A common complaint about Triangle, the offshoot of The Wall and Korner located in Yuanshan Expo Park, is that it’s been hit-and-miss since it opened five months ago. But last Saturday for Bass Kitchen’s Deep Fried House #8, Triangle was a grand-slam home run as punters squeezed into the intimate area to pack the dance floor and lose their minds to the slowed-down disco grooves of Eddie C. The mood was so upbeat that smiles spilled out of Triangle onto the picnic table and merry-go-round areas until the sun came up.
Eddie C (real name Edward Currelly), had as much fun as anyone at the party. “The party in Taipei was really fantastic,” he said in an e-mail interview. “I was totally surprised with the crowd, the venue and the DJs! Big!”
With a few days of downtime before he plays in Greater Kaohsiung tomorrow at ROCKS, Eddie C has been enjoying himself in Taiwan. “I tried stinky tofu tonight for the first time. It’s pretty disgusting but perhaps my palate is immature,” he said. “We found a pretty incredible reggae truck bar on the side of the road down here [in Kenting]. The owner, Ellis, made some great drinks and played some roots rock while about 1,300 school kids on a bus trip walked by us with almost everyone saying hello. I know maybe two words in Chinese so there was a lot of remedial banter. Ellis was deejaying and bartending at the same time, which is a respectable skill.”
Photo courtesy of Love City Central
One of the reasons everyone was having such a blast on Saturday night was because Eddie C still uses vinyl, which many purists say sounds better than CDs or MP3s. “I’ve said this before in other interviews, but my favorite way music sounded was when I recorded from the radio onto cassette,” Eddie C said. “When I first started buying records of the music I heard on the radio, I remember being disappointed with the sound. These days I’m completely in love with record store culture. I totally don’t mind what format anyone chooses to play music but without a doubt vinyl is the best. I’ve been completely addicted since I was a kid and don’t think I’ll stop any time soon.”
Raquell Yang (楊侶芝) has booked Eddie C to play at her WeAre party tomorrow with an eye to broadening people’s horizons.
“Too many people who play music for the clubs in the south are forced by owners or event organizers to pepper a set number of pre-selected hits into their sets,” she said. “Owners would rather play it safe and are scared to challenge their customers with something they’re not used to. Whether for money or not, this has created a musical staleness in the south that doesn’t reflect the talent that exists here. Instead of the DJ educating the crowd with the musical knowledge he should be credited with, he or she is made to bow down to the musical retrogression of those who haven’t spent most of their lives dedicated to music.”
The point of the WeAre parties is to show that the amalgamation of music and art can equal fun. “WeAre pays tribute to a broad variety of art forms including music, painting, sculpture, graffiti and tattooing,” Yang said. “We put all of these together into one night, giving each form a chance to influence the others.”
She added: “Our goals are to break people out of their shells, to show people that art can be combined with music and nightlife, and that art doesn’t have to be confined to quiet galleries. We want to show that the Kaohsiung nightlife can be more than just clubs and arena parties and that we, in southern Taiwan, can be creative.”
■ WeAre Party. Music and Interactive Art (音樂、繪畫及互動藝術派對) is tomorrow from 10pm till 4am at ROCKS, 219 Juguang St, Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市鹽埕區莒光街219號B1). Admission is NT$300 and includes a drink.
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
There is no question that Tyrannosaurus rex got big. In fact, this fearsome dinosaur may have been Earth’s most massive land predator of all time. But the question of how quickly T. rex achieved its maximum size has been a matter of debate. A new study examining bone tissue microstructure in the leg bones of 17 fossil specimens concludes that Tyrannosaurus took about 40 years to reach its maximum size of roughly 8 tons, some 15 years more than previously estimated. As part of the study, the researchers identified previously unknown growth marks in these bones that could be seen only
RSS