With all due apologies to Taichung, Kaohsiung is definitely giving Taipei a run for the money as the most happening city in Taiwan. Last weekend’s outdoor festival in the south, Mega Port, attracted an estimated 10,000 people per day even though it drizzled most of the time. Pier II was an exemplary venue for the concert, its worn down warehouses turned into art spaces the size of five Huashan 1914 Creative Parks (華山1914), and on the water to boot.
At Urban Nomad’s Candy Bird-decorated DJ area, people of all ages were given markers and spray cans and encouraged to write whatever they wanted on the inner cardboard walls. This led to some questionable graffiti as well as some very cute Taiwanese youngsters tagging the alphabet. The light rain on Saturday helped push people from the slippery skateboarding area to the DJ stage next to it. Things got pretty rowdy by 3:30pm as skate punk teens were moshing and dousing each other with beers while DJ Death Rowe was dropping electro bombs on the crowd. The question is, when will Taipei get its own Mega Port?
Tonight, Pipe hosts a cerebral rave with Party in Brain IX, which includes the strong line-up of Nina, Pip, Kaoru, X+Y, and Kolette. The Vinyl Word caught up with the half-French Kolette Hsu (徐一玉) in an e-mail interview to chat about her love of music, her influences, and tonight’s party.
Photo Courtesy of Kolette Hsu
At a very young age, Kolette found that she had an ear for music. “I think I began to fall in love with electronic music when I was 10,” she said. “Around that time, I would always go to a record shop after school and check out the CDs they put out for listening. The first electronic album I ever bought was BT’s ESCM (Electric Sky Church Music).”
When Kolette’s mother heard the CD, she explained that the music was very new. “My Mother told me those kinds of sounds were produced with a computer,” Kolette said. “I loved listening to electronic music with headphones because it felt very personal and I could use my imagination to follow the grooves and synthetic sounds.”
Soon, Kolette began playing in a punk band and then started making her own productions on her computer. A few years later, Kolette was signed to Tripper records and started performing with DJ Kay. “Our live sets were Kay deejaying and mixing some of my sounds and I would sing with vocal effects and play the synthesizer over the top of it,” Kolette said.
Nowadays, Kolette deejays on her own and she doesn’t feel that being one of the only female DJs in Taiwan has helped or hindered her. “I have not been a man, so I do not know the real difference,” she said. “I think maybe women are more likely to be noticed and relatively easy to judge. This can be both good and bad. But I really don’t think there is much difference between male and female DJs.”
Kolette, while keeping an air of mystery, described her sound as “about freedom, but it is sometimes a bit neurotic.” If you want to know what that means, head to Pipe tonight and hear it for yourself.
■ Party in Brain IX tonight from 11pm to 4am at Pipe, 1 Siyuan St, Taipei City (台北市思源街1號), tel: (02) 2364-8198. Admission at the door is NT$400, 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
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
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