Indie electronica/rock duo Astro Bunny (原子邦妮) is that rare thing: a band with a storyteller’s point of view.
The outfit will perform one set for its debut concert at Riverside Cafe (河岸留言) on Wednesday evening. The group is comprised of vocalist/lyricist Lena Cha (查家雯 a.k.a. 查查) — the former front-girl for the indie band Cherry Boom (櫻桃幫) — and bassist/producer Jay Cheng (程杰).
“We named the group ‘bunny’ because I love bunnies and I forced him to like them too,” Cha laughed in an interview with the Taipei Times three weeks ago. “I picked the word “astro” because I’m an anime and computer game geek.”
Photo courtesy of Astro Bunny
The group released its first EP What If There’s No Tomorrow (如果沒有以後) a month ago and will support the release with this concert.
“The astro bunny will lead you to a parallel universe where the ancient and the modern clash in a musical atmosphere,” Cha said, explaining that their electronica is crafted through the juxtaposition of literary ancient Chinese prose and contemporary electronica melodies. The resulting music is a combined composition.
“Because of the neutral nature of the synthesizer used to create electronica sounds, this seemingly lifeless music doesn’t feed you with predetermined themes,” Cha explained. “Rather, it allows you to interpret and imagine meanings according to your mood at the time.”
Photo courtesy of Astro Bunny
The five-track EP is conceived as a concept album and a storybook. The Intro depicts the beginning when nothing exists. Then an explosion takes place, followed by the track The Milky Way (銀河). With the title track What If There’s No Tomorrow, the two imagine the apocalypse of 2012, but resolve to hold on to their love. Flower Blossoms and Moon Round (花好月圓) was originally written by Cheng for indie icon Sandee Chan (陳珊妮) but is transformed into an electronica gem with literary lyrics. The closing track That Day (那天) is an electronica ballad about encountering a former lover and reminiscing about what might have been.
“Electronica is a form that demands a mixture of visual and musical presentation,” Cha said. “We want to bring video artists, VJs and lighting designers together to enhance the experience of our concerts in the future.”
On the cover and inside illustration of the EP there are photographs by Cha taken with an iPhone app that transforms them into designs. She plans to push this concept further to release a photo album with iPhone shots and also a storybook album.
“The possibilities of electronica are endless,” she said. The group plans to release its first full-length album at the end of this year.
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
There is considerable frustration and confusion among many, both in Taiwan and abroad — including in Washington — as to why the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) seems so dead set on using their legislative leverage to slash defense spending and disrupt the ability of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration to function. Are they pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Are they traitors? In reality, there are multiple reasons. In the first column in this series on this subject, “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How and why the TPP and KMT help Beijing” (Sat May 16, page 12), we examined three
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS