American Taiwanese Mochipet (birth name David Wang), who played at Spring Scream for the first time this year, will perform at Brickyard tonight and the Urban Nomad 2012 Grand Opening party tomorrow.
“This is my first time playing music in Taiwan and I’ve had a great time. I had some computer glitches during my set, but Spring Scream was a blast and I saw a lot of awesome bands I have never even heard of before from Taiwan and the rest of Asia. I had no idea this kind of festival even happened in Taiwan,” he said in an e-mail interview with the Taipei Times.
While he may have never played music here before, Mochipet’s Taiwanese roots run deep. “My father worked for the Taiwan Air Force,” Mochipet said. “He had to support his three brothers and my grandmother when he was only 16 because my grandfather passed away early.”
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
Over the years, Mochipet’s father instilled in him the values of being logical and pragmatic. “He had to be a very persistent and hard worker,” Mochipet said. “My mother, on the other hand, is more of a free-spirited risk-taker and she instilled this in me. These are both very different but important qualities. I think this is what gives me the balance in my music and my life.”
When he was a youngster, Mochipet’s grandmother would make small animals out of mochi (麻糬), pounded sticky rice snacks. She called these animals mochi-pets because they were fun to play with and could be eaten. Although he didn’t think mochi-pets were very interesting at the time, Mochipet eventually started using the name.
“Mochipet is the alias I use for all my electronic music production,” he said. “I adopted it as my moniker when I started making electronic music because of how malleable and changeable I wanted my music to be.”
Since he began producing his own tracks, Mochipet’s sound has evolved.
“I started out making IDM and experimental sounds and moved on to hardcore and breakcore,” he said. “I learned techno from Berlin’s Ellen Allien and Modeselektor and hip-hop from collaborations with Hieroglyphics and Myka9 of Freestyle Fellowship and Prefuse73. Recently I have been heading in the dance music direction mainly producing [US] west coast bass music and dubstep. I have also been working quite a bit lately on mash-ups with collaborations with artists such as DJ Z-Trip.”
Mochipet has had a song covered by a 20-piece orchestra, which played it in Carnegie Hall, as well as a song featured in the video game NBA 2K9.
“I am currently trying to take Mochipet beyond just electronic dance music into more of a full-on production stage show with live instrumentation,” he said. “My first priority after returning to the States is to finish my full-length record, Rawr Means I Love You.”
What can people expect from the two Mochipet shows this weekend?
“Nonstop good times I hope,” he said.
■ Mochipet will play tonight at Brickyard, B1, 507 Jhongshan 2nd Rd, Cianjin Dist, Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市前金區中山二路507號B1). Admission is NT$300 for gents and NT$150 for ladies. There’s an open bar from 10pm to 11pm and two-for-one mixed drinks from 11pm to midnight. Students with a valid ID get in for NT$50 before midnight.
■ Mochipet plays tomorrow at the Urban Nomad 2012 Grand Opening party tomorrow from 8pm to 3am at Building 3 East A (3東A), Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914), 1, Bade Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市八德路一段1號3東A). Admission is NT$700 at the door. Advance tickets, which cost NT$600, can be purchased through Indievox at www.indievox.com/urbannomadfilmfest/event-post/7952.
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
William Liu (劉家君) moved to Kaohsiung from Nantou to live with his boyfriend Reg Hong (洪嘉佑). “In Nantou, people do not support gay rights at all and never even talk about it. Living here made me optimistic and made me realize how much I can express myself,” Liu tells the Taipei Times. Hong and his friend Cony Hsieh (謝昀希) are both active in several LGBT groups and organizations in Kaohsiung. They were among the people behind the city’s 16th Pride event in November last year, which gathered over 35,000 people. Along with others, they clearly see Kaohsiung as the nexus of LGBT rights.
In the American west, “it is said, water flows upwards towards money,” wrote Marc Reisner in one of the most compelling books on public policy ever written, Cadillac Desert. As Americans failed to overcome the West’s water scarcity with hard work and private capital, the Federal government came to the rescue. As Reisner describes: “the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.” In Taiwan, the money toward which water flows upwards is the high tech industry, particularly the chip powerhouse Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電). Typically articles on TSMC’s water demand
RSS