After a lull during the Lunar New Year break, the country’s nightlife is coming back to life. Bonestorm (also known by his birth name Rob Jabazz) hopes to take advantage of the crowds by pulling double duty at Revolver this weekend.
For the past four months, Bonestorm has been co-hosting Melt, a biweekly Wednesday night party at Revolver that focuses on trendsetting music.
“I just feel like there must be other people out there who are dissatisfied with the music situation in the city,” Bonestorm said in a Facebook chat interview. “We decided to start a simple DJ night and hope those folks come through. So far, I’m happy about it. We have reliable people that show up consistently.”
Photo courtesy of Rob Jabazz
A few weeks back, the Bounce Girlz came to a Melt night and asked Bonestorm if he and his partners wanted to cooperate on a Friday night party. “I thought it would be cool, since we’re both basically trying to do the same thing,” Bonestorm said.
The result is Loud and in the Dark, which promises “the freshest music for people that are sick of electro-hop and brostep,” a subgenre of dubstep that emphasizes the chainsaw sounds in the breakdowns instead of the pounding bass. Bonestorm, who started off as a dubstep DJ, has now expanded his repertoire to include rap, grime, Chicago juke, and even straight techno.
“I have ADD [attention deficit disorder] when it comes to music these days. I used to be seriously into dubstep for three years, but I don’t like the direction it’s gone,” he said. “Contemporary dubstep is all about female vocal samples and shimmering production. It feels like trance to me. Sort of corny like a Nicolas Cage movie or something.”
Melt and UnderU present Loud and in the Dark tonight from 11pm to 5am at Revolver, 1-2, Roosevelt Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路一段1-2號). On the Net: www.revolvertaipei.com. Admission is NT$250, which includes a drink.
Bonestorm is a man who wears several hats. Besides deejaying and producing music, he is also a graffiti artist, graphic designer and music video director. Tomorrow night at the video game-themed art exhibition and party Now You’re Playing With Power, he’ll be hawking some of his art works.
“Like I mentioned, I have ADD. Luckily, I have enough of an attention span to complete some of the things I start,” he said.
Bulletproof Toast presents Now You’re Playing With Power tomorrow night from 11pm to 5am at Revolver. Admission is NT$300, which includes a drink.
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