After growing up listening to and playing rock and roll, Lichael Mambert (real name Michael Lambert), who will be deejaying at the Bass Kitchen and Friends party tonight at Revolver, heard the mellifluous melodies of electronica and was instantly hooked. “I kind of fell into it by accident,” Mambert said in an email interview with the Taipei Times. “Creating and listening to music had always been central to my life and this sound was just blowing my head off.”
Underground raves in the Toronto, Detroit, and Montreal areas in the mid-1990s were Mambert’s gateway to techno. “There was just so much music of every electronic genre and so many amazing events,” he said. “House and techno eventually took over my up-tempo preferences in that vast realm.”
Always a do-it-yourselfer, Mambert along with some like-minded friends, decided to stage a three-day celebration a few hours outside of Toronto in 1998 called the Om Summer Solstice Festival. “We just felt that the festival we wanted to go to didn’t exist at the time so we made it ourselves,” he said. “We all really learned and grew a lot in that period. It was totally amazing and life changing. It was very humbling to see it all unfold after 10 months of planning.”
Photo courtesy of Michael Lambert
The annual Om Summer Solstice Festival took up the next seven years of Mambert’s life. Eventually, he decided to take the leap and see what the other side of the world had to offer by coming to Taiwan. “When I first arrived it was an adjustment, but I kind of expected that. A new place where I didn’t know anyone felt like a big challenge at the time, but that was kind of the point,” he said.
Any reservations Mambert had about Taiwan were soon dispelled when he found other DJs that spoke his musical language. “I got flyered by MiniJay,” Mambert said. “He was promoting their first deep house party and we just ended up talking about all sorts of stuff. He mentioned that he and Yoshi were always on the lookout for new DJs to play at their parties, so the next time I saw him I passed him a CD.”
Mambert promises “warm, engaging dancefloor music with some good kick to it” for those that attend the party tonight, but just don’t expect him to know exactly what he’s going to play beforehand. “I’ve never really prepared a set,” he said. “I just try to think what the party will be like and when I’m playing, select maybe 100 to 150 tracks to go from, and then just see where it takes me.”
Bass Kitchen and Friends (including MiniJay, Soundsquash, A-Tao, DataBass, Al Burro, and BB) tonight at Revolver from 10pm to 4am, 1-2, Roosevelt Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路一段1-2號). Admission is NT$250, 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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
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