave the acoustic feel back to them.”
The duo is signed to a management company in Canada (Live Vision MGMT) that is promoting GMB internationally, and plans are afoot to tour the UK later this year.
“If you get your name out as a good producer people know you are a good DJ,” said Pretorius.
With music ranging from live electro and rock to Ween to Black Sabbath and back to electro, Hexed Generation’s Voodoo might just get your mojo rising, but with such limited space, take care who you poke it into.
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
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
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